Introduction:

1. Digital Product Management specialization comprising 5 courses is taught by Professor Alex Cowan , UVA Darden School of Business through Coursera

2. The five courses in this specialization are as follows:

1. Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals
2. Agile Meets Design Thinking
3. Hypothesis-Driven Development
4. Agile Analytics
5. Managing an Agile Team

3. The notes below are based on my learnings in Course 2: Agile Meets Design Thinking

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A. Week1: Problem Agile Solves:

1. This course is focused on how we get better inputs in the process. Amazon famously releases every 11.6 seconds.
2. You can’t project manage your way. There is an interdisciplinary team and collaboration is the key. An interdisciplinary team comprising of Designers, Engineering & QA, Sales and Support, Project Manager, Product Manager, Data Analytics team, others. Create small, self-organizing, interdisciplinary teams.
3. Focus on the following:
   1. The individual with testable narratives
   2. Frontload Value.
   3. Outcomes vs Output.
4. Agile Manifesto:
   1. Individual and Interactions over processes and tools
   2. Working Software over comprehensive documentation
   3. Customer Collaboration over contract Negotiation.
   4. Responding to change over following a plan.
5. Agile for Managers:
   1. Establish Project Charters.
   2. Develop easy to use test plans to test usability.
6. Agile for Specialists:
   1. Developer:
      1. Learn the actual narrative what the end-user is trying to achieve with a particular feature.
      2. After the release, ask the right questions. Did the user like it? If they didn’t, why didn’t they like it?
   2. Sales:
      1. Learn how to talk to the rest of the team.
      2. Give his inputs in more actionable way.
   3. Designer:
      1. Life of product is complicated. It has to be marketed, sold, supported, serviced, maintained after release. Hence, designers should be mindful of these considerations as well while designing a product.
      2. Bring your design thinking to others and help engineering, product managers, project managers, sales to use design tools in practical ways to solve problems.
7. Agile Story:
   1. As a persona, I want to do something, so that I can derive a reward. Example: “As a social mom, I want to see if anyone like my Facebook post, so I can decide if I want to go back and look at the post”. So the notification from the App/text/email indicating that the post has been liked could have been developed for such a user story.
8. Three prominent Agile Methodologies:
   1. Scrum: One of the most prevalent agile methodologies.
   2. Extreme Programming (XP): More focused on coding methodologies extended to Project Management practices.
   3. Kanban: Set of techniques to reduce Work-in-Progress (WIP).
9. What makes Agile Hard:
   1. Doing precisely what the user asks - Wrong Approach
   2. Assuming you know the best and ignore the user - Wrong Approach
      

   Area	Not Agile	Agile
   Understanding of Valuable Outcomes	Vague	Specific
   Inputs	Requirements	Narrative Collaboration
   Understanding of the User	Low	High
   Management	Localized Metrics	Team/Project Metrics
   Balme-iness	High	Low
   Collaboration	Infrequent & Formal	Frequent and easy
   Culture	Plan	Experimentation
   Testing & Validation	Few, far between	Many, frequent

10. Instrumenting Observation is critical
11. TDD: Test-driven Development
12. XP: Extreme Programming

B. Week2: Focusing your Agile with Personas, Jobs-to-be-Done, and Alternatives:

1. Good Personas should be VARIED.
   1. Vivid
   2. Actionable
   3. Real
   4. Identifiable
   5. Exact
   6. Detailed
2. Apply Think, See, Feel, Do framework for personas.
3. Problem Scenarios => Epic Stories => Child Stories => Test Cases
4. A Story outline: As a Persona, I want to do something, so that I can realize a reward.

C. Week3: Getting to Great Agile User Stories:

Persona Hypothesis:

• Apply Think, See, Feel, Do framework for personas.

  Question Type	Questions
  Tell me about yourself/in this role	Tell me about being a Technician? How did you get this job? What do you most/least like about it? What about the job is hard/easy? I have head [x], does that apply to you
  Tell me about your area of interest	Would you say you have a specialty/a particular kind of job you like to do? Tell me about the last job you did? Who else was involved? What was hard/easy about the job? What part of the job could have been done better?
  Tell me your thoughts about[area]?	How should things ideally be done? How are things done now? How are they done now?
  What do you see in [area]	How do you learn about what’s new? What’s happening? Who do you think is doing best? Whose career you would like to emulate?
  What do you feel about [area]	Tell me about the last time you did a repair? What motivates you? What parts of the job are most rewarding?
  What do you do in [area]	How many jobs do you do in a week? How many hours is that? How much time driving? How much time is billable?

D. Week4: Focusing on Customer Value with User Stories: