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VPs and Directors of Product Management: Finding Excellence (Udemy.com)

Succeeding in an intense, stressful, invigorating job

Created by: Todd Birzer

Last updated May 2025

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What you will learn

  • Lead a product team to create innovative new products
  • Find market success - working with marketing, sales, and customer support teams
  • Drive growth, competitive advantage, and profitability through product strategy
  • Guide, manage, and motivate an excellent product team

How it compares

Against the other 54 rated Udemy courses in Product Management on CourseDuck:

  • Rating4.6 out of 5higher than 75% of them
  • Reviews1,458#15 of 55 by number of reviews
  • Length4.3 hoursshorter than 51% of them
  • Last updatedMay 2025earlier than 70% of them

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Course Description

This job as a VP of Product, Head of Product, or Director of Product Management has incredible upside opportunities - but it’s not simple to find success in this role.

We need to guide product teams over time…

  • balancing top-level strategy with team-level empowerment

  • finding innovation, customer delight, competitive advantage, and market success

…all while gaining and keeping the confidence of the executives around us.


This course has been designed to help you find this success. To do this, we’ll dive into four areas:

  1. Leading our teams to create innovative new products, working side-by-side with our engineering and technical teams, and our product designers

  2. Finding market success for our products - supporting our sales, marketing, and customer support teams

  3. Driving growth, competitive advantage, and profitability through product strategy

  4. Growing, managing, and motivating an excellent product team


We will include lots of company examples in this course - spanning software, hardware, and services, plus practice activities and case studies. All tools, templates, and course materials are available for download.

If you are in this job today - or are a senior product manager looking to move into this role - my goal is to get you the knowledge, approaches, and tools you need to find excellence.

It's a crazy, tough, rewarding job, and we all need help.

I hope you'll join us!

One final note: This course includes the use of artificial intelligence in the form of an AI-driven role play.

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Instructor Details

Todd Birzer

I'm a product management instructor and consultant, focused on helping product teams become more strategic, impactful, and innovative.

I have over 25 years of experience in product management - as a product manager and leader of product teams - mostly at California-based companies. My most recent role was as the Head of Product at a Canadian start-up, which was good fun. My work has spanned software, hardware, services, artificial intelligence, and product design.

I have an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and I am the author of the book The Three-Minute Product Manager.

We have such incredible opportunities as product managers. What a gift this job!

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Reviews

4.6

1,458 ratings on Udemy

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By Brian Ivander on 12/22/2025

I am a Product Lead in Indonesia. This course has helped me to structure the way I'm leading my team. I know that several things are already implemented, but now knowing such structured approach will help me tick the box for implementing it in my own career. Todd brings it really well, the materials are also excellently written and well understood. Thanks Todd!

By Muhammad Umer Farooq on 12/11/2025

It's a course for directors and VPs but so far it looks like I am not learning anything new

By Naman Agarwal on 8/23/2023

The course was well-structured and easy to follow, with clear action steps. It provided great insights. This course was a euphoric experience and helped me articulate my job better. Thanks, Todd, for saving me thousands of hours of iterations and confusion.

By Wes Wes on 7/6/2023

Great case studies and advice on the EQ-side of Product Management leadership. Would have been also good to have some studies on the negative side, i.e., how to handle things when the VP PM has odd constraints, challenging company politics, or lots of legacy team issues to sort out.

By Manish Sinha on 6/9/2023

Very good course. It provides insights from a VP or Director of Product Management's perspective - what you should do in that role, how you should build your team, develop product strategy etc. Would surely recommend to someone planning to move into these roles and want to prepare themselves with some formal training.

By Anonymized User on 1/28/2023

It's hard to imagine summarizing the Head of Product role in a 4.5 hr course but Todd has done an exceptional job at just that. The content is succinct, to the point, informed by experience and presented in digestible, logical, well-organized modules. If you are looking to hear what is likely 10+ years of experience in such a role (just a guess) summed up in under 5 hours, this is it.

By Lavanya Subramanian on 3/8/2022

This was a great comprehensive course where I got educated and oriented in the right direction on managing product teams, working with executive management and key stakeholders. Can't thank enough to Todd who went above and beyond in providing excellent templates that we can put to use from day-1 and for his thoughtfulness in guiding us through the day-90+ plans. Highly recommend!

By Joshua Khoo on 10/9/2021

I'm a Sr. Product Manager who aspire to be a product leader in the near future. This course really provided me with insights and practical tools towards my goal. While there are some things taught that seem quite basic for a role of a VP, I've had managers leading product teams that never had product experience before. Thanks Todd for sharing your knowledge with us, I would have loved to have you as my Product VP!

By Leadaki on 3/4/2021

Great course on Product Management concepts, although destined for VPs and directors of product managers I would recommend this to any PM with seniority, as a group product manager I also found it extremely useful. Love how Todd lays out the concepts and how it provides real life examples and step by step tactical approaches to carry out a strategy. Great job!

By Vijay Srinivas Vittalam on 12/18/2020

Excellent course for people who are looking for Directors and Vice President roles in Product Management.Todd covered very nicely right from the vision being directed by "The Executive Leadership" team to the Engineering & Technology team as to how they go hand-in-hand and gave various models as to which kind of scenario to choose which one, and then the Sales,Marketing teams for the Market Success once having these then to have the Coaching of the teams as to how to successfully manage a Product Team. Lot of useful insights/pointers links/resources were mentioned. And it is really helpful for people who are in the vested interest of becoming Directors and Vice Presidents. Worth for the bucks! I would give 5/5 for the course Sincere Thanks! Vijay

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Overall Score : 92 / 100