INDIVIDUAL LEARNERS

SCHOOL OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Data Product Manager

Nanodegree Program Syllabus
Overview
Leverage market data to amplify product development. Learn how to apply data science techniques, data engineering
processes, and market experimentation tests to deliver customized product experiences. Begin by leveraging the power of SQL
and Tableau to inform product strategy. Then, develop data pipelines and warehousing strategies that prepare data collected
from a product for robust analysis. Finally, learn techniques for evaluating the data from live products, including how to design
and execute various A/B and multivariate tests to shape the next iteration of a product.

Learning Objectives

A graduate of this program will be able to:

• Visualize data with Tableau for statistical analysis and identify unique relationships between variables via
hypothesis testing and modeling.

• Evaluate the output captured in statistical analyses and translate them into insights to inform product
decisions.

• Understand which data is best collected through quantitative versus qualitative methods, and how to
interpret it.

• Utilize user data to create user personas that can be transalted into code and build user journey maps
that describe the stages a user engages with the product.

• Extract insights from user journey maps to define KPIs of suggested product enhancements.

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Program information

Estimated Time Skill Level

3 months at 10hrs/week* Intermediate

Prerequisites

A well-prepared learner has:

• Basic understanding of data terminology (i.e. big data, database, algorithms, etc.)

• Some experience with data analysis (basic SQL and Tableau), and a general understanding of product management is
helpful.

Required Hardware/Software

Learners need access to:

• SQL, Tableau, Google Slides or Microsfot PowerPoint, Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.

• A 64-bit computer with a minimum operating system of Windows 8.1 or later, Apple MacOS 10.10 Yosemite or later, or any
Linux OS that supports the browsers mentioned above.

• Any Chrome OS that supports the browsers mentioned above.

*The length of this program is an estimation of total hours the average student may take to complete all required
coursework, including lecture and project time. If you spend about 5-10 hours per week working through the program, you
should finish within the time provided. Actual hours may vary.

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 Course 1

Applying Data Science to Product Management

As products become more digital, the amount of data collected is increasing. Product managers now have the opportunity
to utilize this data to not only enhance existing products, but create completely new ones. Understand the role of data
product managers within organizations and how they utilize data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to solve
problems. Learn how to visualize data with Tableau for statistical analysis and identify unique relationships between variables
via hypothesis testing and modeling. Evaluate the output captured in statistical analyses and translate them into insights to
inform product decisions.

Course Project

Develop a Data-Backed Product Proposal

A key responsibility of data product managers is analyzing market data to propose new product
opportunities. In this project, learners will apply the skills acquired in this course to create the MVP launch
strategy for the first flying car taxi service, Flyber, in one of the most congested cities in America—New
York City. Learners will acquire taxi data for a comparable initial analysis. The dataset contains real taxi
drop-offs and pick-ups in New York City. First, learners will analyze the existing use cases for and identify
temporal, behavioral, and spatial trends of ground-based taxis from the dataset. Next, they will deep-dive
into user research data to understand the general sentiment, desire, concerns, and use cases of a flying cab
service to prospective customers. Finally, they will synthesize their insights to create a data-backed product
proposal that recommends what features the first flying taxi service should have to maximize consumer
delight, adoption, and profits.

Data Product Manager 4

 • Explain the concept and history of data product management.

• Distinguish the different types of data product managers.

Lesson 1 • Identify the various internal stakeholders that data product managers work
with.
Introduction to Data
• Understand the fundamentals of general product management from talking
Product Management
to customers, analyzing data, designing high-level solutions, prioritizing
work, setting a roadmap, facilitating development, organizing launch
communications, and producing product iterations.

• Analyze what is being measured in a dataset.

Lesson 2
• Explain the benefits of aggregates or roll-up tables.
Granularity, Distribution • Compare and contrast the differences between fact and dimensional tables.
& Modeling Data
• Calculate and analyze the distribution of a dataset.

• Identify and differentiate visualizations and justify when to apply the right
Lesson 3 visualization for the appropriate analyses (spatial, temporal, distribution,
correlation)—box plot, line chart, donut chart, density map, or histogram.
Trends, Enrichment
& Visualization • Implement enriching datasets and utilize common online repositories for
publicly available datasets for analysis.

Lesson 4

• Utilize SQL and other data analysis techniques to explore and enrich a dataset
Midterm: Develop a
to identify customer pain points, trends, and opportunities.
Data-Backed Product
Proposal (Part 1)

Data Product Manager 5

 • Interpret data and insights to come up with product objectives.

• Design KPIs that measure if your products are meeting their objectives.
Lesson 5
• Utilize best practices and different techniques for setting up explicit feedback
mechanisms.
Setting Product Objectives
& Strategy • Create experiments that generate meaningful results in a timely, resourceful
manner.

• Drive instrumentation strategies for proper event data collection.

