| The goal for Product Managers is to build scalable, repeatable products however customers, sales colleagues and revenue aspirations can cause us to deviate from the ideal growth path. If this happens too often, questions arise about product-market fit and one-off or ‘strategic projects’. The scaling module focuses on product, economic and organizational issues that emerge as a tech/software company grows, or indeed struggles to scale. Service based software companies build custom solutions designed to meet stated customer needs, sometimes referred to selling to ‘a market of one’. Product based companies design software for a wide range of clients positioning offerings for scale through standardisation and leveraging configurability rather than customisation. Day 1 focus will be on how product companies grow (versus services companies), competing internal stakeholders and the challenge of prioritizing work, and among competing goals/metrics/sampling biases. Day 2 covers customer value pricing and SaaS packaging, with students applying concepts to their own products and company contexts. |
Day 1
- Introduction
- 4 Laws of Software Economics: how we make money in tech
- Exercise: students identify whether they manage products or services
- Product pie charts (technical investment portfolios)
- Natural biases of (internal) company departments
- Exercise: apply pie chart method to students’ own products
- How to “sell” roadmaps internally
- Optional/time-permitting: developer-side and market-side explanation styles
Day 2
- Understanding and quantifying customer value for our products
- “Revenue stories” that describe value in customer language
- Pricing products based on customer value
- Exercise: teleportation
- SaaS packaging and pricing
- Scaling up selling by simplifying customer choices
- “Pricing out” specials and single-customer requests
- Financial and opportunity costs
- Exercise: exec-level escalation
- Ways to say NO
- Optional/time-permitting: Validation and Building the Right Things
- Exercise: pairwise interviewing
- Nurturing a Culture of Experimentation
This module will use a mix of:
- Short interactive lectures
- Real-life examples (students apply tools to their own products)
- Small group exercises for delegates
- Extensive discussion
| Module Content & Assessment | |
|---|---|
| Assessment Breakdown | % |
| Other Assessment(s) | 100 |