Building The Product Managers of Tomorrow, Today

What happens when you have a product that sails the tide of competition effortlessly? You wade into the world bare-chested, confident to survive the test of time. And, when does this happen? When your product or service has found a loyal audience who swear by it even more than you!

The aforementioned is the dream of any organisation and to get that perfect product or service whose loyal audience does not leave. Companies spend plenty of time and resources to make the perfect cut! A key player in this entire process is the product manager.

Today product management is the lifeblood of any organisation and is looked upon as a bridge between the engineering and marketing functions. Understanding the user and developing a product which serves their needs, while remaining ahead of the competition is the key requirement of any product manager. With technology diminishing the boundaries across the globe, the role of a product manager is all the more prominent today.

To address this growing need for diverse product managers for startups, organisations et al, Pragmatic Leaders was founded by Talvinder Singh in February 2018. Their flagship Pragmatic Product Leader course is attempting to champion the cause of bringing Product Management into mainstream industry discourse. And more importantly, laying a structured path for becoming a product manager.

Gurugram based Pragmatic Leaders is on the front lines of education’s evolution, bringing real-world hands-on learning to the users and equipping them with the skills needed to succeed beyond the classroom.

“Indian products do not enjoy the status that typical western products inherit. Despite being the third biggest startup ecosystem in the world, product management is usually an afterthought for Indian startups, which essentially sets them up for failure,” emphasises, Talvinder Singh.

Talvinder Singh brings to the table his comprehensive experience in product management. That, coupled with insights by industry experts belonging to a host of reputed global and Indian organisations, places the Pragmatic Product Leader course in a unique position – a perfect amalgamation of theory meets practical knowledge.

The guiding principle of this course is based on the ethos that product management is a global skill set. Unlike product management courses in different geographical regions which pursue localised case studies, Pragmatic Product Leader course has created its content based on global ideas and experiences by collaborating with product managers from diverse industries and geographical regions.

What Makes Pragmatic Leaders The New Stop?  

The course is built on three Es:

• Educate through a structured pedagogy.
• Engage with other product managers to build serendipitous associations to meet challenges through real solutions.
• Employ the managers to make an easy transition into relevant jobs.

The pedagogy of the Pragmatic Product Leader course enables students to build and launch a real product in the course itself! The course is designed to equip students with practical experiences and strong theoretical frameworks to guide them through the entire process.

Engage: Pragmatic Product Leader course offers access to a unique StackOverflow inspired platform exclusively built for product managers to deliberate on the challenges faced by Product Managers globally.

Employ: Running parallel to the course is a non-commercial job board for recruiters and product managers to match up.

Thereby, the programme is designed to encourage product leaders who are developing competitive solutions for products to turn them into commercially viable across the globe.

What’s In The Course?

The course has been designed to bring about a revolutionary way to learn product management. The learning works through four stages:

• Unconscious incompetence: This involves a pre-assessment test to form the base.
• Conscious incompetence: At this stage, aspirants will start to learn from the structured course content at their own pace and they will also be a part of Live Tutorials conducted by Product Managers.
• Conscious competence: This stage involves product creation with real developers.
• Unconscious competence: The final stage involves assessment and presentation followed by aspirants achieving their certification and then they transition into getting a job with a mentor.

“Product managers can be hired globally. Even as some socio-cultural aspects are specific to India, Indian product managers are finding a space to develop a wide range of products across continents. Therefore, we would like to do away with the conventions and accept that being a product manager has nothing to do with geography,” stresses Talvinder Singh.

Building Products With Real Developers And Designers

The programme will pair students with an in-house development team, direct them towards building a real product, launch it for the users and collect feedback. This makes the course more than just a regular degree.

Live Tutorials By Top Product Managers

Pragmatic Leaders’ global network of top product managers will conduct interactive live tutorials. In these sessions, students work on case-based contemporary or realistic product problems from across the globe, thus applying the learned concepts along with their course mates.

Mentors To Help You Transition Into Your Job

The most rewarding aspect of any course apart from the learning lies in getting the student a job. Pragmatic Product Leader course has placement linkages with 38 companies of the entire Times Internet Group. This list is only growing as we speak. These linkages enable students to score a job offer even before the demo day. At the demo day, students will showcase their products to all the recruiters and stand a chance to get an on-the-spot offer. The certified student is then paired with a mentor who regularly checks in for eight weeks to facilitate a smooth transition into the job.

In-Depth Course Content

The course covers 326 topics over 20 modules with numerous assignments and quizzes, making this one of the most comprehensive courses out there. This can be consumed in the form of video and supporting reading material and is entirely self-paced.

All these aspects will constantly push the student to ‘think more’, ‘create more’ and ‘probe more’ leading to the moulding of a confident and well-informed product manager.

Why The Need For Such A Course?

Product management is all about the users: identifying the needs of the market (which are often assumed and uncommunicated), analysing product prototype, studying market constraints and working out a channel to best communicate the product message. With the emergence and popularity of product management courses in India, it is now seen as a critical branch of building a business.

India is the third biggest startup ecosystem in the world, which speaks of the immense scope of products and services in the future and in turn the added need for robust product management systems in place. Courses such as Pragmatic Product Leader will provide relevant and industry-validated content that will help budding product managers to see the inside world of product management at a microscopic level and enhance the user experience by making a product or service 10x better.

The Pragmatic Product Leader course is comprehensive and is uniquely placed to pique the interest of an aspiring product manager, catering to all aspects of education, mentoring, collaboration and employment. Essentially, it aims to become a one-stop destination for everything that is product management.

Students are signing up and it seems that between 5th and 10th March, the first cohort will be full. Skip the waitlist (200+) altogether and join the course right away by emailing at admissions@pragmaticleaders.io, given that seats are filling up pretty fast!

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