Review of AWIP Course

This is my review of the Advancing Women in Product Management (AWIP) Course on Coursera, which I took this over the past 2 months (3 nights a week). Contrary to what its name suggests, it is open to male audiences as well. And it should be, because it is definitely an awesome PM learning resource I would highly recommend to aspiring PMs out there! Let me go into greater detail below.

This course was what I needed at this stage of my career (with barely any PM experience), enhancing my knowledge on the different aspects of PM-ing with the breadth of topics covered. This included common topics in a product lifecycle (PRDs, Customer Segmentation, Market Sizing, Prioritisation, Metrics, Financials, User Journeys), the softer skills (collaborating with designers and engineers, networking) and interview skills (for PM roles in top companies). At the end of each of the 4 courses, I felt like I had gained insights into some skills that I had glossed over previously (Financials, Metrics, Networking), and the reason why I managed to absorb this knowledge relatively easily despite not having real-world experience on it brings me to my second point.

Personally, a common problem when taking MOOCs is the retention of knowledge. For most courses, the practical implementation of the learning only occurs after all the knowledge has been passed on to the learner. Oftentimes, the exercises are either too trivial, or too much at one go. This reduces how effectively I can learn, as I either think that I understand enough of the material already if the exercise was trivial, or I become frustrated at how difficult the final exercise is, and spend 2 or 3 more passes at digesting the content again (which is painful and removes some joy in the learning process).

For the AWIP course, through its “See One, Do One, Teach One” approach, I felt that all my learnings were condensed into a sufficiently difficult exercise that did not take me longer than an hour to complete. For example, for an exercise on understanding financials, there was first a 14 minute video (“See One”) explaining the key metrics in a financial statement. Immediately after, we had to review a company’s financials (“Do One”), then review another peer’s answer to that same exercise (“Teach One”). Finally to round things up, we had a quiz to summarise our learnings on a case study of sorts. In all, this process took around 2–3 hours depending on the difficulty of the material for that week, but I managed to understand the course materials well — at least enough to further my learning on them should I wish to in the future.

Being taught by an industry veteran in Nancy Wang, on top of a wide variety of PM practitioners in weekly themed discussions, also lent much more relevance to the content being covered for the week. In these 1–1 discussions, Nancy would share her own experiences with her peer, and talk about how the concepts taught can be applied across product streams (B2B and B2C for example). I particularly enjoyed the interview series, where she mock interviewed another Amazon PM on the different types of PM questions she talked about previously, as we saw how even experienced PMs may not answer these questions perfectly when put in an interview situation (which was quite heartening to see).

That being said, there’s some room for improvement for the course.There’re 2 potential improvements that are on my wish-list.

First, considering that it is meant for PMs of all levels, there could be even more recommendations on books and resources (though it has pointed me to some fabulous resources already such as the High Growth Handbook) for those that are interested in deepening our knowledge in a particular topic. For example, for the week on KPIs, it would be useful to point us beyond Google’s guide to creating KPIs — depending on the domain, maturity of the product, other resources might provide a more suitable framework for choosing your KPIs.

Second, there could be greater focus beyond what is available in the Valley, which is a common refrain I have for most PM materials online. Given that many innovative products today are built outside of the Valley, it will be interesting to evaluate the differences in how practitioners apply these foundational concepts to their home markets.

Again as with most educational material, YMMV, depending on your current PM experience, your budget, your time, and your preferred style of learning. I would say that it has worked for me (3 nights a week, prefer hands-on exercises to solidify learnings, as well as breadth of topics), and I would strongly recommend it to beginning PMs who don’t know what they don’t know.

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