Hello, and welcome to the product strategy class. My name is Cecilia and I currently work as a product manager on growth team for Uber. In in this class, I hope to share with you all the learnings have acquired in about 10 years managing different kinds of products, mostly startups, but also some growth products and some mature products. I call this class product strategy simplified and demystified. And let me just spend a couple minutes maybe a couple sentences talking about this. Why is it important to simplify and demystify?

First of all, I believe strategies in general a very mysterious concept and even I personally always like horrified and maybe mystified when I think about it. Sometimes you just believe that like you need to have a very particular education to even think about this concept and understand it. So my The goal of this class is to convince you that no, it's not absolutely critical, it is probably desired, but you can always understand the strategy in simple terms. And you can always think about it as a non mysterious concept. It's a pretty simple concept if you think about it on a high level. In this class, we will first focus on product basics such as what products are, how you manage a product, who the product manager is, and what distinguishes good product manager from bad product manager.

Once we cover the product basics, we'll dive deeper into different life stages of a product. In particular, we'll talk about the new products, the growth products, and mature products. And for each of those product types, we will try to define a success formula and a set of levers or factors or variables which you can use or modify to get success to become to make success more likely. Also, as we talked about different life stages of the product and success formulas, we will mention the critical importance of both quantitative and qualitative approaches to product management. As we start talking about success formulas for new products will define success as a multiple of four things. It's a market It's your team.

It's your product, and it's a luck in growth products will define success as a rate of product growth, the rate at which you acquire new customers, as well as the key factor of your product, which is the magic factor, which determines if your product grows fast or slowly. As we talked about mature products, we will define success as customer lifetime value, or the multiple of revenue, gross margin and retention, minus the cost of customer acquisition cost. And we'll talk about each of those factors separately. Now that we defined what this class is all about, let's talk about who this class is for. I would love this class to be useful to everyone, there is no bar for this class, there is no prior knowledge required. And honestly, the less you know, and the more I hope you can learn from this class.

So I'm really interested to get feedback from those people who have absolutely no idea about product management. Let me know how useful this class was for you. In general, this class is good for students, for people who are interested about the products and they're trying to understand like this product, something that potentially can excite me, is it something where I could potentially be build my career or not. There are three key goals to this class I would like to talk about so first goal for this class is to simplify and demystify the key concepts related to product management. The second goal of this class is to explain and emphasize the critical importance of both quantitative and qualitative approaches to product management and product strategy. And the third goal for this class is for each of the product life stages such as new product growth, product and mature product define a success formula and define a set of levers which you can manage to drive success.

Now that we talked about the class goals, let me tell you about three of my personal goals to put it to put things into context. My first goal from this class is to learn by teaching. Basically, while I explain you those complex concepts in simple language, I hope to acquire a skill of explaining complex things in a simple language and make him become more successful in doing so in my future career. My second goal for this class is to elevate my communication skills because I see those skills is critical to succeed as both executive and new product founder. And my third goal from this class is to meet smart people who work on large problems if You are working on less problem and you'd believe you need some help thinking through issues. So you may believe that I can help you somehow definitely reach out I will be happy.

I'll be happy to help meet you. Finally, before we move on, let's talk about what this class is not about to set expectations straight. This class is not about helping you decide whether you should become a product manager and not mobile. We'll give you some arguments, you may get more information which will help you to decide but the goal is not to help you make this decision. Second, this class is not about helping you get the product manager job. Third diskless is not about helping you acquire skills to become a good product manager.

Now let's dive into the product basics.