Product School

Product School is certainly a unique concept. Course is designed near to perfect and addresses all areas of product management in a nutshell and is presented thoroughly within the short duration. Classes are more of a workshop model which is great and there is so much to learn, not just by doing your own project but also listening to what others in the class present and share.

Nim (Nimrod Fox), our instructor is an excellent mentor. Listening to his professional experience, including how he handles day to day challenges as a PM and his career path to product management was such a motivation. He makes you think about "The problem". There were multiple instants when I was constantly focusing on the solution (typical engineering mindset) but Nim pushed me each time, to wear the product hat and strengthen my opportunity hypothesis instead.

I would definitely recommend PS to anyone new to product management or someone who is looking to excel as an effective PM

I spent the last 8+ weeks focusing on my software and product management skills at Product School.  Logan Hutchingson was my instructor that was excellent.  He taught the details on how to become a great PM.  But, he also took you on daily issues he faces and how he addressed them.  The role playing was very beneficial.  I also gained great feedback on my interview skills and how to better prepare for my interivews.  Logan was very informative on the product process, how to deal with the many aspects of launches and the class is focused on being a great PM.  After the class was finished I am well prepared to launch software products and have some interivews with Fortune 100 firms.  Great job Logan and Product School.

I took Product School Silicon Valley April-June 2018, our instructor Teesh is a very knowledgeable Product Manager with over a decade or experience.  For anyone who is thinking about switching fields to product, I highly recommend Product School.  For someone with little to no experience with product management specifically, I am now clear about what the role entails, who I will be working with, what I will be working on, on how to be successful in the role.  There are many hands-on activities that put you in the shoes of a real-life PM and forces you to work with your peers and articulate your ideas, such as writing a PRD, user stories, Go-to-market Strategies...  Teesh was also very experienced and helped guide us through these activities by helping us think the way a PM should.  All in all, it was a great experience for me with a high-quality instructor and very good material for educating those interested in exploring Product Management.

Course: 8 week long Software Product Management on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, from March to May 2018.
 
Location: Santa Monica, CA 
Parking note: For those driving there, several public lots are available free for the first 1.5 hours. Classes run 2.5 hours though so expect to pay between $3 – $5 per class depending on how early you arrive and how late you stick around after class.

Instructor: Rich Headley, currently a PM at Cornerstone OnDemand.
Rich is very knowledgable, engaging, and covered all the relevant course topics on the syllabus. He also took time to address additional questions and concepts during class. I especially liked the way he applied PM concepts to real-world anecdotes and connected them to what we were learning.

Product School learnings: To get the most out of PS, you’ll need to put in more effort beyond doing the assignments.

• Participate in class.
• Get to know your classmates. 
• Take advantage of the multitude of meet-up opportunities.
• Dive into the Slack community.

​By the end of this course you will learn what you need to know to develop a new feature or product from idea to prototype and present it, using any number of the PM tools discussed along the way.

They are always looking for feedback to make this program better and encourage interaction, which I appreciate. As far my evaluation of the school itself, there’s always room for improvement in a relatively new tech business learning program geared toward professionals. However I firmly believe that with instructors like Rich there it will continue to get better and better with each class.

I look forward to using what I’ve learned from this course in my career.

I attended the 8 week Software Product Management Certification Course which was held at Denver. 

This is one of the best courses that I have ever taken in my professional life. The course content was very apt and to the point. The best part of the course was it was not all instructor lectures and slides alone. Every class had a hands on practice material to be done in class as a group or as an individual. Also the homework assignments were very insightful and helped me develop on the concepts that I learned in class. The Slack channel is really helpful. Also I liked the fact that the class was really small. Just around 10 students which helped each one of us get personal attention from the instructor.

Our instructor was Ken Furie, who is the Head of Product and Technical Strategy at Gloo at Boulder, Colorado. Ken made the class really interesting and enjoyable. His informal approach to the class made all of us very comfortable from Day 1. Every class was less lecture and more of a group discussion. Ken was extremely patient in answering all our questions, however silly they may be. Also he kept up the subtle humor, which all the students appreciated and enjoyed very much. Ken is a very positive person who is really passionate about products and that reflects in his instructor mode as well. Also his knowledge and experience in the Product space speaks for itself. He also helped us prepping up our resumes and personal stories. Discussed the Do's and Dont's in interviews and really prepared us with confidence to attend any interviews. I would any day attend another session with Ken anytime.

