Technical Skills
for Product Managers

"Great course, I feel like I'm way more comfortable around technical topics now. Materials is clear and very engaging comparing to normal theory no other courses. Vladimir also take great deal of care to explain any questions even if they are quite beyond of the scope of the course. Well done!"

"Vlad is a genuinely awesome guy who manages to make tech-talk fun. Very glad to have taken his course, and I encourage other non-technical PMs to do so as well."

"I cannot recommend this course enough and I wish I had found something like that sooner! The material is explained in a comprehensive manner both during the live sessions and in a simulator. You get lots of practical tasks; the topics explained are straight to the point without unnecessary noise, and of course you are always supported by the mentor [during the session and whenever you have a question while going through the simulator]. It helped me to grasp the core topics and now I actually understand what my BE team is building and how I, as PM, can contribute in the technical conversations!"

"Really enjoyed Technical Skills for PMs by Vladimir Kalmykov. For me, it was a great mix of live sessions and simulator practice at my own pace. Materials are well structured, and the storytelling and real-live PM's cases and products kept me focused without getting overwhelmed by technical details. Even as a non-techy, I got a taste of APIs and testing — and it actually made sense!"

"Many thanks to the whole team! This is a cool course that helped me see the world of PM from the inside in no time. I had studied in another PM course for almost a year, and it wasn’t even close to such cool practical assignments as yours. You are the best!"

"What I liked:
— The simulator is excellent, the material is easily absorbed
— All tasks with an independent drawing of architecture: at first you freeze, then it becomes easier and clearer
— Different possible immersion depths: you can dive right in at any knowledge level, you can follow the links and read more
— Special thanks for the shared templates
— I definitely learned a lot of new things, especially about APIs and Security, and I want to study further

In general, during this course, my idea of ​​​​what PMs do in general and how much knowledge is needed has changed. Previously, it had seemed that this was one of the most humanitarian disciplines in Tech, but on this course, I realized that it was not. Additional knowledge and understanding of how IT systems work is critical."

"There was a lot to cover, but the concepts were clear. The simulators were well thought out and not too simplistic. There is a lot of information to get through, but given the materials are available to you, it is helpful to have the time to review and reference as needed."

"I really liked the presentation of the material: clearly, to the point, in simple language, and with practical examples. It’s lovely, you rarely see this! And the most useful thing for me was doing exercises and getting feedback. This is probably the highlight of the program — more practice, not theory:) Of the topics, I really liked metrics (SLI, SLO) and architecture, as if I dove into a level deeper. My tech lead is no longer enthusiastic about my new knowledge because I ask him difficult questions:)"

"The best course I’ve taken. A balanced presentation of information. Super-engagement simulator. It was a lucky coincidence that at the time of the course, my team and I had big releases, and once they "dropped" the prod and the information received helped to cope with these cases. A big plus is an access to all the course materials. Oh, and I’ve already signed up for Data driven product management" course!

"I liked the Tech PM course very much. The presentation of the material is cool - you don't just listen, but participate and solve problems in simulator. The simulator is just amazing. I learned to evaluate the complexity of the architecture and what to do so that your product does not wake you up in the middle of the night to solve some issues."

"Guys!!! This course is a bomb that destroyed my whole idea of my work and my tasks. Firstly, I realized that I can do waaaaaay more than I do now. Secondly, now I know which way to go and even what exactly needs to be done, where to start! It’s very cool! And live workshops are an incredible pleasure. After them, I had a charge of energy and creativity for two or three days :))) Vladimir, you are cool! You are all very cool!"

"One of the best PM courses I’ve taken! Well-structured and really useful content that helps you look at the tech world from a PM’s point of view. And the course is very practical! The highlight is cases from different domains that teach you how to approach a completely incomprehensible task or new area."

"Vladimir, I want to say a huge thank you for the course. This is exactly what I needed, because I had not interacted so closely with the tech and, in fact, NO ONE ever advertises this aspect of product management. But in fact, it is very important and affects the level of professionalism. I would like to have even more simulators, I would subscribe directly to the updates haha :))"

"Guys, it’s a very, very cool course: the presentation is cool, and I haven’t seen anything comparable in content. I’ve attended many different courses, and I gotta say, this one is the best. I liked that you give a general theory (how the api works, how top-level architecture is created), and specific tools (sequence diagram, templates for prd and complexity, I use them every day). The presentation is cool, and additional materials and articles are cool. I will miss Jane and Daniel:)"

"The course is useful for PMs who are not only involved in cust dev and strategy but also, rolling up their sleeves, together with the developers bring features to production. Vladimir helped to reassemble individual pieces of knowledge on the technical side, so that behind the trees from "API Endpoints", "dependencies", "SLA" you can now see the forest and understand where the complexity of the product comes from and what to do about it. The course is useful for both beginners and more experienced products, especially if your background is not related to programming."

