Product Management

2026/2027

Academic Year

ENG

Instruction in English

3

ECTS credits

Delivered at:

Department of Management

Course type:

Compulsory course

When:

1 year, 2 module

Instructor

Лысенко Ксения Андреевна

Course Syllabus

Abstract

This course introduces students to product management—a discipline that bridges user value, business viability, technical feasibility, and user experience. Students navigate the entire product lifecycle: product strategy, market and customer analysis, discovery, hypothesis validation, MVPs and experimentation, product analytics, roadmapping and stakeholder management, as well as launch, go-to-market strategy, and growth. The course is highly practical in nature: standard topics are covered through product teardowns, case study discussions, and comprehensive final projects. In these projects, students define a product problem, design discovery processes and MVP experiments, establish economic metrics, and present their product roadmap and go-to-market strategy.

Learning Objectives

• ● Develop a systemic understanding of the product manager's role and the logic of product thinking: moving from feature requests to testable hypotheses and measurable outcomes. ● Teach students to analyze the market, customer, user, competitors, and product business model. ● Develop skills in planning product discovery: formulating research questions, conducting interviews, and synthesizing insights. ● Teach students to design MVPs and product experiments, define success criteria, and interpret results. ● Develop practical skills in building a metrics tree, selecting a North Star Metric, and making product decisions based on data. ● Teach students to connect product strategy, roadmap, agile delivery, stakeholder management, and go-to-market into a coherent management logic.

Expected Learning Outcomes

• Explain the role of the product manager and distinguish a product problem from a feature request.
• Analyze the market, segments, ICP/personas, competitors, substitutes, switching costs, and product value proposition.
• Publicly defend a product case by grounding decisions in user needs, market context, hypotheses, metrics, and implementation constraints.
• Plan and conduct basic customer discovery: formulate research questions, prepare an interview guide, and synthesize insights.
• Formulate problem, solution, value, growth, and revenue hypotheses and select an appropriate MVP or experiment.
• Apply basic prioritization methods for product initiatives, including RICE, ICE, Kano, cost of delay, and related approaches.
• Build a metrics tree, select a North Star Metric, and interpret funnel/cohort/retention data for product decisions.
• Develop an outcome-based roadmap and formulate a product narrative for the team and stakeholders.
• Design basic go-to-market and growth assumptions for a digital product.

Course Contents

• 1. What is Product Management? Product manager role, product types, and product thinking
• 2. Product Strategy, Market, Customer and Value Proposition
• 3. Product Discovery: users, problems, and opportunities
• 4. Product Design, MVP, Experimentation and Prioritization
• 5. Product Analytics, Metrics and Decision-Making
• 6. Roadmaps, Agile Delivery and Stakeholder Management
• 7. Go-to-Market, Growth, Scaling and Final Product Case

Assessment Elements

• Seminar participation and case work
  Active participation in discussions, completion of mini-cases during class, peer feedback, and short group exercises are assessed. This component cannot be retaken, as it is tied to synchronous participation in discussion and case-solving at a specific moment during the session.
• Team product assignments
  Team product assignments are completed for the product project selected by the team: discovery plan and interview guide; metrics tree and North Star Metric; outcome-based roadmap. Submissions are uploaded to SmartLMS in written format or as a short presentation, depending on the assignment requirements. A peer-to-peer evaluation system is used: each team reviews and assesses another team’s submission according to a rubric provided by the instructor. The instructor moderates the peer assessment and may adjust the final score to ensure consistency and fairness.
• Final product case presentation
  Team defense of a final product case. The presentation lasts 10-12 minutes, followed by 5-7 minutes of questions. The case must include product context, target segment and problem, value proposition, key hypotheses, MVP/experiment plan, metrics tree, roadmap, and go-to-market assumptions.

Interim Assessment

• 2026/2027 2nd module
  0.3 * Team product assignments + 0.2 * Seminar participation and case work + 0.5 * Final product case presentation

Bibliography

Recommended Core Bibliography

• Galli M, Navigating the Product Galaxy: A Practical Handbook for Product Managers, 2025, Publisher Springer Nature (Berkeley, CA)

Recommended Additional Bibliography

• Managing product management : empowering your organization to produce competitive products and brands, Haines, S., 2012

Authors

• Karpinskaia Emiliia Olegovna
• Kaplun Mariia Nikitichna