Product School New York — Local services in New York

In mid-2014 I was being considered for a Product Manager role at Facebook and I had made it quite far in the process; having visited the headquarters and met up with a senior PM and being invited to a closed PM mixer by my recruiter, however, I couldn’t believe how far I had come but deep at the back of my mind I had this impostor syndrome. I just didn’t feel confident enough. I felt there were some holes in my Product management skillset: analytics, metrics, scrum, etc.

My search for a solution led me to discover Product School. I enrolled in the inaugural cohort of the Product School in New York City in the fall of 2015. What sets Product School apart from the competition is that it places a premium on high quality tuition and as such is very thorough in its selection of instructors. All instructors currently work in the industry and are very well versed in the genre and thus bring a fresh industry perspective to augment the course syllabus. Their passion for the subject matter was clearly evidenced as instruction at Product School was top notch and very well paced. Instructors adequately accommodated student’s needs by adjusting their speed and mode of instruction. Unlike your often run of the mill lectures and information overload instruction, I really enjoyed the hands on project based teaching approach by the instructors. The project based course also had numerous assignments given to further reinforce the material covered in class. For once in my life I actually enjoyed doing homework and looked forward in anticipation to the next class session. Wish College courses was this engaging and relevant. The Student to faculty ratio was optimal. Class size was kept to a minimum and was very diverse with people from all walks of life: bankers, IT personnel, UX Designers It also had a good female representation too. Product school is also very flexible as it offers weeknight courses or weekend long courses. Such flexibility in scheduling affords students a lot of options. I had originally signed up to the weekend long session but during the course I had to switch to the evening session. This was achieved in a cinch. Product School doesn’t only instruct you in just the hard skills but also gently infuses key soft skills such as presentation and public speaking which are essential to becoming a successful PM. I was also introduced to several tools and Product Management industry specific software such as Intercom, Trello, InVision, etc. Product school also provides its students with great support and timely response. There is a sense of belonging and community which is facilitated by a dedicated Product School Slack channel where currently enrolled cohorts and alumni maintain communication during and post-graduation. This course covers everything you need to know about Product Management to jumpstart your PM career. The class highlights exactly what it takes to become a great PM, helping you figure out what strengths and experiences you can leverage. Product School delivers clarity of thought, a strong community, and the confidence to execute on your PM vision. Armed with the skillsets and the PM toolkit I now feel very confident to take on the challenge of becoming a great Product manager. Post product school, I have received several unsolicited job requisitions via LinkedIn from recruiters. What stood out to me was that each recruited specifically stated that I was being considered for these Product management positions because of my affiliation with the Product School.To me this a stamp of approval, a validation of sorts and attests to the quality and klout that Product School commands in the industry. I recommend Product School enthusiastically without any...

I just wrapped up the 8-week full-stack product management course and am really happy with my decision. I had an wonderful experience and would highly recommend the course for anyone who is motivated to learn about Product Management and understand formal frameworks for how to approach product thinking to advance their career, become more effective in your job, or transition into a product role.

The Search I knew I needed some sort of formal education to get a better grasp of what the job entailed and wanted to do this time/money investment after diligent investigation. When I first decided to research about the right school for Product Management, I wasn't really sure where to begin. I read through product blogs, went through the websites of various schools who offered Product Management courses and finally zeroed in on Product School after doing tons of research. I found that Product School had a pretty comprehensive syllabus in place, good faculty (practicing PMs from reputed organisations) and a strong alumni base that would help in networking later.

The Curriculum There are core competencies that every PM must have -- many of which can start in the classroom -- but most are developed with experience, good role models, and mentoring. I believe the course succinctly covers most important aspects of product management. While product expertise is really about mastering business, creativity, engineering, communication and analytical skills. While PS may help you to get started by providing you with a strong foundation, inputs from experienced/seasoned PS faculty helps contextualise certain real-life situations.

The Class PS in-class discussion and activities helped in putting into perspective how design, business, and engineering gets amalgamated together to deliver the final product. We did wire-framing starting from basic hand-sketches to using Balsamic, Sketch, Invision, to covering concepts like usability research, UX and prototyping.

While there were aspects of machine learning coding and software frameworks that were covered during the classes, it was more to give exposure than developing proficiency because a Product Manager need not be expert at these (depends on exact role and organisation). Again, there is so much you can cover in a 8-week part-time course.

The Instructor The faculty at PS is experience and great at communication. The whole point of taking a F2F class, instead of going through a Udemy course, is to be able to leverage the experience of the instructor. Instructors at PS (Joel in my case) had really deep product experience and had been a PM with multiple organisations, and was absolutely awesome. He was able to throw real-world examples to every question brought up in the class and articulately it brilliantly. Joel is also just an awesome and fun guy which pushed hard to make the evening classes (5 AM morning class for me) entertaining and engaging. He took an extra effort to supplement the course-content with additional material relevant to the topics being discussed.

Overall I had a great experience at the Product School and would recommend it to anyone looking for a combination of great content, developing strong foundation and hone overall approach to product thinking. I strong believe that the PS continue to grow in its stature and will be a great name to add to your credentials. The overall proposition lives up to its promise.

Thanks Joel for a wonderful 8-week coaching and team PS for putting together...

I took the Product School PM Class of April 2018 in NYC. Coming into Product school was exactly what I was looking for since I've become a Product Manager myself a few years ago. I didn't have much mentorship in the beginning of my career and had forged my way through with my love for the user guiding me but I was hungry to know how to be an ideal Product Manager and how the best worked. I had played around with the idea of going to get an MBA but it never sounded right until I found out about Product School. Exactly what I was looking, a very solid foundation for a beginner or aspiring PM to start off with.

The course work was solid and organized in a intuitive flow with hand-ons classwork to better internalize the things we learned further hardened with our individual project that cumulated in a final project presentation. But what really made this course from a nice to have class to an invaluable experience for me was my instructor, Chris Maliwat.

I didn't look into my instructor before the class started but I believe I got very lucky since his history for product resonated with the types of products I aspired to work in myself. Chris was an exciting teacher and full of energy, able to draw deeply from his extensive history with his personal anecdotes that were relevant to the course and offered contrary opinions on some of the course material to provide a different perspective.

Chris was also very generous with his time grabbing coffee with me to personally walk through my experience and resume and has offered his time to many of my classmates also to help them improve. Chris astounded me with his incredibly agile mind and has set a role model of the type of PM I would wish to work with in the future and strive to be.

Overall Product School's PM Course with the Chris Maliwat magic sauce has provided me a solid structure and way of thinking for me to more effectively grow to become a more impactful Product Manager. Would highly recommend to a new PM who just fell in the role and lacked mentorship to help avoid all the newbie mistakes (remember choose a instructor who's background resonates with you.)

I also took the Coding for Managers with my instructor Joe and he was also a fantastic instructor its fantastic that the instructors are full time professionals also.

In addition I just finished the Data Analysis for Managers with my instructor David Tuffey. David Tuffey was a fantastic instructor and he really helped the class understand the material and put what we learned into perspective. I highly appreciated the extra time David spent putting together class summaries that highlighted the important things we went over and extra links to point us to further information. The class gives a high level view of the things that PMs use for data analysis and there's a lot of content to go through. The non-PM courses at PS introduces a large amount of content and require you to dig in during your own time. The class gives back as much as you put in and you should start working on your final project as early as possible to work through the technical obstacles to source your data and clean it before you do your...