Bachelor of Arts in Product Management
Product managers develop strategies and concepts for digital products, coordinate their development, analyze and validate ideas and help them grow.
Become a product manager
and develop successful products
Have you ever wondered who developed products like iPhone, Spotify, or TikTok? We’ll tell you! It was a team consisting of software engineers, designers, and product managers.
Is Product Management the right fit for you?
The decision is entirely up to you. But if your fingertips are tingling to understand customer needs, you know how to communicate with users and stakeholders of the company, you want to make sure that the right product is being built, are as curious to explore markets and industries as you are to interpret data and you can integrate respectfully in a team, Product Management is the right fit for you. It is essential to understand that Product Managers are the opposite of lone fighters: there is no Product Manager without a team.
What will you learn as a Product Management student at CODE?
Our students learn to lead the product development process with cross-functional teams based on agile ways of working. Driving innovation and change in organizations of all sizes based on a clear product strategy while communicating with different stakeholders is another important task of future Product Managers. If you are interested in founding your own company, you can in addition learn how to start and run your business.
Which spectrum of technology applications will you cover?
Our students explore software solutions as well as hybrid products involving hardware. They work on highly scalable products that aim to combine social and community-driven purposes with profitability. For instance, one area of focus is on innovative products that help the economy to become more sustainable, and strengthen society’s resilience in a future of increasingly volatile ecosystems.
I chose to study Product Management at CODE because I fell in love with the pedagogy’s description as it reflects perfectly what I was looking for and which values I believed in. Diversity and transdisciplinarity are melted together in the CODE’s environment to support exploration and inventiveness.Adrien Sosson, #thirdparty student
Product Manager: Career Path Options
It’s not easy to say “this is a typical product manager”. You can find several types of product managers out there in different industries. The role and its responsibilities can even vary from company to company. However, we are trying to shed light on the most common ones right now:
Growth Product ManagerA data-driven decision-maker, detail-oriented strategist, organized and looking forward to working in larger organizations and later-stage products.
Main focus: marketing analysis, data science & product marketing.
Experience Focused Product ManagementGood listener and communicator, always putting the customer first, right eye for excellent user experience, enjoys in-depth conversations with designers and developers.
Main focus: research methods, user experience.
Community Focused Product ManagementThe customers’ voice, strives for changing the world while embracing cultural diversity, and it’s an expert in transferring user wishes into viable products.
Main focus: culture, arts, bridging gaps.
Entrepreneurial Product ManagerWilling to stand on your own two feet and resilient, a good networker, visionary, and a great communicator that can bring the right people together.
Main focus: business models, finance, stakeholder communication.
Platform & Tech Product ManagerAnalytical tech enthusiast and a strong communicator always prepared to dive into technical discussions with the team.
Main focus: tech stack, APIs, integration.
CODE is all about new ways of learning
The most effective way to learn is not by passively absorbing selected facts and ready-made content to reproduce for the next exam. Information is best remembered when it is embedded in the context of practical meaning. That’s where curiosity-driven education comes into play.
There are core competencies that every product manager needs to be successful, while other focus areas allow our students to deepen their knowledge and find their profile of expertise. Some skills can be learned in the classroom, but most are developed with experience, good role models, and mentoring. Unlike traditional universities, we value interdisciplinary approaches. All three parts of digital product development – software engineering, interaction design, and product management – are interwoven throughout our bachelor programs. This way, our students gain experience in collaboration setups already during their studies, giving them a vital foundation to build on in their professional life.
At CODE, the role of our faculty is different. It’s all about knowledge sharing, and they see themselves as coaches and mentors, encouraging students to push boundaries and shape their profile. Studying at CODE guides students to decide what kind of product manager they want to be and who they want to become in their professional life.
Modules
The program is focused on a set of modules that explore the range of
the discipline product management. We give you a lot of freedom to choose the modules you want to dive into.
- Communication & Presentation
- Customer Discovery & Market Research
- Business Intelligence and Analytics
- Product Marketing
- How to Start a Startup
- Requirements Engineering
- Product Innovation & Definition
- Agile Process Management
- Product Strategy
- Economics
- Product Sales
- Strategic Partnerships and Third-Party Integration
- Business Model Design
- Consumer Psychology
- Finance and Controlling
- Organizational Development
Meet our PM team
Our professors and lectures focus on enabling our students to have meaningful firsthand experiences, guiding them to reflect on these experiences critically, and empowering them to master our challenging interdisciplinary projects.
Florian Grote
Program Coordinator
Chris Bonau Schmidt
Professor
Roland Fassauer
Professor
Swantje Quoos
Professor
Ceren Ahiska
Senior Lecturer
Birte Loeckel
Lecturer
Intersection with other study programs
As part of an interdisciplinary learning experience, many modules offered by the Interaction Design and Software Engineering departments are also credited towards the Product Management Bachelor degree.
Three Bachelor programs for young talents
Decide within your orientation semester, whether you are a developer, designer or an entrepreneur and choose the focus, that fits best for you.
Your career choices
As a successful product manager, your feet rest firmly on a solid foundation of business economics, marketing and data analysis, while your eyes are fixed on the sky: dreaming up valuable, usable and feasible visions for new products and software solutions. In order to successfully design and implement a new product, product managers have to be passionate about all aspects of the product – from software engineering and technical features to front-end and interaction design. Fluent in coder-speak, product managers have their artsy designer vocabulary at the ready and shine in board-room management presentations.