"The course is really cool. It all starts with "I know this," "I understood this," and "I have already read it somewhere." BUT THEN I UNDERSTOOD EVERYTHING and, moreover, remembered it so that if someone wakes me up at two in the morning, I can make a 1-pager for the CEO =)) The authors managed to I-don't-even-know-how shove into my head all the info I came for. Everything is simply and clearly laid out on the shelves, and everything is repeated exactly as many times as you need to remember. Moreover, you determine the level of immersion for yourself. Simulations just rock, and the atmosphere at the workshops makes brains melt."

"I took many courses, but this is the only one that I did not regret paying for in the middle or at the end. I can’t say that I would be ready to become a technical manager immediately after completing the course, but I got a better picture of how it all works. Now I see any service not just as a thing that somehow works but I clearly understand what pieces it consists of and how they interact with each other. Before starting the course, I had been unemployed, so I had to go through many interviews with technical sessions on them. The results of these tech sections — before, during, and after the course — are like chalk and cheese. Before the course, for me those interviews usually ended in the technical sections. During and after the course, I already knew the theory, knew how to approach problems/test tasks, identify clients, services, and their dependencies and successfully complete the technical sections. Without this course, it would have been impossible for me.

"I liked the simulator for its structure and clarity. Besides, it was always straight to the point. It helped me to structure my knowledge, and most importantly, to start putting the knowledge into practice. The course is perfectly balanced in terms of both new information and feedback. After the course, I got access to a huge amount of additional materials and very cool checklists available. I definitely recommend the simulator to those who are starting or already working with technology products."

"The course lived up to all my expectations. At first, it was difficult, since this is really a new direction for a PM of general expertise. But over time, in the simulator, in practice, you begin to pump new skills and get excited. I pumped "neurons in the brain", as Vladimir says. There are very cool simulator cases that you can immediately practice on your product. In the process of training, I used a lot in my work and plan to continue to implement all the materials and tools I have learned into my work."

"A smooth transition from simple to complex in just 4 weeks. A lot of practice and materials in different formats: a simulator, articles, lectures, group work, and a project game. I got a high-level understanding of all parts of the system. Most importantly, the fear that there is something You don’t know -- it’s gone! During the course, I began to ask more questions about the implementation, look at technical documentation, better discuss dependencies, and monitor the technical metrics of services."

"What's particularly cool about this course is that it packs knowledge that you can’t load into your head by simply reading articles and watching videos. If you don’t have a technical background, it’s very difficult to pull it up on your own. So for me, this simulator was a godsend: a high density of knowledge flies into my head through the game and practice + very comfortable conf calls with interesting cases, on which my brain had to really work. Yet it is important to understand that this is not a magic pill (it does not exist), but a very cool portal to the world of tech. I want to go deeper and now the vector is clear."

"A training course that has an author and a soul. This is its key advantage over other programs compiled by anonymous methodologists without real practice in global IT companies. It was interesting and useful! I did not want to miss a single part of the program, not a single article from additional literature. At the zoom workshop, I met smart and passionate people. Designing products together was fun. The diverse backgrounds of the participants fueled the discussion."

"In a nutshell: the course exceeded expectations, I will recommend it to my colleagues, thank you! I signed up for the course to improve my technical skills: to better understand the architecture of software / IT products, to improve the quality of product solutions, and also to create more competent / well-developed requirements for development.

The course helped 110%: answered not only the questions above but also many others. We started with a general picture and gradually went deeper into details. As a result, a structured picture formed in my head: what the product looks like "under the hood", what the PM is responsible for/does, and where the PM does not go (but has to know about it). And thanks to numerous practical cases, this knowledge began to turn into skills. What was especially useful for me: 1. A large share of practice: at workshops, on my own in a simulator, on my own in additional tasks. 2. Good course structure and storytelling. 3. Small groups and close interaction. Team practices are very good."

