MSPM 2022 Curriculum and Course Descriptions

Spring
46-751 Accelerate Leadership Assessment-0 Units
MSPM students are required to participate in leadership training through the Tepper School
Accelerate program. The Accelerate Leadership Center offers one-to-one coaching, a series of
leadership workshops and Leadership Development Certification for students to create action plans
that advance their personal and professional leadership goals. The Accelerate Leadership Center
offers a premier leadership development experience and enhances high-performance analytical skills
with essential leadership and communication behaviors.

46-870 Business Fundamentals for High Tech PM (Tepper)-12 units

This course will provide a basic introduction on general business management. Topics include
organizational structure, the role of different business domains in an organization (accounting,
finance, operations, marketing, strategy) and how they relate.

05-670 Digital Service Innovation (HCII)-12 units

Attention entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers! This course teaches you to invent mobile
information services. You will learn about value-creation in the service sector and a human-centered
design process including improv brainstorming, story-boarding, interviewing, video sketches, and
selling. Students work in small, interdisciplinary teams to discover unmet needs of users. They create
multiple concepts of a mobile service and assess their technical feasibility, financial viability, and
desirability. Then they choose a single service idea and produce a plan with a business model and a
video sketch suitable for posting on a crowd funding site. Grades will be determined primarily by the
quality of the team's products.

OR

05-652 Service Design for Product Management-12 units Skip Shelly & Peter Weeks
In this course, students will collectively define and study services and product service systems, and
learn the basics of designing them. They will do this through lectures, studio projects, and verbal and
written exposition. Classwork will be done individually and in teams.

OR

05-617 Design of Artificial Intelligence Products-12 units

This course teaches students how to design new products and services that leverage the capabilities
of AI and machine learning to improve the quality of people’s lives. Students will learn to follow a
matchmaking design, user-centered design, and service design process. They will learn to ideate;
reframing problematic situations by envisioning many possible products and services. They will learn
to iteratively refine and assess their ideas with real users/customers. Class projects will focus on the
challenges of deploying systems that generate errors and the challenges of situating intelligent
systems such that they harmonize the best qualities of human and machine intelligence.
46-871 Principles of Product Management (Tepper)-6 units
This course will introduce the role and responsibilities of the product manager in a software-intensive
product or services company. Students will learn about standard processes, tools, and techniques for
successful product management, including building and managing a product roadmap, understanding
customer needs, prioritizing development and feature requests, evaluating tradeoffs and making
decisions.

45-740 Managing People and Teams (Tepper)-6 units

Teams are increasingly used to innovate and implement in a variety of organizational settings. This
course is designed to improve your effectiveness as a manager by introducing you to concepts for
managing people and teams in organizations. Students will be exposed to cutting edge research as
well as given an opportunity to practice some of the principles introduced through course exercises,
case discussions, and assignments.

46-873 Business Communications (Tepper)-6 units

This course will be aimed at helping students know how to target and deliver messages to business
audiences. Students will learn delivery skills and will simultaneously learn how to construct
arguments and problem-solve for decision makers and how to understand what these audiences
need from them (including superior, peer, and subordinate audience groups).Students will be
evaluated on presentation assignments that are relevant to product management.

