Product Management Lab

Product Management Lab at a glance

  • Term

    IAP + Spring H3

  • Units

    6 IAP + 6 Spring

  • Eligible students

    All MIT Sloan graduate students and SCM students

  • Co-requisites

    15.761 Introduction to Operations Management 

  • Bid/Application

    Application/ Permission of Instructor 

  • Host organization profile

    Relatively small, young technology-centric companies looking for smart, motivated students interested in tech and product management

  • Sample sectors

    B2B, B2C, fintech, healthtech, SaaS

  • Sample host organizations

    EA, Elphi, Embr Labs, Intelihealth, KAYAK, Nasdaq, Skye, Toast, Whoop

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:

  • Learn principles in customer development
  • Learn 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:

  1. Identify a customer problem
  2. Build a lightweight (3-4 page) market requirement document (MRD) for the product
  3. Build a lightweight (3-4 page) product requirement document (PRD) for the product
  4. 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 6 credits. Students are expected to have 120 hours of project work with their host company. This can be remote, hybrid or on-site, depending on the host company and project. Students are not expected to be on campus during PM-Lab. Students apply to a project and are accepted by permission of instructor. It is recommended to take 15.785 prior to 15.786 or to have some previosu PM experience. Accepted students will rank their top 8 projects in canvas and will be matched by the teaching team. 

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. The lecture will be on Mondays and Wednesdays 2:30-4:00pm. 

 

Follow this link for the recording of PM-Lab Networking Night 2024

Follow this link for the virtual host pitches from Networking Night 2024

 

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.