Coming into CS177, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had just come off a summer of remote working, where I felt quite disconnected with my colleagues I was working with, and I wanted a change of environment. Product Management was something that I had never even thought about diving into before, and with this class saying it was “Human Centered”, I was sold.
As an engineer, I had always looked at PMs, and thought their job was simply to talk to a bunch of people to facilitate the progress of a team or a project. Looking back, I wasn’t necessarily wrong about that, but after doing PM work on our final project, I realize that being a PM is actually a lot more work than I had initially anticipated. What an engineer does on a product is only the tip of the iceberg, and while a PM might not necessarily do everything else, they have to have hands in all areas of the product, which means hours and hours of research to acquire the necessary domain knowledge for a product.
I think the most important thing I learned in this class is how to research a product and its viability in a market. Conducting interviews, thinking about revenue models, and debating customer bases are just a few of the things that I learned that was completely new to me before. All of the weeks of research, development, and brainstorming before the product is actually implemented gave me a new sense of confidence in the product while I was developing the web app, having great confidence that it would be a success.
If we had more time in the class, I would have liked to finish the product to an MVP state, where users would be able to log in and submit documents, and save the resulting simplified text. In addition, I would have also like to implement the translation feature into our product, and make it look prettier, although that might be a job for another team member. I would have also liked to so a soft release of the product, to see if our assumptions for our audience base and revenue model were correct, and if not, why they weren’t.
Overall, this class was a blast – I loved working on a product with my team, especially since we are all new to the different PM concepts introduced in class.
