About us
Who we are
The Department of Product is a global educational institution dedicated to helping product managers and other technology professionals progress in their careers through acquiring new skills. We are made up of product professionals with decades of experience and our ambition is to provide our students with an indispensable, practical toolkit of resources and perspectives on what it means to build products today.
Building digital products involves a unique blend of business, technology and user experience and we know that excelling in all 3 of the areas can be a difficult aspiration for most people. Our educational programs are designed to help product managers and technology professionals improve in areas they may be lacking and to enhance areas of excellence.
To be a product person means to never stop learning.
Our program instructors
Unlike many other training programs, our instructors are not professional corporate trainers or industry spokespeople – they are real-world Senior Product Managers and technology professionals. With a blend of experience working for both larger organisations and smaller startups, you’ll learn from this real, hands on experience of product management.
Richard Holmes
Senior Product Manager
Richard is a Senior Product Management professional with over 10 years experience working for companies including eBay, Channel 4, lastminute.com and Macmillan Science and Education. Richard also has experience in early stage startups such as Shutl (acquired by eBay).
Jason Leonard
Senior Product Manager
During his 10 years experience, Jason has led significant digital transformation projects across many globally recognised brands including The Guardian, Dice Holdings and Whitbread. Jason also has experience in early stage startups such as Mendeley (acquired by Elsevier in 2013).
Our program instructors have worked at the following companies:
What we do
Our goal is to empower the global product and tech community through insightful analysis, tools and educational programs.
We focus on the needs of the product community; a group of people who often feel isolated in companies but emboldened when working together. We’re dedicated to providing honest, unique insights into what it means to be a modern professional working in the tech industry today and we are committed to creating world-class educational materials to help you build better products.
What people are saying
Our focus on high quality, original content and our ability to distill technical concepts into easy to understand formats continues to impress the global product community.
Phenomenal article explaining APIs. Everything you need to know about a RESTful APIs. #API https://t.co/ah6ilgTvou
— Tina Bean (@TinaMBean) January 25, 2017
SQL Skills for Product Managers | Outstanding must-read post from Richard Holmes #prodmgmt https://t.co/tZA80S0GbU pic.twitter.com/sOjwWQS4qx
— Paul J (@pivotservices) May 9, 2017
This is great stuff... https://t.co/WVyNsp4kXM
— NSJ (@lansaja) January 21, 2017
Probably the best article ever about getting up to speed with SQL as a PM: https://t.co/dGpciks40H from @Deptofproduct
— Octavia Hirst (@tavihirst) May 22, 2017
APIs Explained for Product Managers via @jeanettesuh https://t.co/HzWZ7wyDgn pic.twitter.com/Nyuaf1fndL
— Andrew Chen (@andrewchen) January 24, 2017
This is excellent: APIs Explained for Product Managers https://t.co/v5e4CE8DtO via @sjohnson717 #prodmgmt
— Matt Anderson (@MattAndersonUT) January 10, 2017
What previous participants say
"I did the General Assembly course on Product Management, but it didn't cover the technical side of product management and I didn't really know where to start.
I did some research and couldn't find many courses out there that covered this. I came across the Web Technologies Program and it offered the structure and level of content I was looking for. Having spoken to my brother (a front end developer), he echoed that it offered a good structure and would cover the material a product manager would need (based on his experience of what technical understanding made a good product manager).
The program gave me a broad overview of the key technologies used in building digital products from a product management perspective. I particularly liked the practical exercises with front end technologies (HTML, CSS and Javascript), as well as learning about APIs. I’d definitely recommend it to other product managers who want to learn more about the technical side of product management."
Joe Thornton, Product Manager
“I hadn’t heard of the Department of Product before, but I was impressed by the quality of the free content so I decided to give it a try. The best part about the programs they offer is that they are uniquely tailored to the needs of product managers. Too many other courses focus on general technology skills and are often tailored towards engineers; the Department of Product is unique because it focuses on the product community and our unique needs within organisations.”
Imelda Malone, Product Manager