Updated: July 1, 2024 - 11 min read
Product School is turning ten! We’re taking a moment to celebrate every student who took a chance on themselves, and us, in order to level up in their careers and invest in the future.
To usher in a new decade, we’re offering 10% off our certifications! For a limited time, enjoy 10% off the next step in your product management career. Whether you’re looking to jumpstart your journey, step into a leadership position, or specialize in Product Marketing or AI, Product School is the gold standard. We’ve been at it for 10 years, and we’re sticking around for a whole lot more!
Keep reading to find out how it all started and how it’s going 10 years later.
10th Anniversary Special
10% off Product School Certifications for 10 days! Enroll by July 10th!
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2014 - Product Manager Certification (PMC)™. How It Started.
When I graduated from business school with an MBA, I wasn’t thinking about founding Product School. No, I was thinking about getting a job! I soon landed at a company where I expected to be on the business side of things. Because of my engineering background, however, I ended up working with the developers as well. Soon, I was running back and forth between the two.
Unbeknownst to me, I had become a product manager.
When I thought back to my business school education, I couldn’t help feeling it hadn’t fully prepared me for the realities of a career in product management. Looking around, I didn’t see any programs or training that did.
They say your past self is your ideal customer. I set about creating the curriculum I never had: the one that would have prepared me for my first job as a Product Manager. The Product Manager Certification (PMC)™ was born!
In 2014, I taught the first session of the first PMC™ cohort in person in San Francisco.
In 2015, I hired the first Product School instructors (who weren’t me!) and opened new campuses in Silicon Valley and New York. We were bi-coastal! The responses from students kept me going. They loved our hands-on approach. The best part, of course, was that they were finding jobs after completing our courses. Word spread, and so did we. By 2016, we were up to 6 campuses.
Enterprise Training
Also in 2016, we did our first Product Training for Teams. By that time, we had already sent plenty of fresh-faced PMs out into the world—and they were enjoying great success. But I was inspired by the potential of changing how a whole team thinks, works, and builds things together. By working directly with companies, we could make Product Management better from the inside out.
Since 2014, we have taught over 20,000 students across our individual and team offerings. I’ve watched, amazed, as cohort after cohort forms, connects, and learns together. As the times change, so do we, always offering the most relevant skills for the next generation of Product Managers.
2017 - Product Leader Certification (PLC)®. Product Leader Growth.
In 2017, a few years into the Product School journey, I co-wrote The Product Book with Josh Anon, now Senior Director of Product at Roblox, and watched it become a #1 Amazon bestseller. It has since sold over 200,000 copies, been translated into 4 languages, and made into an audiobook. It felt incredible to put into words everything I’d learned so far and see how many people were looking at Product from my perspective.
I was growing into the leader I had always wanted to be, and I wanted the members of our Community to feel the same way. By this point, a lot of our alumni were going up for promotions and trying to climb the ladder. Speaking to them, they were clear: they needed more. More than we could ever fit in PMC™. They were ready to take on new challenges.
We created the Product Leader Certification (PLC)® curriculum to go deeper into Product Leadership topics like Build vs. Buy and fine-tuning OKRs. We also teach how to lead a team, communicate strategy, and land a promotion in Product.
In order for the Product School Community to advance in their careers, we had to raise the bar when it came to instructors. Today, our instructors are all Lead Product Managers or above and Group Product Managers or above for PLC®, forged at top companies like Google, Apple, and Spotify.
A Decade in Product...
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2018 - ProductCon. The Global Era.
So much was going well, and we wanted to expand. We added more campuses in the US, Canada, and the UK—16 in total.
We hosted our first ProductCon in San Francisco. To be honest, it seemed like a bit of a gamble. Our courses were going so well. Why put on a major event for 1500 people and risk nobody showing up?
One of the things that convinced me that ProductCon was a great idea was the enthusiasm of the speakers we contacted. I quickly realized that while CEOs and founders from successful companies had an abundance of speaking opportunities, some of the most brilliant people at those companies—the ones who made them so successful—didn’t have a platform to share their ideas with the world.
CPOs, VPs of Product, and other Product Leaders have so many inspiring ideas to share based on their hands-on experience in Product. They’ve been in the trenches! So we decided to give them a stage. And in doing so, we established Product School as a standard-bearer for thought leadership in Product.
Since that first conference, we have done 17 more in London, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles plus 4 fully virtual ProductCons. In total, we’ve hosted over 200,000 Product-passionate attendees.
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The Proddy Awards
As we gained momentum with our leadership certification, enterprise trainings, and conferences, it dawned on me that we were in a truly privileged position. At Product School, we were often the first to know about the best new products on the market. Whether through an instructor or a ProductCon speaker, we were always in the loop about the latest product that was about to shake up an entire industry.
We wanted to give these game-changers a platform and keep our community informed about the next big thing. The solution was The Proddy Awards, our annual selection of the best digital products. Now in its 6th year and spanning 14 categories, I never grow tired of seeing the Proddy badge proudly displayed on the most elegant solutions out there.