• Assemble and arrange your narrative based on stakeholders.

Lesson 5 • Weave data visualizations and insights into presentations in a consumable
format.
Proposal Synthesis & Design
• Develop the key points to hit in a product proposal presentation.

Course 2

Establishing Data Infrastructure

Products that collect data from its users can only leverage such data if it gets processed and stored properly. Data product
managers need to ensure their products have the appropriate supporting data pipelines in place so that data collected from
users can be extracted, transformed, and loaded into a data lake or warehouse that can be used for statistical analysis.
Learn about data infrastructure components including data pipelines, data producers, data consumers, data storage, and
data processing. Master the nuances of evaluating strategic decisions for data pipeline technology, including security and
compliance. Apply learnings to make step-by-step decisions for data infrastructure of an organization. Create solutions for
real-world data infrastructure problems and evaluate tradeoffs.

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 Course Project

Build a Scalable Data Strategy

Once a product has been launched into the market, the amount of data collected typically dramatically
increases and requires the appropriate infrastructure to support such growth. In this project, learners
will continue acting as a data product manager for Flyber, a flying-taxi service that has been massively
successful in New York City after its first product launch, and create a data strategy to not only handle
the massive amount of incoming data, but also process it to get the business insights needed to grow the
business. First, learners will define the data needs of primary business stakeholders within the organization
and create a data model to ensure the data collected supports those needs. Then, they will perform
the necessary extraction and transformation of the data to make the data relevant to answer business
questions. Lastly, learners will interpret data visualizations to understand the scale of Flyber’s data growth
and choose an appropriate data warehouse to enable that growth.

• Understand the importance and need of data pipelines.

• Understand the various components of data pipelines.

• Learn how to organize data pipeline components to automate end-to-end data

Lesson 1
flow.
Introduction to Data Pipelines • Create conceptual data pipelines.

• Learn about the influence of Saas and IoT on the data infrastructure world.

• Understand classic data problems that can be addressed by data pipelines.

• Learn about primary data consumers and their data needs.

• Identify data consumers in an organization and relevant data use cases based
Lesson 2
on their business goals.
Data Consumers • Understand the components in building a relational data model.

• Apply relational data models to business scenarios.

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 • Learn how to create event data models and implement them to get business
insights.

• Understand primary product management KPIs (active users, session length,

bounce rate, conversion rate, and click-through rate).
Lesson 3
• Use data collected from event models to calculate product KPIs.
Data Producers • Identify primary data producers in an organization.

• Distinguish between backend data producers (SaaS, ERPs, and data stores).

• Differentiate between types of data (structured vs. semistructured vs.

unstructured).

• Understand the difference between ETL and ELT processes.

• Distinguish between batch processing and stream processing.

• Select the appropriate data processing components for the product based on
data needs.

• Distinguish between a data warehouse and data lake.

Lesson 4 • Differentiate between SQL and NoSQL databases.

• Determine the appropriate data storage components for a particular data

Data Strategy
infrastructure of a product based on data needs.

• Assess capabilities of various data warehousing options (build vs. buy, cloud
vs. on-prem, open source vs. proprietary, and insource vs. outsource) to make
strategic decisions for data infrastructure.

• Understand data security and compliance (PII, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA)
components related to product use cases.

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 Course 3

Leveraging Data in Iterative Product Design

The best products adapt to market changes over time and are constantly being refined based on user feedback. With a robust
data pipeline, the amount of data collected through product usage is extremely valuable to product managers for enhancing
their products. Understand which data is best collected through quantitative versus qualitative methods, and how to interpret
it. Learn how to apply chi-square tests to determine if results from data analysis are statistically significant. Utilize user data
to create user personas that are actionable for development teams to translate into code and for building out user journey
maps that describe the stages a user engages with the product along with the associated risks and opportunities. Extract
insights from user journey maps to define KPIs of suggested product enhancements and design the relative hypotheses and
experiments that are needed to prove the assumptions of product enhancements.

Course Project

Create an Iterative Design Path

As products exist in the market over time, opportunities for product design improvements arise. In this
project, learners will continue in the role as a data product manager for Flyber, a flying-taxi service that
has grown its user base exponentially, and define customer segments and relevant new product feature
opportunities. First, learners will evaluate data from a conducted A/B test to identify key behavioral
and descriptive attributes of users to define user personas and map out the significant stages of the
user journey within the Flyber app. Then, they’ll create an assumption map to explain the testable risks,
opportunities, and correlated KPIs for product design improvements of the app experience, including
the most impactful page and most significant subset of users. Lastly, learners will use the completed
assumption map as well as the developed user persona and journey to construct hypotheses for new
product features of the Flyber app and experiments to validate these hypotheses.

Data Product Manager 9

 • Describe how data collection and usages changes depending on the state of
the software (from pre-launch to product with existing customer base).

