Driving Business Impact for PMs
Up-level your PM career by shifting your thinking from outputs to outcomes and ship features that deliver results for your company.
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Course overview
Move from feature factory to customer outcomes and drive impact in your business
Product teams often get stuck focusing on outputs and predictable delivery (what and when am I building a thing) instead of outcomes (what will change as a result of building this thing). This leaves out the critical element of making sure you are building the right (most impactful) things in the right way.
Jon's has 25+ years of experience in technology companies from CNN to Google, and has created this course to provide you with a comprehensive set of tools to help you develop impactful products by shifting from output-based thinking to outcome-based thinking. You will deepen your understanding of your customers and their needs as well as identifying and de-risking the different kinds of hypotheses built into your roadmap.
You will also work to understand how your work contributes to your company's strategy. You will learn and apply frameworks to ensure your features solve user problems that drive business impact which connects all the way up to your company's goals.
We will also help you develop successful products by understanding customer needs, identifying opportunities, managing risks, and creating value for customers.
Using a combination of lectures, interactive hands-on exercises, and case studies from Airbnb, Dropbox, Zappos, and more, the course will focus on practical application and provide you with the skills and knowledge necessary to level up and apply these tools in real-world product management scenarios.
Who this course is for:
01
You're a senior product manager who wants to delivering outstanding impact and business value to your users and your business.
02
You're an early career PM and want to level up your career and understand how to deliver business impact.
03
You're a startup founder who wants to validate ideas and develop products that meet customer needs and create value for them and your biz.
What you’ll get out of this course
Learn how to prioritize the most impactful opportunities to move the needle for your business
You will learn how to identify the most impactful opportunities using Impact Mapping and other framing techniques and shift from output orientation ("what are we building?") to outcome/impact orientation ("what will change as a result of building these things?")
Grow your user empathy and customer discovery skills
You will learn how to better understand users and the problem space they are working in through Journey Maps that are customized for Product Managers
Understand the risks and hypotheses built into your roadmap
By making explicit the different hypotheses in your plan and identifying the riskiest ones, you will be able to quickly validate the riskiest assumptions and improve your outcomes.
Understand how your features tie in to the company goals
By working through user outcomes and how they drive business outcomes, you will be able to clearly tie your features to user behavior that drives business results.
Create real-world deliverables for YOUR PRODUCTS
The course is designed to provide you with practical experience applying these tools to real-world product management scenarios. You will build actual journey and impact maps for your actual users & products.
Learn from an industry expert with 25+ years of experience
You will benefit from an instructor who has seen product management done well and poorly in his career as a product leader and consultant. Learn best practices and traps to avoid from companies like Google, CNN, Ford, and numerous startups and midsize companies.
Boost your career
By developing these skills, you can enhance your PM career prospects and become a more valuable member of your product teams.
Become a part of a community of impactful product leaders
Learn with and from our community of product leaders from companies like Google, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and ServiceNow both in the course and in our community Slack channel for class alumni.
What’s included
Live sessions
Learn directly from Jon Harmer in a real-time, interactive format.
Lifetime access
Go back to course content and recordings whenever you need to.
Community of peers
Stay accountable and share insights with like-minded professionals.
Certificate of completion
Share your new skills with your employer or on LinkedIn.
Maven Guarantee
This course is backed by the Maven Guarantee. Students are eligible for a full refund up until the halfway point of the course.
Course syllabus
9 lessons • 3 projects
Week 1
Journey Mapping
Journey Mapping is a strategic framework for understanding your customers entire experience and the problems they have that lead them to your product. As Product Managers, it is important to pick the right problems to solve. In this module, you will understand what's important to your customers so that you can combine customer outcomes with business outcomes. You'll use a provided workbook to create your first Journey Map.
Week 2
Impact Mapping - Principles
Impact maps are a powerful tool for product managers to align product development with business goals and outcomes. In this module, you will learn the fundamentals of impact maps, how they can help prioritize features, and how they help you tie your work to your company goals.
You will also create your first impact map, which we will review more on day 2.
Week 3
Hypotheses and Confidence/Risk
Every product or feature is based on two hypothesis. The Solution Hypothesis (will my product solve the customer's problem) and the Outcome Hypothesis (will customers change their behavior enough to drive the desired business outcome). In this module, you will dive in and detail out some of the hypotheses implicit in your products, and learn about the Confidence/Risk Matrix and how it helps you decide when to pay-to-learn (testing) vs pay-to-earn (ship it).
Week 4
Impact Mapping - Quantification and Refinement
In this module, we'll dive deeper into your impact maps and learn about how to better quantify how much impact and start to reframe your thinking around the kinds of outcomes you can achieve. We'll also learn how applying MECE thinking to this process allows you to better prioritize which features to do first.
Bonus
- 📓
A quick reference guide to help you in the future.
Bonus Material
What students are saying
Meet your instructor
Jon Harmer
Jon Harmer
Product Management Leader
With more than 25 years of experience, I feel like I've seen it all, having founded startups, turned around companies (or failed to), and led product teams and created products within companies such as Google, CNN, Home Depot, Ford, and Bank of America. I've created products from scratch, launched features to a customer base of over 2 billion active users, and more than doubled revenue for existing products. I've been responsible for growing CNN's breaking news subscribers over 1200% while simultaneously reducing delivery times by 75%. I've held the title of founder, Vice President of Enterprise Product Management, CMO, Director of Product Management, Senior Product Manager, Vice President of Marketing, and Director of Product Marketing. I have a background in the entire company lifecycle from founding to acquisition over my career. I developed products across a number of verticals/industries, including SaaS, telecom, marketing technology, financial services, online media, healthcare, retail, automotive, and public safety. I have coached and mentored hundreds of Product Managers and founders around the world through Google, Techstars, and Georgia Tech.
I am a former chef who became a product management and marketing leader for technology companies. Yeah, it surprised me too :D. I'm also an Atlanta native, where I live with my wife and four children and I hold an MBA from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, and a Bachelors of Science in Management from Georgia Tech. I'm also on a quest with my wife to run a half marathon in each of the 50 states. So I've got that going for me, which is nice.
Course Structure
8 hours
Live Sessions
Four 2-hour blocks
Four two-hour live sessions where you will learn with a group of peers via framework overviews, case studies, group discussions and live instructor feedback.
Projects & Exercises
2 hrs
Key Exercises:
- Creating your own Customer Journey Map
- Creating an Impact Map
- Developing your Hypotheses
- Quantifying your Impact Map
- Assigning Risk to your Impact Map
What people are saying
Fred Martin
Fallon Jensen
Learning is better with cohorts
Active hands-on learning
This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects
Interactive
You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and live workshops
Learn with a cohort of peers
Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you