The 16 Best Product Management Courses Online & In-Person

Oscar Wilde once said, “You can never be overdressed or overeducated.” While you may doubt the former of those words — you’ll probably get some strange looks if you walk into work in black tie attire — the latter could not be truer.

Education is something that is not limited to grade school and college years. Just because you’ve worn your cap and gown and relished in that coveted diploma doesn’t mean you’re done learning. Everyone has something new to learn, whether that be a new musical instrument or better practices for your career.

If you’re in product management, you might feel like you’ve learned all there is to know to be a standout employee. However, there are plenty of opportunities for you to brush up on the old and master the new.

Product Management Courses

1. Project Management Certificate by Cornell University

2. Product Management 101 by Todd Birzer

3. Product Management: Building Great Products by Jon Kolko

4. Product Management Course Bundle by PM Loop

5. One Month Product Management by One Month

6. Product Management First Steps by LinkedIn Learning

7. Professional & Personal Development Courses: Business by Stanford University

8. Become a Product Manager | Learn the Skills & Get the Job by Cole Mercer and Evan Kimbrell

9. Professional & Personal Development courses: Business by Stanford University

10. Product Management In-Person Training by 280 Group

11. Blackblot Strategic Product Management™

     

    Training Program by Blackblot

12. Product Management Training Public Workshops by Mind the Product
13. Product Management by General Assembly
14. Product Management Course by Product School
15. Product Management Certificate Course by BrainStation
16. Product Management Certificate Program by UC Berkeley

The 8 Best Online Product Management Courses

1. Project Management Certificate by Cornell University

Price: $3,600

Cornell University’s online learning program, eCornell, offers totally flexible education programs that are compatible with your hectic life. Each program is interactive, so you can craft it to fit your personal career goals and schedule. The Project Management Certificate program offers five courses, including Organizing the Product and its Components and Using Earned Value Management for Product Managers.

The program is developed by Cornell’s faculty, so it’s trustworthy and effective. In addition, completing all five courses awards you 50 PDU — Professional Development Unit — credits towards a Product Management Professional certification and the final exam.

2. Product Management 101 by Todd Birzer

Price: $11.99

Todd Birzer is a product management director and consultant, the author of Becoming a More Strategic Product Manager, and an MBA graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. His online course Product Management 101 is totally flexible and can be completed on your own time, taking about 4 hours and 13 minutes to complete.

The course contains 62 lectures in six categories, including Market Intelligence and New Product Development. It’s an in-depth program that is especially helpful for people with 0-5 years of experience who want to learn better strategies and practices for product management.

3. Product Management: Building Great Products by Jon Kolko

Price: $44.99

Jon Kolko has held several positions at many companies, though he is currently a Partner at Modernist Studio, and the Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design. His online course Product Management: Building Great Products gives a nice introduction to product management by helping you define market opportunities, understand positioning solutions and their value, and structure the delivery of products.

It’s a great course for designers, product managers, and business owners looking to broaden their skills and learn more about product management. It features eight lectures, covering themes such as Insight Combination and Product Roadmapping. The entire course only takes about an hour and 19 minutes to complete, so it’s perfect for someone with very limited time for education.

4. Product Management Course Bundle by PM Loop

Price: $396

PM Loop is a platform for online training and an online community for business professionals working in the tech industry. Keela Robison, the CEO and founder of PM Loop, teaches the Product Management Course Bundle which covers the responsibilities of a product manager to help you land a job in the role.

This bundle features four courses that help you use popular product management tools, understand strategies and goals, work on a product team, and manage and train new product managers. The course titles include Product Management: Ace the Interview and Product Strategy. In total, the bundle will take about six hours to complete, and it comes with downloadable templates, exercises, study guides, lists, and sample interview questions.

5. One Month Product Management by One Month

Price: $99

One Month is a site that offers 30-day boot camps on a variety of topics within computer programming, coding, and business. Each course is guaranteed to help you master the topic within a month, saving you time and money. The Product Management course teaches you how to conceive, plan, and execute a new product with the help of instructor Christian Arca, a former Product Manager at Etsy.

