edX Professional Certificate Programs

Product Management

Achieving Product-Market Fit

Learn how to truly know your target customer, your customer’s underserved needs, your value proposition, your product feature set, and your user experience, then integrate this knowledge into product and market requirements and positioning plans.

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What You Will Learn

  • Determining your target customer. It all begins with target customers who will ultimately decide how well your product meets their needs. You should use market segmentation to get specific about who your target customer is.
  • Identifying underserved customer needs. After forming your hypothesis about your target customers, the next step is to understand their needs. As you try to create value for customers, you want to identify the specific needs that correspond to a good market opportunity.
  • Defining your value proposition. Your value proposition is your plan for how your product will meet customer needs better than the alternatives. Out of all the potential customer needs your product could address, which ones will you focus on with your product?
  • Specifying your MVP feature set. Once you are clear on your value proposition, you need to specify what functionality your minimum viable product will include. The MVP approach is aimed at building only what is needed to create enough value in the eyes of your target customer to validate that you are heading in the right direction.
  • Creating your MVP prototype. In order to test your MVP hypotheses with customers, you need to show them a version of your product so they can give you feedback on it. You will need to apply user experience (UX) design to bring your feature set to life for
  • Testing your MVP with customers. Once you have your MVP prototype ready, it’s time to test it with customers. It’s important in this step to ensure the people from whom you are soliciting feedback are in your target market.
  • Iterating to Improve Product-Market Fit. The Lean Product Process is an iterative process. After analyzing the customer feedback, you want to revise your hypotheses based on what you learned and loop back to an earlier step in the process.

About This Course

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At A Glance

Expert Instruction
Build Skills

Self-Paced
Progress at your own speed

4 Weeks
2-3 hours per week

Free or $249.00
For the full program experience
Discounted to $224.10 when you purchase the full Product Management Professional Certificate Program.

10 Professional Development Units (PDUs)
Earn PDUs toward your Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Mangement Professional (PMP) certification

Courses


Your Instructor

James Green

Dr. James V. Green leads the education activities of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute at the University of Maryland as the Director of Entrepreneurship Education.

What Our Students Are Saying

This was an excellent course aimed at giving step by step overview into identifying target customers to achieving product market fit.
Kannan Raveendran
I started this course in order to learn a solid methodology regarding the management of product development. I firmly believe that this course is complete for a noninitiate or someone with a technical background. It also provides students with meaningful insights on how to develop a product, prototype, and test it with your target customers.
Anonymous
This course contains critical insights that can make the difference between the success and failure of your product.
Anonymous
All information was divided into the well structured and designed lessons with texts. It's easy to be focused on the core ideas. The challenge questions at the end of each module provide a synopsis of the information from the module.
Anonymous
Amazing course with valuable knowledge for any founder, entrepreneur, or someone wanting to learn about the product market analysis.
Anonymous

Syllabus

Week 1

Module 1: Determining Your Target Customer

Week 2

Module 2: Identifying Underserved Customer Needs

Week 3

Module 3: Defining Your Value Proposition

Week 4

Module 4: Specifying Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Feature Set

Week 5

Module 5: Creating Your MVP Prototype

Week 6

Module 6: Testing Your MVP with Customers

Week 7

Module 7: Iterating to Improve Product-Market Fit

Job Outlook

Project Manager jobs are expected to grow by 33% over next 10 years

PMI.org

Program Project Manager income is $60k to $100k based on industry

Payscale.com

You can earn $10,000 more as an Agile Project Manager

Payscale.com

Corporate Endorsement

Supporting US military efforts require accuracy and efficiency. We are passionate about it. In keeping with the integrity of our Nation’s military men and women, it is imperative that we provide them the best technology imaginable. The Agile Project Management program provides clear direction to channel team efforts in a more concise manner. I highly recommend this program to any organization relying on teams to get things done.
Debbie Gray, Director of Human Resources, GTMR Inc.

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