Introduction to Product Management Workshop

Who: General Assembly
Where: WeWork – South Lake Union, 500 Yale Ave N, Seattle, WA 98109
When: February 11, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
What: The first step in turning an idea into reality is to understand product management. Saying, “All I need is a tech team” is a bit like saying, “I want to construct a building from the ground up and all I need is a construction crew.” There is a huge amount of work between the idea stage and the coding stage, and this workshop will help you understand what needs to be accomplished.

Schedule: – Is Your Idea Worth Working On? – What Features Should Your Product Have? – How Will Your Product Be Built?

Takeaways

Learn to break a idea into its primary parts to assess a product’s feasibility
Find tools to evaluate the viability of early ideas
Study a step-by-step description of the product development process
Learn to test a product’s early market potential
High level overview of software building process and the people involved
Learn to create a spec

Prereqs & Preparation

This class is geared toward students managing product at a startup, or for students at larger companies interested in adapting their process to be more startup-like.

About the Instructor

Eric Appesland
Product Manager,
Hitachi Consulting

Eric has worked for Hitachi Consulting for the past 5 years focusing on providing management consulting services in conjunction with custom-development enterprise solutions. His role involves business strategy and planning, stakeholder alignment, and project management to reach attainable business objectives.
Part of the business strategy often involves building a digital infrastructure to support those business objectives. Eric’s role includes select activities such as requirements gathering, designing the user experience and creating the UI through the Define and Design phases, working tightly with engineering resources during Development, testing, release planning, feature and bug prioritization, and user interviews.
Eric has experience in managing broad cross-functional client relationships, presentations and product roadshows, and finding consensus among divergent business priorities. Successfully launched and managed numerous large-scale enterprise web-based products through multiple iterations of the entire product lifecycle. Recently completed Product Management education course through General Assembly.
Additional experience as a Management Consultant including Market Expansion Strategy, Financial Forecasting, WACC Analysis, Organizational Strategy and Design (OS&D), Change Management Analysis, and Market Trends Research Committee. Eric was also Co-founder of a Microfinance Savings & Loan in rural Ghana, Wealth Management Market Research Intern, 5 years at WaMu, and completed his B.A.B.A at the University of Washington Foster School of Business focused in Finance and Information Systems.