45-872 Product Marketing (Tepper)-6 units

This course will focus on the strategies of technology-based products. We will examine how
technology products differ from non-technology-based products and how the unique attributes of
high-technology products influence the marketing strategies and tactics of those products. We will
cover issues such as the diffusion of high technology products and "crossing the chasm"; pricing of
technology products including versioning and bundling; compatibility; standardization within product
markets; competition in technology-focused product arenas; continuous versus discontinuous
product changes and the product line. Examples of technology-intensive industries are computer
hardware and software, media and entertainment, telecommunications and e-commerce. Students
explore the unique economic circumstances facing firms in these industries and identify strategies
that enable firms to succeed given these circumstances. This course is ideal for students who want to
pursue a career as a product/product line manager for a technology company. This course helps
students understand the unique economic characteristics seen in today’s technology-intensive
markets and how they impact the strategic interactions among firms and consumers. Students study,
for example: Why firms in technology markets give away their best products for free. Why Apple
taxes consumers for hardware but subsidizes music, movies, etc. while Amazon subsidizes their
hardware but tax software (music, books, movies, etc.). Why Sony won the Blu-Ray format war
against HD-DVD which was sponsored by a whole array of companies. In order for students to
understand how firms strategically interact in technology-intensive industries this course will use a
combination of simple but rigorous analytical models, emerging theories, and formal case studies.
05-898 B4 Data Science for Product Managers (HCII)-6 units
Product managers engage in a variety of complex activities critical to product success. These include
product requirements gathering, forecasting customer demand, customer segmentation, and
analyzing and responding to customer feedback. Historically decisions in these areas have often
relied on intuition and guesswork, leading to misjudgment of the market and other key factors, and
ultimately, product failures. Developments in data science, combining the increasing availability of
data from internal and external sources with new algorithms that exploit that data at scale, offer new
possibilities for putting product management decisions on a more quantitative and rigorous footing.
Students in this course will be introduced to a variety of data science techniques applicable to
activities to which product managers typically contribute. These techniques include preference
modeling, time series forecasting, regression, clustering, classification, A/B testing, and analytics for
unstructured data including. Along the way, students will learn about practical aspects of applying
data science to product management, including such as choosing appropriate metrics for product
success. This course is primarily aimed at students with technical backgrounds who wish to apply
their skills to product management. Backgrounds in basic statistics, and some programming
experience are required, as the course will includes hands-on exercises in Python to illustrate the
concepts

05-898 A4 HCI for Product Managers (HCII)-6 units

This course provides an overview and introduction to the field of human-computer interaction, with a
focus on how it applies to managers, technology executives, and others who will work with HCI
professionals. Particular emphasis will be placed on what HCI methods and HCI-trained specialists can
bring to design and development teams. The course will provide a hands-on introduction to proven
tools and techniques for creating and improving user interfaces, such as Contextual Inquiry, Rapid
Prototyping, Heuristic Analysis, and Think-Aloud Usability Testing. Students at the end of the course
will have learned how to perform some useful techniques and will have an understanding of
systematic procedures for creating usable and useful designs and systems. This course is required for
students in the MSPM program and reservations will be set aside for these students.

Summer
46-750 Internship-3 units
This is a seminar for the students of the MSPM program that works in concert with their required
internship.

Fall
46-752 Capstone Project (HCII)-12 units
The Capstone project is structured to cover many of the ongoing challenges that product managers,
and the companies that employ them, face at any stage of a product’s lifecycle in partnership with an
industry sponsor. Our MSPM graduate students work in teams (minimum 2 students). Paired with
faculty mentors and their industry partners, teams produce product requirements, provide customer
discovery, discover product/market fit, complete competitive research, create product marketing
communications analysis, construct forecasts, generate pricing research and analysis, and other
product management activities for an industry partner's existing or new products This 15-week
course runs from August to December and gives each student two educational opportunities: 1. Put
into practice the theory and learning from foundational courses 2. Obtain relevant and hands-on
experience working on an industry-facing project.
05-670 Digital Service Innovation (HCII)-12 units
Attention entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers! This course teaches you to invent mobile
information services. You will learn about value-creation in the service sector and a human-centered
design process including improv brainstorming, story-boarding, interviewing, video sketches, and
selling. Students work in small, interdisciplinary teams to discover unmet needs of users. They create
multiple concepts of a mobile service and assess their technical feasibility, financial viability, and
desirability. Then they choose a single service idea and produce a plan with a business model and a
video sketch suitable for posting on a crowd funding site. Grades will be determined primarily by the
quality of the team's products.

OR

05-652 Service Design for Product Management (HCII)-12 units

In this course, students will collectively define and study services and product service systems, and
learn the basics of designing them. They will do this through lectures, studio projects, and verbal and
written exposition. Classwork will be done individually and in teams.

46-874 Principles of Product Management II (Tepper)-6 units

This course builds on Product Management I and expands upon the role and responsivities of the
product manager in a software-centered product company. The purpose of this course is to equip
students with the various methods, practices and tools they will need to be achieve product success
across the product management life cycle (PMLC). We will introduce the Five Product Movements
Model (5PMM) as the basis for the PMLC. We will survey the discipline of product management
across the PMLC movements of strategy, planning, development, marketing and operations. Course
participants will form teams and apply their learnings to a practical product case throughout the
semester, with an emphasis on the strategy and planning movements. We will also examine how the
role and responsibilities of the product manager must change to be successful as their category
matures over the technology adoption life cycle (TALC).

1 Technical Depth elective taken in the School of Computer Science-12 units

1 Tepper Elective-6 units