Product Management

Technology Basics

Monday, November 13, 2017
3:30 PM to 5:30 PM 
Hawes 203

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Guest instructor: Sam Clemens, co-founder Chief Product Officer, InsightSquared

 

Required Reading

1. 10 Tech Terms Even Non-Geeks Should Know - Benjy Weinberger

2. Top Five Technical Skills Every PM Should Know - Colin Lernell

3. Getting to technical enough as a product manager - Lulu Cheng

4. Cloud Computing Introduction - Chris Woodford

5. Native vs. Web vs. Hybrid Apps, What’s the Difference? - Gigvy

 

Recommended Reading

1. 40 Key Computer Science Concepts Explained in Layman's Terms - Carl Cheo

2. Resources for learning CS Basics Online

3. Escaping the Black Hole of Technical Debt - Atlassian

4. Why are databases hard to scale - Quora

 

Assignment

1. As a team, write a one-pager describing the technology decisions you’re making as you begin to consider product implementation. These could include areas like the importance of application performance and reliability for your product, privacy and security, and/or the perceived technical complexity of your near and long-term solution (e.g. does it use machine learning?). This could result in decisions around deployment (e.g. in the cloud), platform (web / native mobile), database / storage, etc. Technical decisions are inevitable and if they aren’t considered and deliberate may cause problems for you down the road. Conversely, more strategic or well-considered technical decisions can help drive near and long-term product success. This is a first draft of the Information and Software Architecture section of your PRD. Post a link to this one-pager in the Assignment Master tab Nov 13 - Tech Basics by 5:00pm Sunday, November 12.

2. One month countdown to your final deliverable, the PRD! Please bring any questions you or your team has about the PRD. We will use the last 15 minutes of the session to talk PRD as well as what to expect in PM102.