I’m on a mission to ‘level up my PM skills’. The first step is to find out more about current thinking and approaches towards product, which is why I made my way through the product-led fundamentals course by ProductLed.
My experience of the course.
It’s an interesting mini-course that does what it says (on the can), which is introducing the fundamentals of product-led approach to selling stuff in a series of less than 10 minute videos bookended by a quiz and certificate at the end.
It feels somewhat like a classic-MOOC format online course you’d find on digital learning platform like Coursera, EdX, or even FutureLearn where you get to taste (for free) before you choose to order the main meal (for a fee).
Themes and takeaways.
The course practised what it preached: Try before you buy (coaching and other products and services by Product-led) and show not tell (visual media, supporting materials and video), and more.
Connecting the principles with what I do
In my professional practice, we applied the “try before you buy” and “show not tell” approach for all Monash MOOCs from 2015 to 2019, specifically the Food as Medicine free to join MOOC (for a generalist audience) that was a requirement for the series of for-fee courses for healthcare professionals and NNedPro.
In 2014, Monash University partnered with FutureLearn, a UK-based digital education platform, to boost the university’s digital education strategy and explore how MOOCs might:
- grow Monash’s brand and reputation
- offer opportunities for lifelong learning to alumni
- act as a pathway for for-fee online courses
- drive innovation and enhancement of the online teaching and learning experience.
Again, these concepts and ideas are congruent and not dissimilar to a product-led approach.
With the MOOCs, learners had the opportunity to complete the course (access materials etc) before choosing to pay to upgrade to receive their certificate and maintain access to the course e.g., ongoing access to the course for as long as it was being offered on the platform rather than access being restricted two weeks after the course finished.
Why so fast?
As a side note, I found the production style of the videos interesting. Although the play controls listed playback speed as ‘normal’, the videos felt like they were playing at an increased speed which gave the videos a slightly jilted and jumpy feel, especially to the video.
This may have been an intentional design decision (like YouTube creators) or a configuration on the video platform used to stream the video. Also noting that ‘skim watching lecture videos’ is a thing.
…or maybe it was just AI-generated video?
Maybe it wasn’t the editing style that gave the videos a slightly jilted and jumpy style, but AI-generated instead using a tool like HourOne or HeyGen, which I recently discovered on Day 4 and Day 5 of The 12 Days of AI. Here’s my AI-generated video for reference.
