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Product Design

Product Thinking for Engineers

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Intermediate content levelIntermediate

Get more meaningful tech products into production

Course outcomes

  • Draw from an increased list of sources for product ideas
  • Chart a path from product vision to execution
  • Learn how to help engineering teams maintain velocity as products grow

Course description

Product thinking skills can help software engineers and developers understand and drive product direction from their unique position as implementers. Learning the skills to lead a software team from product inception to success creates more well-rounded engineers who can increase progress on their teams and benefit their organizations.

Join expert Chelsea Troy to understand how to identify product goals, how to distill them into priorities, and make them approachable from an engineering perspective. By incorporating product thinking into your work you can avoid the most common pitfalls of the product lifecycle and get more meaningful products into production.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Improve familiarity with the product management process and the necessary skills
  • Get more meaningful tech products into production
  • Improve the morale and effectiveness of teams that maintain software products

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re a software engineer or designer who would like to incorporate product thinking into your work to maximize your impact on the progress of your team and the organization.

Prerequisites

  • Some prior work at a tech product company (helpful but not required)

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

What the heck is a product mindset? (60 minutes)

  • Presentation: Identifying product goals, distilling them into priorities, and making them approachable; why a product mindset is more important than ever; the product cycle; product vision; history of the commercial tech industry in three overarching product strategies (“garage genius,” data-driven, centering marginalized perspectives)
  • Group discussion: What brings you to the course? What broader questions are you hoping to answer?
  • Q&A
  • Break

Organizational execution strategy and feature prioritization (60 minutes)

  • Presentation: Benefits and drawbacks of waterfall and agile; prioritizing features (what blocks what); workstream table
  • Group discussion: Your experiences with waterfall and agile
  • Hands-on exercise: Disambiguate streams
  • Q&A
  • Break

Specifying the work and keeping up velocity (60 minutes)

  • Presentation: What needs does the feature serve and how should it be built?; getting the perspectives and buy-in of experts; metrics for decision-making (optimizing, satisficing); empowering and collaborating with other engineers; initiating and handling design changes
  • Hands-on exercise: Choose an optimizing metric; set satisficing metrics
  • Q&A

Your Instructor

  • Chelsea Troy

    Chelsea Troy leads the machine learning operations team at Mozilla. She also teaches in the Master’s Program in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Her online workshop, Fundamentals of Technical Debt, is available On Demand through the O’Reilly platform, and she also gives live courses about machine learning, large language models, and product thinking.

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