Day 1: Strategy, Innovation, and Your Business Model
What do Product Managers Do?
The Haas-Berkeley Product Management program kicks off with an interactive exercise in which Product Managers from a range of industries capture and compare what they actually do every day, and how they prioritize and manage their diverse responsibilities.
Organizational Strategy and Product Management
This session provides a much-needed update to the classic models of business strategy. You will work through the latest models for understanding your product as a complete business—a business that must actively scan its environment for opportunity, fine tune its infrastructure to support those opportunities, and execute on those opportunities with efficiency and speed.
Building your Current Business Model
On day one, you will complete a Business Model Canvas for your product or product line. This new model is an innovative way to create a quick and easily updatable business plan for your product(s) or your entire company. Each morning of the program, you will revisit your Business Model Canvas, applying what you have learned to your own product lines. Your talented peers will assist you in refining coherent, practical plans to implement when you return to your office.
How to be Different than your Competition
How do you step back from the day to day grind, and really do things that move the needle? What do Product Managers really need to be? What attributes do you need? How should you spend your time? How do you get the organizational authority to make the decisions you need to make? This session is led by a former Product Management executive who learned how to get out of the daily barrage of fires and e-mails and make strategic decisions that made a meaningful difference—for his product and for his company.
Innovation and Product Management
In this session, you will learn about the organizational structures, behavioral incentives, cultural attributes and informal networks that are most highly correlated with a repeatable pipeline of successful product innovation. You will learn about what has worked in some of the more successful companies, and have ample opportunity to share and learn from the experience of your peers.
Day 2: Product Planning
Customer Focused Design
Learn Customer Design from the leading expert on the topic. In this session you will get a clear understanding of user and customer needs. Most people perform customer observation then jump to a solution, without first generating insights and new ideas. In this session, you will learn how to generate insights and new ideas as well as come up with solutions. You will also learn your individual learning style, helping you understand what part of customer focused design you are innately well-suited to manage. You will have an opportunity to learn and practice interview skills, to determine how many in-depth interviews are needed, how to design new products, and how to make your customers feel like heroes.
Market Research
Successful and profitable product development depends on using the right tools to ask and answer the right questions—regardless of whether research is conducted in-house or outsourced. In this session, you will learn how to:
Evaluate and select appropriate methods of data gathering and research (including interviews with potential customers, focus groups, surveys, and secondary research)
Decide when and how to hire an external research firm
Perform market research and analyze data with a minimal budget
As a result of this program, you will be better able to decide when to conduct market research, what research to conduct and how to conduct it, how to analyze the data collected, and, most importantly how to draw actionable conclusions from the analyses. You will work during the session on understanding the specific questions you need to answer (which features to prioritize, how to price a new product, etc.) and how to use market research to get meaningful input to your questions.
Day 3: Pricing Strategy and Market Research
Breakthrough Results with Pricing and Power Pricing
Pricing right is a critical component of successful product management. Customers reject otherwise good products which are priced too high. Companies risk losses when prices are too low. This session is designed to help you establish a coherent and responsive pricing strategy, yielding higher long-term profitability. Using case analysis and discussion, you will learn how to calculate economic value to the customer and use that to understand what customers should be willing to pay. You will then learn a comprehensive framework for developing a successful pricing strategy and develop tools to analyze the role of costs, customer price sensitivity, and competition.
Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
In this session, you will take a fresh look at segmenting your markets, subjecting your chosen market segments to rigorous analysis. You will become more fluent in the most important metrics that define which market segments you serve, including how attractive they are, what they desire most, and how they are best reached. You will work through the ideal methods for selecting segments to target, and choosing your market positioning. And, you will translate these concepts into decisions and actions through exercises on the Business Model Canvas.
Product Life Cycle
While the above session was about a snapshot in time, this session is about how to make the right decisions about your products at each step in the product lifecycle. You will learn how innovations diffuse in the marketplace, how to bridge the gap between early adopters and larger markets, and how to determine what type of life cycle your products have so you can make good decisions.
Day 4: Managing without Authority and Achieving Great Results
Strategic Business Interactions: Negotiation, Power, and Influence
While you need analytical skills to discover optimal solutions to problems, you also need a broad array of negotiation and communication skills in order to get these solutions accepted and implemented. This session will enable you to manage conflict, and negotiate effectively in both collaborative and competitive situations. You will develop these skills experientially through a negotiation simulation exercise. Session topics include:
How to prepare for a negotiation
Specific techniques for creating value ("expanding the pie") and dividing value ("claiming value")
Strategies to develop trust, gather information and build relationships to enhance negotiation power
Tactics to manage conflict, de-escalate conflict situations and manage people with different personalities and communication styles ("difficult people")
During the negotiation simulation exercise, you will get specific behavior and performance feedback, allowing you the opportunity to polish your negotiation skills.
Leading Product Teams
This session is about creating and managing high-performance product teams. You will learn how to get cross-functional teams to work together, trust each other, understand each other’s challenges, and work towards a common goal. This session is taught through a fun and interactive series of exercises.
Day 5: Customer Focused Design and Implementing your Business Model Canvas
Product Portfolio Planning
Companies must view new product investments and their associated returns in a portfolio context. This enables you to thoughtfully allocate scarce resources, improve operational execution, and maximize overall profitability.
In this session, you will use well-established portfolio modeling practices to simplify the difficult task of developing product portfolios in rapidly changing, dynamic markets. You will learn to support the portfolio management process by:
Assessing each product for strategic fit, profitability, investment requirements, risks, and other appropriate factors
Balancing budget and available resources within the portfolio
Using tactical scoring, visual mapping, and financial modeling to manage the portfolio
This session will also include a simulation game that models portfolio management challenges.
Implementing Your Business Model Canvas
The Product Management program concludes with another opportunity for you to revisit your initial business model canvas, synthesize your key learning from the week, and determine what you will change back at the office. This session allows an opportunity for you to share ideas with each other and to learn from what others plan to do as a result of the program.
