You'll learn about a product manager's skills, responsibilities, and collaborators, and you'll start thinking about how to discuss these fundamental concepts. Gradually, you'll become familiar with the professional language that would show employers that you're ready for a career in product. In other words, you will start thinking and talking like a product manager.

In this checkpoint, you'll start to explore how product strategy varies based on the type of company, industry, and audience.

If every product succeeded, then companies wouldn't need product managers. As you're no doubt aware, many products fail. One of the key reasons for this is the failure to find sufficient *product-market fit*.
If you understand the people who use your products, you can create solutions that fit their needs and increase the likelihood of success.

Product discovery is an ongoing process that includes ideation, brainstorming, data and feedback collection, experience mapping and prototyping, prioritization, and planning. Product managers use product discovery to generate insight into the pain points, desires, and goals of a product's users. The ultimate goal of the discovery process is to give a PM confidence that they are building the right product in the right way.

Whether you have a UX team or you're designing features yourself, you need to understand the basics of good interaction design. You might think it's easy to throw some buttons and links on a page to make an app, but it's actually very complex and difficult to create an experience that's intuitive and easy to use.

Product managers are responsible for more than just individual features and designs. They also have to plan for the future of their product—anticipate risks and opportunities, figure out where the product is going, and plan for what needs to happen between now and then.

As a product manager, you'll help your team make many decisions about how your software or application should be used. But how will you know if your product works the way it's supposed to? You and your team know the product well, and the interactions seem obvious to you, but will end users actually know how to use it?

What's the point with theory if you cannot build anything. Time to put your theory into practice by building a product of your own.

You are now beginning to work through some of the more technical, hard skill modules included in this program. These include SQL, Python, and—later on—Tableau. Although these are optional to learn, we would highly recommend to put some effort in learning these to craft you into a better version of yourself.

Understand how to market your product, learn and practice a few data analysis skills using Google Sheets. In your product management career, you'll use many different tools to analyse data and understand how your product is doing. Spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets are a popular tool for this kind of analysis.

You'll get some practice using one of the most popular data visualisation and business intelligence tools today: Tableau. Adding Tableau to the list of software skills on your resume will give you a significant advantage in the job market. And even better, you'll be able to apply your Tableau skills to a project to impress potential employers with.

Create the PM equivalent of an effective portfolio, for that you'll need a quick and succinct way to communicate your capabilities and previous work. What kind of projects should you share? How will you capture your audience's attention? How long should it be? In this checkpoint, you'll learn the answers to these questions, and plan which project story you want to share.