I thought this class and the project definitely opened my eyes on what being a product manager entails and taught / allowed me to exercise many of the skills good product managers possess. I thought that we touched on a breadth of subjects ranging from coming up with your SOM to OKRs to negotiating, and lectures gave me new perspectives and frameworks that we could apply to our product and understand our customers better.
During our group project, our team did a great job establishing norms and communicated very well. Though we struggled to stay completely aligned on our product, as it changed and morphed throughout the quarter, we did our best to overcome the challenge, stay on track, dig deep into our customers through careful user research, and ultimately push our product as well as each other in the best direction. As mentioned, since our product changed so much, I was able to get a lot of practice doing user research and performing interviews. A highlight was speaking with the Stanford Bike Shop employees about electric bikes—they were very eager to share their thoughts on electric bikes, as they believed that they were the future, and their insights were very helpful to our project.
This class offered many concrete frameworks and guidelines: Design Thinking, User Story Mapping, Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, among many others. Although initially I thought these frameworks were rather template-y and gimmicky, they do serve as excellent starting points and helped get us to ask the right questions and think about the user from every angle. Product management is more than just the product, however—it involves so many other things such as leading a team (which can be especially hard when you have all the responsibility but little authority), understanding the target market, and creating and executing a go-to-market strategy. Lectures provided me with exposure to all those things, and as someone who is interested in working in the tech industry, whether it be as a product manager, entrepreneur, or software engineer, I’m excited to take the wisdom from this class and apply it to future endeavors.
If we had more time, I would have loved to continue shaping our service and attempting to secure company partnerships. I had such a great time working with my team on Joyride, and I’m very grateful to my teammates, the wonderful TAs and guest speakers, and Christina for the amazing experience this quarter.
