COURSE NUMBER: MBA267.1
This course is dual-listed with the Evening-Weekend MBA Program

COURSE TITLE: Product Management

UNITS OF CREDIT: 2 Units

INSTRUCTOR: Yasi Baiani

E-MAIL ADDRESS: ybaiani@berkeley.edu

PREREQUISITE(S): None

CLASS FORMAT:
Combination of lectures, guest speakers, class discussions, individual and group assignments, and a project.
The project will be done in small groups, where teams will work on an idea together throughout the semester. The project deliverables will count towards midterm and final grades (see breakdown of course grading below). Students are encouraged to bring their own startup ideas to this class. By using various tools that the product people use such as customer discovery, market research, competitive analysis, and user testing, you should be able to assess the viability of your idea and work towards designing a solution that your target customers want. Students will self-form teams for final projects based on their interests and backgrounds.

REQUIRED READINGS:
Combination of assigned readings, assignments, and project work.

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE:

• Class participation: 25%
• Midterm deliverables (interim work related to the final project): 35%
• Group final presentation and deliverables: 30%
• Final feedback to your cluster: 10%

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:
Product Management is one of the high impact roles in today’s companies. Product managers (PMs) typically own the end-to-end product development process from concept and ideation all the way to launch of the product in market. They work cross-functionally with many teams across the organization to build, test, and launch a product.

This course helps students understand what makes a top notch product manager and provides students with the required knowledge, skills, and tools to succeed in that role. Through this course, students will get exposed to the full product development cycle and learn how to go from an idea to designing and launching a product. This course uses a learning-by-doing approach to build basic product management skills.

The Product Management course is the combination of 1) lectures on key product management topics; 2) speakers; 3) hands-on practices; 4) a class project which requires students to define, validate, and design a solution to a real life problem from scratch.

CAREER FIELD:
This course is mainly designed for students with limited or no prior product management experience who are interested in becoming product managers. Entrepreneurs who want to lead the design and development of products in their own companies could also benefit from this course by better understanding the end-to-end product development process.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:
Yasi Baiani teaches the Product Management elective course in the EWMBA program at UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business. Yasi is a product innovator, entrepreneur, and investor. She is currently the Head of Product Management, Software Experiences at Fitbit where she strategizes, designs, and develops the next generation of Fitbit’s features and products. Prior to Fitbit, Yasi was the CEO and Co-Founder of ActivePepper, a health and fitness mobile company, and the Product Innovation Manager at athenahealth, a $5.5 billion healthcare IT firm. Yasi was also a VC investor in a $3.5 billion venture fund in Silicon Valley, invested in tech and digital health startups. Yasi is currently serving on the Board of Directors of the Iranian Alumni of Harvard. Yasi has been recognized as one of the LinkedIn Top Voices in Digital Health and has over 320,000 LinkedIn followers. Yasi was listed as one of The 27 Most Impressive Harvard MBAs by Business Insider. She holds a BS in Business Administration from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School.