After completing the 8-week Product Management course, I confidently recommend Rich Headley to be your next instructor at the Product School, Santa Monica. Prior to the course, I was under the impression that to be a Product Manager, hiring companies required candidates to have a high technical knowledge/background. As a Psych grad with a sales background, I had a lot of reservation in enrolling for this course as I thought I would struggle to understand concepts/hold my class back and not find many uses for the course.

From the first day of class and to the very end, Rich fostered a safe & interactive learning environment that simplified concepts while connecting them to real-life applications through in-class exercises. A typical class looks like this: after teaching us that class' content, Rich would break up my class into smaller groups so we can practice what we learned using a case study and present our findings to the class. After we presented, Rich would give the group constructive feedback that I felt instilled confidence in us that we understood the concept and encouraged us to practice on our own for the final project.  

I greatly appreciated Rich's availability throughout the 8 weeks. I ended up missing Week 3 due to illness and had to catch-up. Instead of being upset that I was behind, Rich made himself available on Slack and by coming in early/leaving class late so I could ask questions & for feedback. Without that, I probably would've been discouraged to continue and probably wouldn't be writing this review today.

In retrospect, I was surprised at how many translatable skills I got to develop and sharpen through the 8-week course. Although I don't have plans as of right now to pursue a career in PM, I'm confident that when the time comes, I'll be able to draw upon what I've learned but also leverage the Product School's network to accelerate my journey. 

Thanks Rich for pouring in so much of your own free time to share a real-world perspective/honest view of what PM life is like and practical insights/best practices to be a successful PM!

Professor Joel Palath easily made my experience unforgettable and invaluable at Product School. His knowledge of the field, along with his ability as educator, pushed our class to learn much more than we could have on our own. I came to the class with experience as a product manger and was not too sure what to think of the course but left with immediate results. The material we covered helped me revamp the way I am approaching products at work and helped kickstart my own startup. Professor Palath presented solutions to real problems that PMs face on a day to day basis by not just reviewing material from a textbook/slides but by weaving the course material with his own real world experiences as PM. This made the course much more enjoyable  and made the concepts much easier to grasp. The class was a very tight knit group and our support has survived outside of the class. I am meeting with a classmate this week to work on our personal products and have done this with various other peers. The Product School is worth the cost for any aspiring product managers and I would absolutely recommend taking Professor Palath! A+++

I definitely recommend Product School if anybody is looking to start a career in product management. Speaking of course material, it is very well organized. The beginners will understand it easily as it covers all points in details. It does includes two in class activties in each class. It s a great platform where you interact alot. Each activity will explain the purpose of the elements discussed in the slides of the course material. My instructor was Roman Dzadzic, He is an amazing professor. He not only taught us in an effective manner but also helped us in the homework. I remeber i had number of questions and he never failed to answer even a single time. I had diffculties in public speaking. Specially this stuff was completely new for me to talk about. I would say I ould take out my fear of public speaking with this class. 

As a person relatively fresh out of college, I have not had much exposure to the PM world. I have a peculiar background that allowed me to work in design and software engineering, but had no real exposure to put those skills to test. While taking the course, I worked as a visual designer, bringing a more design centric perspective into the PM class, and was able to practice my knowledge and collaborate with fellow students in the class. I knew that being a PM is something I wanted to do, but needed more experience to get the foot in the door. From this experience, I was able to meet my instructors, and fellow students who I have joined to partner with in product design and development.

Taking this course is like any other prep-course; you get what you put into it. Not only that, you are able to grow a network of people in various industries. I learned a lot from the class, and from people’s experiences and stories that led them to where they’re at.

This class is meant for everyone, those who have experience in Product Management, or those who are looking to transition into it. There are many stories that congregate into each cohort, and it enables us to broaden our vision of what an effective PM can be by learning from each other, and from different industries.