🎯What are the Goals/Objectives of Product Case Studies?🎯

The Product Buds Product Case Studies initiative aims to help you develop your "Product Sense" or your ability to understand the defining factors that make a great product. Through taking part in this initiative, participants will gain the following:

• Learn different ways to approach common problems faced by product managers.
• Gain knowledge about design, research, user experience, strategy, estimation, analytical, metrics, and technical concepts from a product manager's perspective.
• Practice solving a product problem correctly in a low-pressure and interactive environment.
• Obtain feedback that will inform you of areas to focus on for improvement.

🤔 Why are Case Studies Important for PM Roles? 🤔

Solving product case studies cultivates Product Sense, a skill that is heavily tested and leveraged in PM interviews and jobs. Whether you are an aspiring PM or a current PM, case studies will help you grow your product intuition. As your product intuition develops and you improve on solving product case studies, you will be able to give a cohesive answer in PM interviews and increase your confidence on the job. This exercise will also provide you insight into how great PMs solve interesting problems differently, and can therefore help you develop your own unique problem-solving framework/method.

🧠 How Can I Do Product Case Studies with the Product Buds Community? 🧠

1. Product Case Studies Workshops

We will kick off our Product Case Studies track with a Product Case Studies Workshop in collaboration with Kenton Kivestu from RocketBlocks happening on July 7th, 4:30PM PST / 7:30PM EST.

In this interactive workshop, we will walk through a single product design case study question in detail, break it down, and learn how to provide a cohesive and well thought out answer! By attending this event, you will learn how you should exactly approach product design questions, what interviewers are really looking for, and what separates a good answer from a great "will-get-you-hired” answer

Periodically, we will invite experienced PMs and APMs to come and share their methodology of solving a Product Case Study for participants to learn from!

2. Bi-Weekly Live Product Case Studies Discussions

As a community, we will have bi-weekly interactive case studies sessions to help participants enhance their product sense and learn about different ways of solving product problems. These sessions will be led by a moderator and can have the following format:

• Bottom Up Approach: Solving product design, estimation, strategy, testing, and prioritization questions based on a particular case study prompt. Participants will be given a prompt to brainstorm on during the call and give their thoughts as well as hear out fellow community members. The moderator will be guiding the participants to solve the given case study.
• Top Down Approach: Providing participants with a product before the discussion and asking specific questions on that existing product and its features. The idea is to practice debunking a product and figuring out why a product exists and designed the way it is. Who are the users? What might have been some key decisions that went into this product? How would a PM test certain features of this product?