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Back to Action Learning Labs
15.786 Product Management Lab
Product Management Lab (PM-Lab) is an Action Learning lab that provides students with a hands-on introduction to product management with an emphasis on its role within technology-driven enterprises. Using common digital tools, such as storyboarding, wireframe mock-ups, and A/B testing, students will help real companies with their business challenges. This course is intended for students seeking a role in a product management team, or to contribute to product management in a new enterprise.
Topics include:
- Opportunity discovery
- Product-technology roadmapping
- Product development processes
- Go-to-market strategies
- Product launch
- Lifecycle management
- Central role of product manager in each activity
PM-Lab impact stories
Readying products for the market
Students help companies with their product management strategy, from the product design stage to development and marketing. In 2021, 82 students worked with 40 hosts from 7 different industries.
Project companies by industry
B2B/SaaS
- AirWorks
- Boss Insights
- Contack
- Hardworkers
- IDEO
- Metrika
- WellMode
Consumer
- Agni
- CarGurus
- Charli Cohen
- Embr Labs
- Loop
- Strava
- Whoop
- Wiley
E-commerce
- Klaviyo
- Thras.IO
Edtech
- Fuzu
- qBraid
- Raga Labs
- Trybe
Fintech/real estate
- Apartment List
- Elphi
- EverQuote
- HaloDAO
- Intralinks
- Juno
- Let's Get Set
- Softcom
Healthtech
- 1uphealth
- Ginger Health
- Grand Rounds
- Inito
- LeanTaaS
- Mumble Melody
Sustainability/IoT
- Acoustic Wells
- Adaviv
- Blue Wave Solar
- Ceres Imaging
- REsurety
The class
This course equips students with the skills required to hit the ground running as a product manager for a software product. These skills are as relevant to the management of a feature within a larger product, as they are to the management of the entire product surface area at a young startup.
The class covers:
- Lean principles in customer development
- Lean product development through rapid iteration of MVPs. Pivoting in real life
- The modern cloud ecosystem and how software is architected on it today
- A UX development workshop and usability testing
- Agile software development via Scrum
- Learning through experimentation and A/B testing
- A practitioner career retrospective on going from CEO-of-the-product to CEO
A number of these class sessions will be co-led by well-regarded practitioners. Recitations will focus on learning the use of tools (such as Balsamiq, Confluence, Jira, and Google Cloud Console) that complement some of the above sessions. In emphasizing that becoming a successful PM requires a great deal of learning by doing, students will work in fixed teams of 3 – 4 students over the six weeks of class to:
- Identify a customer problem
- Build a lightweight (3-4 page) market requirement document (MRD) for the product
- Build a lightweight (3-4 page) product requirement document (PRD) for the product
- Release a PR/FAQ for the product
Cross-functional teams (e.g. MBAs, MBAns, SFMBAs) are encouraged but not required.
Details
PM-Lab is partnered with the Product Management Club, one of the largest clubs at MIT Sloan. The lab portion of the course starts in January during IAP, and is 6credits. Students enrolled in the lab are required to take the 15.786 Product Management course portion in H3, which is an additional 6 credits. Students who are matched with a project will automatically be enrolled in the H3 course. Students taking PM-Lab do not have to bid for the course portion.
Student testimonial
-
Tommy Shi, MBA '22
As part of a relatively lean team, I had the opportunity to get my hands on many different facets of the product development process, from driving research conversations with users to wireframing the product experience to drafting an initial database design. Through working with developers, I gained a better sense of how development teams think through the technical architecture behind products, the questions that are important to them, and how a PM can streamline their work.
Despite experiencing only a sliver of a PM’s scope of work, I gained critical takeaways in approaching product strategy and leading implementation that I can undoubtedly take into my own experiences down the road.
Benefits of becoming a host organization
PM-Lab offers an invaluable opportunity for students to work on a real time PM project over fourweeks from January to early February, while also providing companies an opportunity to build connections with MIT Sloan students.
Some benefits of hosting a PM-Lab team include:
- Support on company product strategy (e.g. understanding the market landscape and analyzing competitive products for an enterprise e-commerce company, then developing a prioritized product feature roadmap)
- Support in implementation and execution (e.g. validating product-market fit, funnel and conversion impact analysis, creating epics/user stories for an MVP)
- Streamlining recruiting process for summer internships and beyond
- Improved presence and reputation on-campus at MIT
Roles and responsibilities
Host companies must be able to:
- Identify and scope PM projects for at least 3students
- Support a 4-week experience
- Submit description of host company and project to be included in a company book
- Attend in-person or virtual Networking Night
- Delegate a mentor (preferably a PM) for the student through the duration of PM Lab
- Engage in mid-review and final-review sessions in which students can receive feedback
- Complete a post-program survey
Interested in becoming a host?
If you are interested in hosting a PM-Lab team, please contact dpm-cert@mit.edu with the number of student spots available.
Host testimonial
-
Eilon Shalev, MBA '19, co-founder and CEO of Elphi
Elphi has been an avid partner ofPM-Lab from its inception in IAP 2019. We have been blessed to have worked with two, three, and six PMs during IAP 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively. Elphi has had four surges of product breakthroughs thus far, three of them were during and because of MIT PM-Lab MBAs. In only 3/4 weeks, students were able to hit the ground running, assumeresponsibilities on core product requirements, conduct user research with actual Elphi clients and users, craft a product roadmap, prioritize tasks, create JIRA tickets for engineers, manage engineers daily, deliver actual code into our cloud-native testing environments, and delineate next steps for the product enhancements. Can it even get any better than this? Join us next IAP to figure it out for yourselves!
Host timeline
-
Early November
Company presentation and Networking Night with MIT Sloan.
-
Late November
Student matches are confirmed with host companies.
-
January
Four-week PM-Lab experience.
Application/matching process
- Participating students receive a company book with host company projects and descriptions ahead of the Networking Night
- Each student submits an application, including a list of preferences for host companies
- Sloan faculty review applications and match students with companies, based on interest and skill. Companies can request certain criteria of candidates (e.g. industry knowledge)
- Sloan faculty/ teaching teamwill reach out to the company for final confirmation before confirming the match.
PM Lab Faculty
Management Science Chrysler Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management Charles Fine
- actionlearning@mit.edu
- 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02142
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