"The course flew by in one breath. If you work with a development team but are not a techie yourself, I recommend it. All information is presented in a structured and simple language, the boundaries are marked where information from the PM is very important, and where it is better to leave it to the programmers. There was a lot of practice and cases from different areas, a great opportunity to practice with other PMs. It is worth noting that the course is taught by Vladimir, Group Technical PM in Booking, so there was an opportunity to ask questions "how does it work there?"

"The course just rocks! Everything is cool, literally everything. I have something to compare with, in two years I took a dozen different courses. In short, as an ed tech sommelier, I say, you f*cking rock. It was the most interesting course of all in terms of format, content, and conduct! Webinars are not boring, with practice and analysis of real cases, and to the point. The simulator, thank you for this, perhaps this is the best format available on the market. Everything is designed with a class, links in place, and the discipline of the creators is there as if the course was designed for themselves. I was taught to understand the architecture, and not to be afraid to communicate about API and those metrics. I already use everything at work, and I began to understand the developers, got an ability to speak to them in their language."

"The course is really worth it, it because it really instills skills and the ability to apply them to different areas through working on cases. The course helped me deal with the technical component, start managing a support team and understand what are the ways out of a situation when accidents happen every week, and the support shrugs and says that monitoring shows that everything is stable. Also, the course helped to systematically look at the product and its architecture and start thinking from a higher level on the architecture of related products and product strategy!"

"Thank you very much for the course! It was very cool. The main thing that I liked about the course is that it teaches you how to disassemble any product into its component "bricks", highlighting the main blocks of the architecture. The simulator is very structural: first of all, it helps to understand the basic principles, and then deepen knowledge. The topics covered in the course are very interesting (both SLI/SLO and data protection and security issues are covered.) I also liked that there is a lot of practice in it, and discussions in group classes help to form the skill, which can then be further developed."

"I have been working as a product manager for a little less than a year and until the last moment, I had doubted whether I should sign up for this course. There was no goal of becoming a TPM and I was not sure how relevant the information received on the course would be for me. I can say now that I have never regretted my decision to take the course. For me, the main motivators were the following three aspects:

1. I wanted to understand technology and development at a deeper level in order to ask the right questions to the development team. Thanks to the course, I felt progress in this direction. Previously, I always had to rely on the expert opinion of the team leader/developer. Now the process of discussing technology solutions has become more two-way, which greatly helped to make better decisions and improve communication within the team.

2. Ability to access systematized knowledge. I assume that even without the course I would be able to find all the information, but it would take 4−5 times longer and still leave a certain feeling of uncertainty. Now I know what is more important when evaluating the technical complexity of a product, and most importantly, I know where to dig further, and what to do to improve my competence
3. The system of personal OKRs within my company. The course has a very balanced presentation of the material. ProductDo managed to squeeze a sufficient number of complex tasks and cases and work in teams into a one-month course. As an extra advantage, I want to note that the questions are structured in such a way that they make you look for additional information in third-party sources, and thereby expand your understanding of the material being studied. It was very useful to watch how colleagues think, to learn some insights and understand where to grow further."

"The course is on fire, thank you 💔 I found you just in time. The project is still in the pilot and several times a week I think:" Thank you, Vladimir, for appearing in my life 😅 Such an excursion into the world of developers, at the same time with clear boundaries of where you can and where you don’t need to go. It was helpful to remember the tech part and stir up my brain. Separately, I would like to note that during the entire course you also hear a lot of real cases from colleagues, which, I think, is very cool."

"The course covers what other courses on the market do not even touch. In addition to the ability to find jobs, pains, calculate unit economics, etc., it is imperative for the PM to understand how it all should work, what parts it should consist of, and what can go wrong. This course is about that and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who came into PM sphere not from development."

"An excellent course that helps to systematize all knowledge and experience in my head and use them as correctly as possible in my work. Before that, I had known a lot, but fragments and some things remained without proper understanding, frankly, too superficial. So the course seems useful not only for beginners in tech but also for those who have more than once encountered an unfamiliar IT language and tried to figure it out on their own. What I especially liked:
— interactive in the classroom, it was driving
— simulators to consolidate knowledge rock
— format "from easy to difficult / from junior to senior in 5 lessons"
— useful resources (for example, the sequence diagram or project evaluation in a Google spreadsheet)
Thank you for the course and for always answering all the questions, challenging some of them — it’s cool!"

