ECON 28
Solution Design and Product Management Winter 2020

Cross-listed CSCI 28
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

Google Glass, Blackberry Storm, and the initial Obamacare Website represent just a few of the many failures that litter the IT project graveyard: 40 to 60 percent of large technology projects fail. All too often, the cause has little to do with the quality of technical engineering. More often, companies choose the wrong problem to solve or the wrong way to solve it. Google failed to account for the Google Glass price tag and privacy concerns. Blackberry failed to fully appreciate the touchscreen revolution. The Obamacare website failed to address management issues. The underlying conflict is that engineers and IT teams like to be told what to build, but customers often do not know what they want or how to express it. Identifying the right problem, designing the right solution, communicating the correct specifications to engineers, and delivering the right product to primary stakeholders are all difficult challenges crucial for successful product development. This course will explore various frameworks that product managers use to address these challenges. In doing so, we will model interactions between market forces, corporate directives, engineering challenges, and user experiences to interrogate the resilience of our ideas. We will also analyze and critique methodologies presented in readings by technology management prophets Marty Cagan, Steve Blank, Don Norman, Steve Krug and Eric Ries. Throughout the course, students will work in small teams to develop their own product management toolkit and deploy it towards solving a technology problem of each team¿s own choosing. Adjunct Instructor Bio: Allan Wellenstein is a senior vice-president at DataArt, a global technology consulting firm and the head of their Solution Design consulting practice. Allan has over 15 years of experience helping some of the world largest companies design and implement massive technology transformations. Though technically headquartered in New York City, he lives with his wife and three children in Pittsfield, MA.
The Class: Format: lecture
Limit: 12
Grading: pass/fail only
Requirements/Evaluation: final project or presentation
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: students will be asked to submit a brief paragraph describing their interest in the course and what they hope to get out of it
Materials/Lab Fee: $10 and approximately $30 for books
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ECON 28 CSCI 28
Attributes: EXPE Experiential Education Courses

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