Thankfully, the advancement of technology and the recent pandemic have allowed many schools to offer courses fully online. Product management is one subject you can find hundreds of courses on no matter how new or experienced you are in the field.
If you are looking for an online course to help gain knowledge about product management, the best 5 product management certification courses online are:
Table of Contents
What Certifications Should I Get As A Product Manager?
As a product manager, you have to have quite a few skills and abilities to create success with your product. While it’s not always required, or the requirements are different for each product and job, there are a few things worth getting to help you. You can get certifications such as:
- Product marketing
- Digital management
- Software product management
These will help you achieve your goals with your product or give you the edge over someone else trying to get a product management job.
How Do You Become A Product Manager?
Thankfully there is not only one path to becoming a product manager. You can really become a product manager no matter what background you have, To become a product manager you have to have the desire to grow, learn and lead others to do the same.
Having a background in marketing, finance or management is helpful in this field because it shows you have some experience in the knowledge you will need to know. In reality, you need to know how to manage products and create a good profit margin with your team. The biggest things you need to know to become a product manager are:
- Know your business and its market
- Product management fundamentals
- Study and learn the product management field
- Have an experience that can create a portfolio of your abilities
What Is The Difference Between a Product Owner And a Product Manager?
A product owner is usually the person who builds, creates, and brings the ideas to life once they have been thought of. A product manager is a person who decides what needs to be made and leads the team that will make it.
Usually, you won’t have both of these roles in a smaller organization because the owner will also be the manager. A product manager is a job that can usually be filled by anyone with a management or marketing background while a product owner usually has to have a creative mind that is willing to research and build.
The 5 Best Product Management Certification Courses Online
Learning how to manage products is extremely important to creating a good profit margin. You can have a fantastic product but lose money due to a lack of management around selling and creating a business plan that can create desire and need for your product.
To create the business that you need for your product, you need to know how to manage your product and everything that surrounds it. Thankfully, you can learn everything you need online through courses specifically made to teach product management.
1. University Of Cape Town Product Management Course
The University of Cape Town has an online course dedicated to teaching you how to develop, brand, launch, and manage a product that will create a large profit margin. You will leave the class with the ability to create a roadmap to building a business centered around your one product.
The class takes 6 weeks to complete once you finish the orientation. On average you will spend around 7-10 hours of online work each week however, the class can fit whatever pace you need within a certain time frame.
The cost of this course is $681 and can be paid in a payment plan or all at once before orientation begins.
2. Udacity Online Product Management Course
Udacity has a fantastic online course that lets you wholly control your pace and learning plan. You can pay a monthly subscription for $399 and pay for only the months you need versus paying for each course. They also have a savings option where you can pay for 4 months at a time for only $1356, which is a 15% savings.
You don’t need any prerequisites or prior experience to start this course since it’s a beginner-type course. This course goes through everything from creating a product to managing a small business operation.
3. Udacity Growth Product Manager Course
This course is a more advanced course that requires a bit of prerequisite knowledge like experience in product management, as well as knowledge in excel. This course is fully online and will require around 3 months to fully complete.
You can pay a monthly subscription for $399 and pay for only the months you need versus paying for each course. They also have a savings option where you can pay for 4 months at a time for only $1356, which is a 15% savings.
4. Digital Product Management Specialization
The University of Virginia provides a course fully online that teaches a fully modern, digital approach to managing your product. While a hands-on approach is necessary for certain things, in the ever-changing digital world, you can use technology to manage more things for you than ever before.
You can enroll in UOV for free and courses are based on the hours required to complete and how advanced the class is.
5. Real-World Product Management Specialization
In this program you can learn everything you need to know from people who are hiring product managers. These experts have seen the best and the worst of product managers and they know how to teach you what you need to be successful.
Through Coursera, you can enroll for free to see all of their course options and pick and choose your courses from there. The course fees depend on how long it takes to complete the course and how advanced the course is in terms of knowledge and know-how.
Final Thoughts On Product Management Courses
You can become a product manager no matter your background or previous experience. Even if you don’t have the experience you can take many courses fully online that allow you to learn everything from product creation to marketing and management of a team.