The Product Podcast
Building on the success of The Product Book, I wanted to take Product School’s thought leadership to the next level with The Product Podcast. At minimum, I knew I would learn a lot from interviewing the impressive lineup of Product Leaders who were willing to go “on air” with me. The podcast quickly shot into the top 10% of tech podcasts on Spotify, bringing a whole new audience into the conversation.
Since launching in 2019, The Product Podcast has racked up 8.4 million downloads. For over 500 episodes, we’ve kept iterating to improve on format and content to ensure we’re delivering the most innovative ideas. I’m thrilled whenever I hear from students who discovered Product School through the podcast. It’s given us a reach that I never could have fathomed when we first started 10 years ago.
Opportunities Online
In keeping with the theme of global reach, in 2019 we opened our 17th campus online. We thought we were doing it to make our courses accessible to those who lived outside of Product centers like the Bay Area and London where we had campuses. Right away, we noticed that students who did live in those places still preferred the online option.
We never cut corners when it came to remote learning: we had small cohorts, taught the classes live, and never diluted the curriculum in any way with a wealth of resources available for students to take advantage of during and outside of class time.
What really caught my attention were student satisfaction scores, which have always been the most important metric at Product School. They were through the roof! We immediately set about offering more online cohorts to satisfy the demand and phasing out our in-person classes to make those instructors available to teach at our Online Campus.
You know what happened next. Amidst the chaos and uncertainty of 2020, at Product School, we were extremely lucky to know one thing for sure: how to teach Product Management online. We had always been a fully remote staff, and we decided to go fully remote as a school as well. We haven’t looked back!
The Future of Product Report
In 2021, we released the first Future of Product Report. We surveyed our partners in the Product world and backed up their insights with in-depth research. We were floored by the number of Product people who immediately downloaded and read it. I know they read it because they were quoting all over social media!
In retrospect, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise at all. Product people are hungry for actionable insights that they can test and apply, and we had a direct line to some of the most innovative voices in the industry. Similar to the lesson we learned from ProductCon, we turned out to be the best people to bring the best voices in Product together in one place.
Learn why 2024 is a great year for product
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Unprecedented Growth
During this “Global Era” that started with ProductCon in 2018, we expanded at an unprecedented pace—our business more than doubled. Up until this point, we were 100% bootstrapped, growing steadily along with the number of students who signed up to learn with us.
As those cohorts sold out faster than ever, we decided it was time to scale up and did a funding round so that we could meet the skyrocketing demand. We raised $25 million. This not only meant that we would be able to train every person and team who wanted a Product School education, but it proved once and for all that we were the Gold Standard in Product education.
2023 - Product Marketing Manager Certification (PMMC)™. Finger on the Pulse.
Branding, messaging, and storytelling have always fascinated me. In Product, some say that the best products “sell themselves”. At the same time, the most successful companies depend on talented Product Marketers to launch and promote their products. Both can be true: great products do speak for themselves, but only when companies position them perfectly.
We wanted to give Product professionals a way to complement their portfolios with a specialization in Product Marketing that expanded on their existing product knowledge. With best practices instead of jargon, PMMC™ equips PMs with a deep understanding of product positioning and value propositions.
2024 - Artificial Intelligence Product Manager (AIPC)™. Ready for the future.
This year, we took on our most ambitious challenge yet: teaching Product Managers how to develop AI products. As I’ve said on multiple occasions, there are no “AI PMs”. There are just Product Managers doing their job, which is to say, leveraging the most powerful technology to make great products.
At Product School, we could do nothing less. To be a part of the Product conversation is to be interrogating AI, cutting through the hype, and finding opportunities to use this new superbrain to the best of our abilities. Once the conversation around AI started heating up, it was clear to us that companies wanted—needed—Product Managers who tackle non-deterministic products. But there was a lack of skilled PMs who understood how to design, write the specs for, and go to market with AI-powered products.
AIPC™ covers all those most applicable areas of AI for Product Managers. We also launched AI for Teams, our training, coaching, and advisory services for AI-powered enterprise transformation. I’m proud to say that the AIPC™ alumni are ready to go out and fill that skills gap: they’ve used an LLM to build a prototype, designed AI-native user flows, and built an AI PRD as their final project. They are ready for whatever the future has in store!
And so are we. Here’s to 10 more years!
10 Years of Product School
Ever since that first cohort in 2014, I never doubted our mission. Seeing our first alumni land jobs in Product was a high point in my career. It confirmed that what we were doing made sense and made a difference. Whenever I need to lift my spirits, I go on LinkedIn and scroll through the posts from our certified PMs shouting out their fellow students, and instructors, and talking about what they learned.
If you’ve been thinking about taking the plunge into the world of Product, feel free to take this as a sign. There’s never been a better time to hop aboard! Join us in a new decade of knowledge and opportunity.
10th Anniversary Special
10% off Product School Certifications for 10 days! Enroll by July 10th!
Learn moreUpdated: July 1, 2024
