Special Topics in Management

This multidisciplinary course explores how product leaders lead product teams to build and launch successful products in market by drawing from multidisciplinary best practices across user research, design, and engineering. Topics will interweave new learnings with I School curriculum concepts to demonstrate how to apply these skills and work with relevant stakeholder experts at different stages of product development. Students are required to participate in weekly sessions and complete three module activities that will build up a digital portfolio that can be used in their job search after school. Students taking this course will further deepen their understanding of how the concepts they have learned in the I School curriculum are relevant to the field of product management by applying them first-hand.

This course is designed to give participants a practical overview of the modern lean/agile product management paradigm based on contemporary industry practice. We cover the complete lifecycle of product management, from discovering your customers and users through to sales, marketing and managing teams. We'll take an experimental approach throughout, showing how to minimize investment and output while maximizing the information we discover in order to support effective decision-making. During the course, we'll show how to apply the theory through hands-on collaborative problem-solving activities. There will also be guest lectures from industry experts.