• Choose common KPIs for different business models (freemium, SAAS,

Lesson 1
eCommerce).
Choose & Measure KPIs • Calculate the most popular KPIs for user acquisition, activation, retention, and
revenue.

• Suggest additional data that should be collected to allow for KPI tracking.

• Identify the steps in a typical user acquisition and activation funnel.

Lesson 2
• Run analyses in Tableau to determine rate of user dropoff during each step of
Evaluate User Acquisition a funnel.
& Usage Funnels
• Visualize a funnel analysis in Tableau in bar chart form.

• Explain the importance of segmenting user data by cohorts.

• Identify behavioral traits in a data set that could be used to analyze cohort
Lesson 3 behavior.

Cohort Analysis • Apply cohort analysis to segment funnel analysis.

• Calculate feature use within a product, both among all users and among
selected cohorts using existing event data.

• Explain the benefits and drawbacks of quantitative data.

• Explain the benefits and drawbacks of qualitative data.

• Determine when qualitative data is most useful during the iterative design
Lesson 4 process.

Qualitative & • Describe unstructured and structured methods of qualitative research,

Quantitative Data including interviews/focus groups, surveys, and prototype testing.

• Explain the framework of “jobs to be done” as used during qualitative research.

• Narrow scope and choose which feature(s) to test first using the RICE
framework.

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 • Explain the benefits and drawbacks of A/B testing.

• Explain the benefits and drawbacks of multivariate testing.

• Determine what type of test is appropriate given feature(s) of interest.

Lesson 5
• Determine what user actions should be tracked during A/B and multivariate

A/B Test & Multivariate Test tests.

• Explain methods to create unbiased control and test groups of users.

• Apply the correct statistical methods to explain the difference between the
experimental and control group data and make a decision.

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Meet your instructors.

JJ Miclat
Senior Product Manager at Zendesk

JJ is a product leader obsessed with creating simple, novel solutions for the world’s most challenging
issues. He’s sunk his teeth into analytics and data product management for Beats Music, Apple,
VSCO, and Collective Health.

Vaishali Agarwal
Product Manager at Expedia

Vaishali has 12+ years’ experience in tech ecosystem ranging from product management, product
development, content writing, to coding. She is experienced in building platforms, high performance
startup divisions, streamlined operations, and managing customer expectations.

Anne Rynearson
Senior Product Manager at Disqo

Anne has 6+ years’ experience in product management in the software industry, including
EdTech and market research industries. She is an agile leader experienced in launching and
growing both consumer and enterprise-facing products. Proven ability to lead cross-functional
teams in iterative data-driven product development with a focus on strategic product growth.

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Udacity’s learning
experience

Hands-on Projects Quizzes

Open-ended, experiential projects are designed Auto-graded quizzes strengthen comprehension.
to reflect actual workplace challenges. They aren’t Learners can return to lessons at any time during
just multiple choice questions or step-by-step the course to refresh concepts.
guides, but instead require critical thinking.

Knowledge Custom Study Plans

Find answers to your questions with Knowledge, Create a personalized study plan that fits your
our proprietary wiki. Search questions asked by individual needs. Utilize this plan to keep track of
other students, connect with technical mentors, movement toward your overall goal.
and discover how to solve the challenges that
you encounter.

Workspaces Progress Tracker

See your code in action. Check the output and Take advantage of milestone reminders to stay
quality of your code by running it on interactive on schedule and complete your program.
workspaces that are integrated into the platform.

Data Product Manager 13

Our proven approach for building
job-ready digital skills.
Experienced Project Reviewers

Verify skills mastery.

• Personalized project feedback and critique includes line-by-line code review from
skilled practitioners with an average turnaround time of 1.1 hours.

• Project review cycle creates a feedback loop with multiple opportunities for
improvement—until the concept is mastered.

• Project reviewers leverage industry best practices and provide pro tips.

Technical Mentor Support

24/7 support unblocks learning.

• Learning accelerates as skilled mentors identify areas of achievement and potential
for growth.

• Unlimited access to mentors means help arrives when it’s needed most.

• 2 hr or less average question response time assures that skills development stays on track.

Personal Career Services

Empower job-readiness.
• Access to a Github portfolio review that can give you an edge by highlighting your
strengths, and demonstrating your value to employers.*

• Get help optimizing your LinkedIn and establishing your personal brand so your profile
ranks higher in searches by recruiters and hiring managers.

Mentor Network

Highly vetted for effectiveness.

• Mentors must complete a 5-step hiring process to join Udacity’s selective network.

• After passing an objective and situational assessment, mentors must demonstrate

communication and behavioral fit for a mentorship role.

• Mentors work across more than 30 different industries and often complete a Nanodegree
program themselves.

*Applies to select Nanodegree programs only.

Data Product Manager 14

Learn more at
www.udacity.com/online-learning-for-individuals →

12.16.22 | V1.0