"I definitely solved my problem — to speak the same language with the technical team. It may not be perfect yet, but it’s a matter of practice. But now it’s easier for me to describe what I want to get from our services and it’s easier to understand what the guys are talking about on the development synchs, what restrictions they see, what is "calling an endpoint" etc. I really liked your approach. From the first communication, you wrote to me and asked about my expectations and my goals, and until the very end. Some incredible amount of new materials, approaches, tools. So cool."

"For quite a long time I used to delegate the development of the technical side to the team 100% and thought that this did not concern me. Until, during my vacation, our production went down for an hour, and I realized that problems on the architectural side directly affect my product metrics. At "Tech for PM" I was able to clearly separate my area of responsibility and team lead’s one in my head, I understood what technical metrics are and why it is important for me to work with them."

"The topic with the metrics tree especially caught me, because before it was "SRE makes us do something, let's do something", but now it's clear that this should come from the business and the PM. The team and I have already begun to sketch a tree for our service to set up monitoring for what matters most and start measuring reliability. I liked that there is homework and a simulator format. It's easier to learn and there is an external motivator to practice. I liked the list of articles with different levels of complexity, I haven’t read everything yet, but I saved everything) I liked that everything is structured in Notion and it’s easy to search for what you need.

"I am extremely satisfied, I will gladly recommend this intensive course! It became clearer to me how to evaluate the work with the product from a technical point of view, what to pay attention to (both mine and the developer team's), and what and how to ask them. Well suited for those who do not have a computer science education, but who work or would like to work with technologically complex products. This is exactly my case. It became clear how far you can upgrade tech skills - earlier it had seemed to me a huge topic, which it is not clear how to approach. I also noted the cool atmosphere in the classroom and the cheerful, inspiring presentation of the material."

"I couldn't find any more courses on this topic. It's cool that this material is intended for Middle and Senior specialists, there is not much of it either. I liked the playful form, and the peppy language. I also liked that a lot of time was devoted to students' questions at the seminars."

"The course teaches you to look into the technical depth of the product. Once on the course, your brains begin to work continuously, first on practical tasks during the lecture, then on simulators, in addition, there is a game in the department. In just 5 weeks, you get a concentrated amount of useful information. If you value your time and want to spend it usefully, then the course is simply a must-have."

I want to note this:
1. Practical tasks for the lecture. Very engaging, and interesting to do.
2. Learned new tools, including checklists, this is top :)
3. The simulator gave me the opportunity to think about some things from a different angle, it's cool
4. Cool lecturer! Always prompt and ready to tell more "

"Exciting! A course created by PMs using a product approach (finally!). Intense, dense, and I am delighted with how you managed to immerse everyone in product work effortlessly. Without platitudes and abstruse turns, professionally and immediately to the point. Special respect for how you used different activities: simulator, self-study, puzzles on the web, group work, additional materials with instructions... I took various courses and enrolled here thinking that I had high expectations, but it turned out to be underestimated: )"

"ProductDo Tech is another way to see the complexity of PM’s work, and one that can sketch the Product Architecture, decompose it into services and APIs, know what is the key and what can be done last. "Playing in the Department" will once again show the complexity of working with the API. Each lesson is reinforced by a simulator on the topic covered. Topics of monitoring, metrics, security, and integration will all be covered and shown in 5 different cases, and one of them will be yours! My neural connections have been created, now they will work for me in my PM job."

"The course has become one of the best I’ve taken lately. First of all, I would like to note the practicality of the course, Vladimir’s ability to explain any complex topic in simple words and, again, reinforce it in practice. I will separately highlight the pool of knowledge and real skills that a PM should have in reality: what we should and should not do, how to communicate with techies, the limits of PM’s responsibility, useful tools, and much more. As a result, you get a set of skills and knowledge for the job of a PM at the level of an international company."

"I really liked it! The material, presentation format, simulators, department! Thanks to Vladimir for all the live lectures! And for participating in those moments that I shared with him! The course is absolutely worth the money! Advice to everyone who has gathered: watch the webinar live, actively participate and do not be afraid that someone is smarter or more experienced."

"My main impression is the presence of individual feedback from onboarding to the last lecture. A lot of point comments, scrupulous analysis of the game in the department, feedback in the simulator, I have not encountered this before and it pleasantly surprised me and was valuable."

"A course with excellent structuring of information and examples that are affected specifically at the Middle / Senior level. I learned a lot. I recommend it to everyone who is already in product management, but wants to expand and deepen their knowledge."