The course educates you on selecting a product to launch based on customer needs, developing that product, and communicating it to customers. In just four weeks, you can develop a strong foundation in product thinking, setting yourself up for success to mastermind the next great product.

6. Product Management First Steps by LinkedIn Learning

Price: $29.99/month for a LinkedIn Learning subscription

LinkedIn Learning offers online courses to educate users on creative, business, and technology skills. You can search for courses within each of those three themes based on specific subjects or software. The Project Management First Steps course is taught by former Adobe Principal Product Manager Doug Winnie. It covers the six stages of a product’s lifecycle: researching, planning, building, releasing, refining, and retiring.

The course also teaches you the basic responsibilities of a product manager, such as how to work with a product team and define a product. With the help of this course, you’ll understand the necessary process for putting out the best possible product. The course is just an hour and 51 minutes long and features eight chapter quizzes.

7. Professional & Personal Development Courses: Business by Stanford University

Price: $605

Stanford University offers an outstanding number of online courses within Liberal Arts & Sciences, Creative Writing, and Professional & Personal Development as part of their Continuing Studies program. Within the latter category, there are many Business courses — specifically, Product Management courses — perfect for an aspiring or growing Product Manager. For instance, two courses include User Experience (UX) Design for Product Managers and Fundamentals of Product Management.

These courses are both taught by product management professionals and offered by the prestigious Stanford University. These, among other related courses, cover a variety of themes within the industry, preparing students to handle the many sides of product management. Each course is 10 weeks long, and, although online, involves frequent interaction with the instructors and other students to ensure an interactive educational process.

8. Become a Product Manager | Learn the Skills & Get the Job by Cole Mercer and Evan Kimbrell

Price: $11.99

Cole Mercer is currently a Senior Product Manager at SoundCloud, while Evan Kimbrell is the Founder and Director of Sprintkick, a digital agency in San Francisco. Both have plenty of industry and training experience. Their course Become a Product Manager | Learn the Skills & Get the Job claims to be the most updated and complete course covering product management.

The course has an impressive list of learning objectives, covering topics ranging from the product lifecycle to comparing competitors to managing customer interviews to communicating with product stakeholders and much more. The course offers 144 lectures in just under 13 hours of course video content in categories such as Ideas and User Needs and Designing and Running Experiments. In addition, the course comes with 25 articles and 121 downloadable resources to use throughout your life in product management.

The 8 Best In-Person Product Management Courses

9. Professional & Personal Development courses: Business by Stanford University

Price: $630

The same Continuing Studies program at Stanford University also offers in-person courses for those who’d prefer a more interactive experience. What’s special about Stanford Continuing Studies is that it works to share the same educational resources with adult students. After all, every student deserves the same learning environment, regardless of if they’re an undergraduate, four-year student or an adult learner returning after years of field experience.

Stanford offers solely-on-campus courses, such as Product Management for the Internet of Things: A Hands-On Course, as well as several online courses that are also available on-campus. In anywhere from six to 10 weeks, you can gain the tools you need to achieve success in product management in a classroom setting. Courses run weekday nights and Saturdays to work around your personal and professional life.

10. Product Management In-Person Training by 280 Group

Price: $1,995-$2,495

280 Group is a Product Management training and consulting firm, located in Silicon Valley, California. 280 Group works with companies and individuals around the world, providing them with products and services to educate, support, and delight those interested in learning more about product management.

280 Group has two groups of In-Person Product Management Training courses: Optimal Product Management and Product Marketing, as well as Agile for Product Managers and Product Owners. Each group has courses ranging in skill level from beginner to advanced and is created for people who are currently or aspire to be product managers, product marketing managers, or product owners. The courses run monthly in many locations, such as Boston, London, Los Angeles, and Toronto.

