Product Management and Design

CSF007

6 ECTS Credits

Welcome to Product Management and Design

What you'll learn

This course will teach you how to build products users want and love. It gives you a foundation in the tools and practices of modern product management and interaction design. You will collaborate with peers to apply these product development skills to real user challenges.

The course begins with a focus on user research. You'll learn and apply the design thinking framework to product development. You'll learn to define user needs through user interviews and market analysis, to translate those needs into product specifications, and define metrics to test product success. Next you'll learn to create and test design prototypes (wireframes, user journeys). You'll learn key concepts in UI/UX design including information hierarchy, and typography and color. You will create high-fidelity UI mockups using industry-standard tools. You’ll conduct usability tests to gauge the effectiveness of your designs.

Working with your peers, you will practice the complementary and collaborative roles of PMs and UX designers in early product development. You’ll also practice giving design critiques to other teams, and responding to feedback on your designs. By the end of the courses, your team will have a user-tested, refined, and development-ready spec for a web or mobile application.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

  • Apply at least one product ideation framework (e.g. design thinking) to identify product opportunities
  • Conduct qualitative concept tests, and make product decisions based on user feedback
  • Create basic wireframes to describe a user journey
  • Write product requirements documentation that describe the purpose, features, and metrics of success for a software product
  • Design high-fidelity mockups for an application, and build interactive UI prototypes using industry-standard tools
  • Analyze and assess a design, and give actionable feedback for improvement

Meeting Times

All times are listed in GMT, please convert to your local timezone.

  • Class time: Wednesdays, 5 - 6:30pm GMT
  • Office hours: Mondays, 5 - 6pm GMT

Instructors

Folarin Lawal, folarin.lawal@kibo.school
Ope Bukola, ope@kibo.school

Weekly Topics

  • Week 1: Software development teams and design thinking
  • Week 2: User experience research
  • Week 3: User interface design basics
  • Week 4: More user interface design
  • Week 5: Review week
  • Week 6: Product requirements
  • Week 7: User flows
  • Week 8: Prototyping
  • Week 9: Continuous design life cycle
  • Week 10: Final project

Course Tools

  • Google Docs/Sheets/Slides
  • Figma
  • Gradescope
  • Woolf