Everything about products that I want to share with aspiring PMs/POs

A lecture for junior PMs/POs who do not have a good mentor by their side.

Working and learning alongside a great mentor is likely the wish of many junior PMs and POs.

Watching and learning from the side how to define problems, how to think and make decisions, how to handle various situations that arise while working, and how to structure work and produce results becomes a shortcut to growth.

However, not everyone is lucky enough to work with a great mentor. Most find themselves in a situation where they must work on their own without a senior to look up to and learn from. Hoping to be of help to the junior PMs/POs who are struggling today, I have generously included various techniques and mental models that I have acquired through learning, execution, and deep reflection.

Through this course, which directly reflects my own thought process, I hope you will achieve these kinds of transformations.

• Defining problems sharply, specifically identifying and defining problems that are 'worth solving' for a product organization.

• Utilizing quantitative data and qualitative customer research in the right places.

• Working in a way that proactively establishes and validates hypotheses, rather than simply gathering requirements and designing screens.

• Approaching product tasks systematically by structuring them, without getting lost on where to start.

Hello, I'm Minwoo Kim, the creator of this course.

In this course, I have included everything I have learned, practiced, and built through trial and error while working in the IT startup industry for over 10 years. If you enjoyed my previous content, I believe you will be satisfied with this course as well. As always, I have made an effort to include only the essentials without any fluff or exaggeration.

You can view my previous posts and content at the links below.

For speaking engagements or collaboration inquiries, please email minwoo@minwookim.kr. Thank you.

The background behind the creation of this course

I first started becoming interested in the Product Manager role in 2012. At that time, only the "Service Planner" role existed in Korea. Since there was nowhere to learn about product management in Korea, I had to learn from experts abroad.

I studied using content from Google's Ken Norton, Marty Cagan who wrote <inspired>, Kissmetrics founder <a href="https://hitenism.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Hiten Shah</a>, Lean Startup mentor <a href="https://steveblank.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Steve Blank</a>, Y Combinator founder <a href="https://www.paulgraham.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Paul Graham</a>, and many other great individuals (including <a href="https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Lenny Rachitsky</a>, <a href="https://lg.substack.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Julie Zhuo</a>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/shreyas" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Shreyas Doshi</a>, who are well-known in Korea these days).</inspired>

Due to my nature of reading voraciously and feeling unsatisfied unless I immediately put what I've learned into practice, I applied my studies to my work right away and learned further through trial and error on the job. As a result, I developed a unique way of working that differed from other service planners in Korea at the time.

• Rather than immediately building the features requested by customers or stakeholders, I strove to meet customers in person to understand the problems and their context,

• Rather than creating planning documents (functional specifications, wireframes) and managing projects, I focused on clearly defining and testing risky assumptions that required validation,

• Rather than just launching a feature and finishing there, I strove to precisely track metrics and user behavior using product analytics.

This approach was not common at first, but around 2020, many product organizations began striving to work this way. Thanks to this, I had the opportunity to write, give lectures, and coach other product organizations and individuals.

I have poured everything I've accumulated over the past 10 years—from greedily studying and applying what I learned, to sharing knowledge through writing and content, and teaching through coaching—into this course. I hope it proves helpful to those starting their careers as PMs/POs, as well as those already working in these roles who have concerns about their professional expertise.

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

• Data-driven problem-solving skills

• Hypothesis formulation and quantitative/qualitative validation skills

• Customer-centric ability to define and solve problems

• 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 planning documents (functional specifications, wireframes)

• Managing projects to ensure features are released within the schedule

  
  

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

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

We provide step-by-step explanations of 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 using various cases and references.

What you can learn from this course

1. The Unique Professionalism of a Product Manager

• A PM is not a 'handyman' who only cleans up after the team and handles stakeholder communication, but someone who contributes their unique expertise to the product organization.

• We will show you what expertise a PM should contribute to the organization and how to acquire such expertise.

2. Problem: Properly Defining and Solving It

• I hear from many places that defining the problem is important.

  However, it is difficult to learn how to define a problem well.

• As a product manager, I will show you how to think accurately and rigorously about problems.

• Not all customer problems are problems worth solving within a product. We will provide the criteria for determining which problems are worth addressing in your product.

3. Powerful tools for understanding customers: Designing and conducting in-depth interviews and usability tests

• Great products come from an understanding of the customer.

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

• We will show you the minimum research methodologies a PM should possess in an organization without a professional researcher.

• 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.

• We will show you how to obtain the information needed for decision-making by starting research from the decision-making process and designing business questions and research questions, which is different from blindly creating surveys and meeting customers.

4. Developing Data Expertise: Working Based on Data

• The phrase 'data-driven work' is used in many different contexts. Everything from monitoring business metrics to building recommendation algorithms or utilizing artificial intelligence is grouped under the single term 'data.'

• Therefore, for those entering the field for the first time, it is difficult to know what PMs do with data, what competencies they need to have for this, and what they should study.

• To ensure there is no more confusion, I will explain what it means for a PM to utilize data effectively and what you need to do to build data expertise.

5. Product Metric Framework

• Through various metrics, PMs can understand how customers are using the product and how much business value the product is creating.

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

• We will show you which metrics to monitor from various perspectives such as Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, and Monetization, as well as 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 wireframes." (That is the work of planners at agencies or SI firms.)

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

• To achieve this, the capability for "product discovery"—the process of finding a product that is valuable, usable, feasible, and viable—is essential.

• Product discovery is a comprehensive art form ranging from hypothesis setting to validation. We will show you how to approach this process.

• In particular, we will explain concepts such as assumptions and testing, which can feel abstract, in detail and show you how to apply these concepts in actual work.

7. Growing the Product: Product Growth

• The PM's role does not end with creating and launching or deploying a product or feature.

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

• We will show you how product organizations can contribute to growth by improving Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, and Monetization metrics.

8. Collaboration

• Modern product organizations do not work in a way where 'planning,' 'development,' and 'design' teams operate separately; instead, PMs, designers, and engineers work closely together within a single team.

• I will explain why we work this way and how you can collaborate effectively as a PM in this environment.

  
  

Reviews from those who took the course first

(These are genuine reviews from students who paid for the course. They are not reviews from trial groups or requested from acquaintances.)