Building Software Products At Startups

Course Curriculum

Chapter 1: Get started on your journey to building amazing products

Lecture 1: Welcome to the class!

Lecture 2: Welcome! About me, and why I'm excited to have you join

Lecture 3: Agenda

Lecture 4: The 45 best blog posts, articles, books, and videos about product management

Lecture 5: What is a product?

Lecture 6: Who is a product manager?

Lecture 7: Responsibilities of a Product Manager

Lecture 8: A product manager's job at a startup – Interview with Nick Gavronsky

Chapter 2: Building the Minimum Viable Product

Lecture 1: Introduction to the Minimum Viable Product

Lecture 2: What a VC is looking for in a new product – interview with Jesse Beyroutey

Lecture 3: The Business Model Canvas

Lecture 4: Facebook's Business Model Canvas

Lecture 5: My Business Model Canvas for Arkad

Lecture 6: Customer Empathy – Leave the office and talk to customers

Lecture 7: Building a great user experience – interview with Mark Sherrill

Lecture 8: Why are customers hiring your product?

Lecture 9: Facebook Jobs to be done

Lecture 10: Jobs To Be Done for Arkad

Lecture 11: Understanding your customers' jobs, pains, and motivations

Lecture 12: The "Career Changer" profile for this class

Lecture 13: Ranking the importance of the jobs, pains, and gains of the "Career Changer"

Lecture 14: Setting the vision for your product – the Amazon Press Release

Lecture 15: A recent press release I wrote for NewsCred's analytics product

Lecture 16: What do you stand for?

Lecture 17: The Minimum Viable Product – it's all about testing the assumptions you've made

Lecture 18: The MVP according to Spotify

Lecture 19: Applying the MVP model to new feature development

Lecture 20: Identify and test your riskiest assumptions – interview with Matt Doumar

Lecture 21: Testing with unscalable tactics

Lecture 22: We failed to test our riskiest assumption early on at Arkad

Lecture 23: Hooking users

Lecture 24: I'm hooked on Instagram, this is how they get me

Lecture 25: Applying the habit loop to Arkad – we didn't get to the point of testing this

Lecture 26: You can also use the habit loop to steal customers from your competition

Chapter 3: Building products at companies

Lecture 1: What it's like to be a product manager in a fast growing startup

Lecture 2: Using auctions to get buy in from the company

Lecture 3: Objectives and Key Results

Lecture 4: Success metrics help you determine if your product is ready to be released

Lecture 5: Most software teams work in an agile way

Lecture 6: Scrum is a way many team organize build in an agile way

Lecture 7: Agile, Scrum, & working with a team of engineers – interview with Brian Schmitz

Lecture 8: UX and design processes of successful teams – Interview with Mark Sherrill

Lecture 9: User stories – communicating our work so that it captures customer value

Lecture 10: How I became a product manager