Exercises: Module 01 — Introduction to Product Management¶

Instructions¶

Complete each exercise in order. Exercises increase in difficulty. These exercises use case studies, framework application, and reflection prompts — no code required. Submit your answers by editing this file directly or creating a separate solutions document.

Easy Exercises (1–3)¶

Exercise 1¶

Difficulty: Easy Objective: Distinguish PM from adjacent roles

For each role description below, identify whether it describes a Product Manager, Project Manager, Engineering Manager, or UX Designer. Briefly explain your reasoning (1–2 sentences each).

a. "Sam runs the weekly standup, tracks which tickets are in-progress, and sends a status report to stakeholders every Friday showing which features are on-track for the Q2 release."

b. "Alex spends most of their time interviewing users, analyzing product data, and writing documents that explain which problems the team should prioritize solving in the next quarter."

c. "Jordan owns career development for the five engineers on their team, conducts quarterly performance reviews, and owns the team's technical standards and architecture."

d. "Casey creates wireframes and user flows, runs usability tests, and owns the design system the team builds from."

Exercise 2¶

Difficulty: Easy Objective: Recognize discovery vs. delivery work

Categorize each activity below as Discovery, Delivery, or Neither (e.g., administrative work). Add one sentence explaining each classification.

Exercise 3¶

Difficulty: Easy Objective: Identify the three PM dimensions (desirability, viability, feasibility)

For each product failure scenario below, identify which of the three dimensions was ignored (Desirability = user needs, Viability = business model, Feasibility = technical/operational capability) and explain briefly.

a. A startup built a beautiful app for sharing long-form video essays. Users loved the concept in interviews. The company ran out of money in 18 months because video storage and delivery costs exceeded subscription revenue at every price point they tested.

b. A product team shipped an AI-powered writing assistant that generated excellent content but required a specialized GPU cluster that the company's cloud infrastructure couldn't support at scale. The product had to be paused after launch when infrastructure couldn't handle the load.

c. A fintech company built a sophisticated investment portfolio tool based on extensive internal analysis of market trends. When they launched, they discovered that their target users (retail investors) found the interface overwhelming and never completed setup — they had not spoken to a single potential user during development.

Medium Exercises (4–6)¶

Exercise 4¶

Difficulty: Medium Objective: Apply the "problem before solution" framing

Read the following feature request and reframe it using a proper problem statement.

Feature request (from a sales call): "Our enterprise customer, Mega Corp, wants a way to export all their data to CSV so they can import it into their internal BI tool. They said this is blocking their renewal."

Write: 1. Three questions you would ask before agreeing to build CSV export 2. Two alternative ways to solve the underlying job (besides CSV export) 3. A properly framed problem statement in the format: "[User type] struggles to [task/goal] when [context/situation] because [root cause], which results in [negative outcome]."

Exercise 5¶

Difficulty: Medium Objective: Analyze the product development lifecycle

A product manager at a B2B project management SaaS has received the following signal: their data shows that users who create their first project within 24 hours of signing up have 3x better 30-day retention than users who don't.

Using the product development lifecycle framework from this module, map out what work happens in each phase for a hypothetical initiative to improve this early activation metric:

Exercise 6¶

Difficulty: Medium Objective: Evaluate PM type fit

Read the following job description fragments and identify which type of PM (B2C, B2B, Platform, Growth, Technical, Founding) each one describes. Then answer: What background (engineer, designer, or business) would be most valuable for this role, and why?

a. "You will own our developer API, working closely with developer relations and third-party partners to define API design standards and ensure developers can build on our platform successfully."

b. "You will run rapid experiments across our acquisition funnel, working with marketing and data science to optimize conversion from paid channels."

c. "You will work directly with the founders to define what we build. There is no existing product and no existing playbook."

d. "You will manage our enterprise contracts module, working closely with the sales and customer success teams to understand enterprise customer requirements."

Hard Exercises (7–8)¶

Exercise 7¶

Difficulty: Hard Objective: Apply the empowered product team model to a real-world scenario

Scenario: You are a PM at a company that sells project management software. Your CEO has just returned from a conference and sends you a Slack message: "I just saw a demo of CompetitorX's new AI-powered task assignment feature. We need to build the same thing. Please have an estimate from engineering by end of week and get it on the Q3 roadmap."

Write a 300–400 word response you would send to the CEO that: 1. Acknowledges the input seriously (do not dismiss it) 2. Explains what discovery work you'd want to do first before committing to a solution 3. Proposes a concrete next step (not "let's think about it") 4. Does this without making the CEO feel overruled or dismissed

This is a stakeholder management exercise as much as a product exercise. Your tone matters as much as your reasoning.

Exercise 8¶

Difficulty: Hard Objective: Critique a product decision using module frameworks

Below is a brief case study. Read it and then write a 400–500 word critical analysis using frameworks from this module (discovery vs. delivery, the three PM dimensions, the lifecycle model).

Case study: Quibi

Quibi was a mobile video streaming platform founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, launched in April 2020 with $1.75 billion in funding. The core product insight was that people would watch high-quality, professionally produced, episodic content in 10-minute "quick bite" chunks on their phones. The company hired A-list directors and talent and produced high-quality programming.

Quibi shut down in December 2020, just 6 months after launch, having attracted only 500,000 paying subscribers against a target of 7.4 million for year one. Katzenberg attributed the failure partly to the COVID-19 pandemic (people were at home and preferred TV screens). However, others pointed to different factors: users couldn't share content from Quibi to social media (a discovery gap), the shows could only be watched in portrait orientation on phones (a usability gap discovered too late), and research suggested the "quick bites on mobile" use case was already served by YouTube and TikTok for free.

Your analysis should address: - What discovery gaps likely contributed to the failure? - Which of the three PM dimensions (desirability, viability, feasibility) were most underweighted? - What could have been done differently in the discovery phase?

Expert Exercise (9)¶

Difficulty: Expert Objective: Synthesize module concepts into an original PM philosophy

Prompt: Write a 500–700 word "product management philosophy" — a personal statement of your beliefs about how good product management should be practiced. Your statement must:

1. Take a defensible position on at least three of the following tensions in PM practice:
2. Discovery depth vs. speed (how much validation is enough before building?)
3. User advocacy vs. business requirements (what do you do when user needs and business needs conflict?)
4. PM authority vs. team autonomy (how much should a PM decide unilaterally?)
5. Output metrics vs. outcome metrics (how do you manage a team that wants to measure what it ships?)

6. Short-term execution vs. long-term strategy (how do you balance quarterly goals with multi-year vision?)

7. Be grounded in at least two specific examples (real products, companies, or hypothetical scenarios)

8. Acknowledge the limitations of your own positions — where does your philosophy break down?

This exercise is open-ended by design. There is no single correct answer. You will be evaluated on the clarity of your reasoning, the specificity of your examples, and your ability to hold competing ideas simultaneously.

Complete at least Exercises 1–6 before taking the Module 01 test.