🚀 Why This Microdegree Will Help You Succeed
Everyone wants to build the next multi-billion dollar software platform.
But, to build winning platforms, product managers need to know how to build winning integrations to create a powerful ecosystem.
Challengingly, most schools and online education providers don't teach product managers how to build product integrations.
Well, we're here to change that.
Product Teacher and Blended Edge have teamed up to provide you with this free ecosystem integration certification course for product managers.
Within, you'll learn:
- How to prioritize, scope, and estimate integrations
- How to build a winning integration
- How to level up your product org's integration capabilities
- How to turn your product into an ecosystem platform
Knowing how to integrate products and create ecosystem platforms could be the key difference maker in your career trajectory as a product manager.
📚 Microdegree Syllabus
Here's what you can expect from the course. Feel free to preview lectures before registering!
- The value of integrations
- Understanding an integration's impact
- What info to use to quantify impact
- When to stop gathering info
- Quantifying impact as revenue potential
- Calculating revenue potential
- Twist #1: what if your subscription or services revenue is extremely varied?
- Twist #2: factoring in churn reduction
- Getting to a single "impact number"
- How to attribute revenue from new customers
- Why quantifying impact is important
- Disclaimer for the CFO
- Quiz: Building the business case for integrations
- Why you need to prioritize integrations
- A prioritization matrix for product integrations
- Low-effort integrations are high priority
- High-impact integrations are medium priority
- Medium-impact integrations are low priority
- The Danger Zone: Low-impact integrations
- Putting the integrations prioritization matrix into practice
- Assessing effort for a product integration
- How to reduce effort for a product integration
- Review: Assessing impact for a product integration
- How to increase impact for a product integration
- Why dedicated integrations headcount is valuable
- Progress, not perfection
- Quiz: Prioritizing your integrations roadmap
- Why the end user experience matters
- The difficulty with integrations
- Workflows reduce complexity by managing variance
- A best-practice integration design workflow
- Defining business cases
- Defining use cases
- Defining data flows
- Defining triggers
- Defining outcomes
- Defining field mappings
- Using transformation logic for field mappings
- Using inputs for transformation logic
- Defining test cases
- Summary
- Quiz: Designing an Integration Workflow
- Why capabilities matter more than deliverables
- Integration as a feature
- Integration as a capability
- The crawl-walk-run framework
- Crawl: establish the basics
- Integration building blocks
- Best practice process
- Walk: make connectivity native
- Run: externalize connectivity
- Quiz: Moving to Integration Capabilities
- The value of a platform
- Defining what a SaaS platform is
- Why is a platform different from a product?
- Integrations and the journey to "platform"
- The 5-phase integration capability maturity model
- Phase 1: Integration agnostic
- Phase 2: Integration aware
- Phase 3: Integration capable
- Phase 4: Integration as a core competency
- Phase 5: Integration as a product (i.e. platforms)
- Summary
- Quiz: Turning Products into Platforms
⚙️ About Blended Edge
Founded in 2020 in Columbus, Ohio by Ryan Lunka and Robb Winkle, Blended Edge set out to accomplish a challenging but worthwhile mission: make software integration faster and easier for software teams.
There is no such thing as a software product that doesn't need to integrate to other software products. Software is now dominated by ecosystems, and to participate in (or build) an ecosystem your product needs to plug in. Unfortunately, this is really difficult for most product teams who aren't integration experts. Integration becomes a distraction--a necessary evil.
We believe it doesn't have to be this way!
Blended Edge provides a product, built for software engineering teams, that eliminates all of the friction around designing, building, and maintaining product integrations. Our goal is that building "the next" integration is a simple matter, not a complicated conversation about priorities or bandwidth. For the product team, this means transforming integration from a burden into a growth multiplier.
We look forward to helping as many software teams as possible master integration, and we look forward to building one of Columbus, Ohio's next great technology companies while doing so.
👨🏫 About Product Teacher
Product Teacher is a product management education company.
Our mission is to create accessible and effective resources for a global community of product managers, innovators, founders, and entrepreneurs.
We're here to make product management easier for everyone!
For individuals, we offer self-paced courses, career services, and product job openings.
For organizations, we offer corporate workshops and consulting services.
🙋 Frequently Asked Questions
How long will I be able to have access to this course?
You'll have lifetime unlimited access to this course, across any and all devices that you own! You can come back to review the materials even after you've secured your Integrations Microdegree certification.
Note that this course is hosted on Teachable. You can always log back into the course at https://courses.productteacher.com/
How much time should I expect to use for the course?
This course has been thoughtfully designed to be self-paced so that it fits your schedule. You could finish it in a single day, or you could take as many weeks as you'd like!
We find that most students take about 3-4 lessons per week. That way, they have time to absorb lessons from each module.
Of course, feel free to take it at your own pace! We want to empower you to succeed on your own terms.
🙌 Professionals Served
Product Teacher has helped professionals coming from hundreds of companies to advance their careers in product management.
These companies include: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Netflix, Twitter, Airbnb, Tesla, PayPal, Box, Zoom, YouTube, Adobe, Uber, Lyft, Salesforce, Slack, Reddit, Okta, eBay, Hulu, Spotify
🎯 Kickstart Your Career Today
Investing in yourself is one of the highest-leverage things you can do
Committing to this microdegree could unlock hundreds of thousands of dollars in company revenue as you pursue new opportunities to create value.
And, this microdegree could save you hundreds of hours on the job. By knowing how to design and ship integrations effectively, you'll surpass expectations and drive tangible value.
With the knowledge that you'll gain in this integrations microdegree course for product managers, you'll impress your managers, accelerate your teammates, and drive stronger results for your customers.