Product Management and Design

This course teaches students to build products users want and love. It gives students a foundation in the tools and practices of modern product management and interaction design. Students will work in pairs to apply product development skills to real user challenges.



The course begins with a focus on user research. Students learn and apply the design thinking framework to product development. They learn to define user needs through user interviews and market analysis. They learn to translate user needs into product specifications and define metrics to test product success. They learn to create and test design prototypes (wireframes, user journeys). The second part of the course focuses on UX/UI design. Students learn key concepts in UI/UX design including information hierarchy, and typography, and color. Students will create high-fidelity UI mockups using industry-standard tools. They’ll then conduct usability tests to gauge the effectiveness of their designs.



As students work in pairs, they will practice the complementary and collaborative roles of PMs and UX designers in early product development. They’ll also practice giving design critiques to other teams and responding to feedback on their designs. By the end of the courses, each pair will have a user-tested, refined, and development-ready design for a web or mobile application.



All materials are included.