What I Want to Tell Starting PM/POs About Product

A course for junior PM/POs who don't have good mentors by their side

Working and learning alongside a good mentor is likely the wish of many junior PM/POs.

How to define problems, how to think and make decisions, how to handle various situations that arise while working, how to structure work and achieve results - observing and learning these things firsthand becomes a shortcut to growth.

However, not everyone is fortunate enough to work with a good mentor. Most people find themselves in situations where they have to figure things out on their own without a mentor worth learning from. Hoping to help junior PMs/POs who are struggling every day, I have generously included various techniques and mental models that I have learned, implemented, pondered, and mastered.

Through this lecture that directly transfers my thought process, I hope you will achieve such transformation.

• Sharply defining problems, especially for product organizations to discover and define problems that are 'worth solving'.

• Making effective use of quantitative data and qualitative customer research in the right place at the right time.

• Working in a way that proactively establishes and validates hypotheses rather than collecting requirements to plan screens.

• Don't get lost wondering where to start, but structure your product work to approach it systematically.

Hello, I'm Kim Min-woo, the creator of this course.

This course contains everything I've accumulated over 10 years of working in the IT startup industry through diligent study, execution, and trial and error. If you've enjoyed my previous content, I believe you'll be satisfied with this course as well. Just like before, I've made an effort to include only the essentials without any unnecessary fluff or exaggerated stories.

You can view the articles and content I've previously written at the links below.

For lecture bookings and collaboration inquiries, please email minwoo@minwookim.kr. Thank you.

The background behind the creation of this course

I first became interested in the Product Manager role in 2012. At that time, only the 'Service Planner' position existed in Korea. Since there was nowhere to learn about product management in Korea, I had to learn from skilled professionals overseas.

Google's Ken Norton, Marty Cagan who wrote , Kissmetrics founder Hiten Shah, lean startup mentor Steve Blank, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, and many other excellent people (including Lenny Rachitsky, Julie Zhuo, Shreyas Doshi, etc., who are also famous in Korea these days) - I studied through their content.

Due to my personality of reading voraciously and needing to immediately apply what I've studied to feel satisfied, I applied everything directly to my work right away, and learned even more through trial and error in actual work situations. As a result, I developed a unique working style that was different from others who worked as service planners in Korea during the same period.

• Rather than immediately building the features that customers or stakeholders requested, I made an effort to meet with customers directly to understand the problems and context,

• Rather than creating planning documents (functional specifications, screen design documents) and managing projects, we focused on clearly defining risky assumptions that need validation and testing them,

• We didn't just launch features and call it done, but made efforts to precisely track metrics and user behavior through product analytics.

This approach wasn't common at first, but around 2020, many product organizations began pursuing this way of working. Thanks to this, I had the opportunity to write, give lectures, and coach other product organizations and individuals.

For about 10 years, I studied voraciously, applied what I learned, shared it with others through writing and content, and taught through coaching. I've packed everything I accumulated over those 10 years into this course. I hope it will be helpful to those who are starting PM/PO work, or those who are already working as PM/PO but have concerns about their expertise.

Leading product organizations are increasingly looking for PMs/POs with these capabilities.

• The ability to solve problems based on data

• The ability to establish hypotheses and verify them quantitatively/qualitatively

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• The ability to grow products and create business impact

  
  

However, many PMs/POs are still stuck in these outdated roles.

• Gathering requirements from stakeholders

• Creating Project Plans (Functional Specifications, Screen Design Documents)

• Managing projects to launch features within schedule

  
  

These kinds of PM/POs are nothing more than parts in a feature factory that is only focused on planning and launching features. Working this way makes it difficult to gain market recognition for your value, no matter how long your career is.

This course provides you with the foundational knowledge to become a competent PM/PO who contributes unique expertise to product organizations, rather than just being a cog in the feature factory.

We will carefully explain difficult and unfamiliar concepts such as problem definition, hypothesis setting and validation, thinking from the customer's perspective, data utilization, and creating business impact, and help you make them your own by utilizing various cases and references.

What you can learn from this course

1. Product Manager's Unique Expertise

• PM is not just a 'handyman' who does team cleanup and stakeholder communication, but an entity that contributes unique expertise to the product organization.

• We'll show you what expertise a PM should contribute to the organization and how to develop such expertise.

2. Problems: Properly Defining and Solving Them

• The saying that defining the problem is important is heard everywhere.

  However, it's difficult to learn how to define problems well.

• As a product manager, I'll teach you how to think accurately and meticulously about problems.

• Not every customer problem is a problem worth solving in your product. Here are the criteria for determining which problems are worth solving in your product.

3. Powerful Tools for Understanding Customers: Designing and Conducting In-Depth Interviews and Usability Testing

• Good products come from understanding customers.

  The best way to understand customers well is to meet them directly and conduct research.

• We'll show you the minimum research methodology that PMs should have in organizations without professional researchers.

• We'll show you how to design and conduct In-Depth Interviews and Usability Tests, what common mistakes can be made, and how to avoid them.

• Unlike blindly creating surveys and meeting customers, we'll teach you research methods that start from decision-making, and how to obtain the information needed for decision-making by designing business questions and research questions.

4. Building Data Expertise: Working with Data-Driven Approaches

• The phrase 'working with data' is really used in many places. From looking at business-related metrics to creating recommendation algorithms or utilizing artificial intelligence, everything is bundled under the name 'data'.

• So from the perspective of people just starting out, it's difficult to know what kind of work PMs do with data, what capabilities they need to develop for this, and what they should study.

• To avoid further confusion, I'll explain what it means for a PM to effectively utilize data and how to develop data expertise.

5. Product Metrics Framework

• PM can understand how customers use the product and how much business value the product is creating through various metrics.

• The ability to make decisions based on metrics is one of the core competencies of a PM.

• We'll show you what metrics to monitor from various perspectives such as Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, Monetization, and how to interpret these metrics and make decisions.

  
  

6. Product Discovery: The Comprehensive Art of Setting and Validating Hypotheses

• A PM in a modern product organization is not someone who receives 'requirements' from 'stakeholders' and creates 'functional specifications and screen design documents.' (This is the work done by planners at agencies or SI companies.)

• A PM is someone who provides value by solving customer problems and creates business value for our company.

• To achieve this, you absolutely need product discovery capabilities to 'find' products that are valuable, usable, technically feasible, and business viable.

• Product discovery is a comprehensive art that spans from hypothesis formation to validation. Here's how you can approach it effectively.

• In particular, we will provide concrete explanations of concepts such as assumptions and testing that may feel abstract, and show you how to apply these concepts in actual work.

7. Growing Your Product: Product Growth

• The role of a PM doesn't end with creating and launching or deploying products or features.

• You should also know how to ensure that customers/users actually use the product well and create business value for our company.

• How product organizations can contribute to growth by improving Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, and Monetization metrics will be explained.

8. Collaboration

• Modern product organizations don't work in a way where 'planning teams', 'development teams', and 'design teams' operate separately from each other, but rather in a way where PMs, designers, engineers, and others collaborate closely within a single team.

• I'll explain why this happens and how to collaborate well as a PM in this environment.

  
  

Reviews from those who took the course first

(These are genuine reviews from people who paid for the course. They are not sponsored reviews or reviews requested from acquaintances as favors.)