11. Blackblot Strategic Product Management™ Training Program by Blackblot

Price: Varies

Blackblot provides educational services for market and business leaders around the world. It also developed the Blackblot PMTK Methodology™, a set of comprehensive product management templates and models used to educate people on the best strategies when creating new products.

The Blackblot Strategic Product Management™ training program curriculum teaches advanced, in-depth courses geared toward product managers, directors, and marketers. There are five in-person courses; one is a three-day program, three are one-day programs, and one is a specialized, private program. In just one to three days, you can gain a substantial education in product management, preparing you to take and pass the Blackblot Product Management Professional™ certification program.

12. Product Management Training Public Workshops by Mind the Product

Price: $749

Mind the Product is an international product community, consisting of over 150,000 members. It leads events in over 155 cities to bring people together and recounts those events on its website and blog.

Mind the Product’s Public Workshops are led by industry experts to help teach new skills and improve the abilities of product managers. The courses cover everything from product management basics to product leadership skills. The workshops include Product Management Essentials 102 and Metrics & Analytics 201 and run in cities around the world, such as Austin, Seattle, and Amsterdam.

13. Product Management by General Assembly

Price: $3,950

General Assembly specializes in providing educational resources to transform careers in business, career development, coding, data, design, and marketing. General Assembly has 20 campuses in six countries around the globe and offers programs under four categories: full-time courses, part-time courses, classes & workshops, and events.

General Assembly’s Product Management part-time course covers leadership and communication skills necessary in the industry, user-centered designs and other tools to win over stakeholders, and quality product strategy development. It’s led by a number of instructors, teaching assistants, and course producers who work together to create a course that runs as both a 10-week part-time course and a one-week accelerated course.

14. Product Management Course by Product School

Price: $3,999

Product School was founded in 2014 and provides product management training to product professionals around the world. Real experts in product management educate learners on product management, data analytics, coding, blockchain, and digital marketing. These product managers come from a variety of companies, such as Netflix, Google, and Facebook, to educate aspiring technology leaders.

The Product Management Course teaches you how to build software products, interview for a job in product, and understand important management dilemmas. At the completion of this 8-week, part-time course, you’ll be granted the Product Management Certification (PMC™). The course is held in many cities, including Chicago, New York, and London.

15. Product Management Certificate Course by BrainStation

Price: $2,900

BrainStation builds programs that offer digital skills training to individuals and businesses worldwide. Offering five categories of disciplines — data, design, development, product, and marketing — BrainStation covers a comprehensive curriculum that empowers people to embrace and evolve the digital world.

The Product Management Certificate Course teaches you how to problem-solve for products, identify market opportunities, understand Scrum — a common Agile methodology for creating tech products — and test how your product idea will be perceived by consumers. In order to gain your final certification, you’ll participate in a final project of developing and presenting a go-to-market plan for an original product. The part-time course is available in five cities: Boston, New York, Chicago, Toronto, and Vancouver.

16. Product Management Certificate Program by UC Berkeley

Price: $7,950

UC Berkeley’s Berkeley Executive Education offers programs within four areas of focus: Leadership & Communication, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Finance & Business Acumen, and Strategy & Management. Programs are created for both individuals and organizations to offer a well-rounded education in business leadership.

The Product Management Certificate Program, within Strategy & Management, combines design thinking with the MBA program at Haas School of Business to build an individual with two roles: a general manager and a product designer. You’ll learn from professors who’ve worked in fields from customer-focused design to competitive strategy to customer insights. A combination of hands-on exercises and peer coaching will help you achieve success in this five-day course in Palo Alto, California.

Find the perfect program to fit your life. That may be a flexible, online program that you can complete on your own time from the comfort of your home. Or, perhaps that means traveling to a nearby city to complete a short workshop, part-time course, or full-time course with the in-person guidance of professors. Whatever your path may be, remember that it’s never too late to educate yourself on your current or aspiring career.

To learn more, read this post on how to become a product manager next.