• Study the actions required to bring a product to market.
• Learn strategies to build, leverage, defend, and sustain new products.
• Gain business management knowledge.
• Focus on pricing strategies and tactics.
• Discuss the span of products — consumer and B2B, products and services, digital and physical.

This course focuses on the strategies and methods for building, leveraging, defending, and sustaining inspired new products and brands. A successful new product has many similarities to a successful new business, so this class will cover a broad set of business management concepts from various functional business areas, positioned within the context of successful product development and launch.

The course also emphasizes pricing strategies and tactics, recognizing the importance of pricing and its close link to fundamental business principles. Students will explore the actions required to bring a product to market, including understanding your target audiences' needs, values and lifestyles, and the key elements of a launch plan.

Pre/Co-requisite: 49-606 - Understanding Markets, Products & Services

• Learn the concepts, roles, and responsibilities of product and brand management.
• Study how strategy and business models work together to shape a business.
• Learn planning, development, and marketing tools that work to differentiate a product.
• Use a business simulation to understand how a business's functional areas tie together.
• Gain an overview of multiple business types: corporate, entrepreneurial, for-profit, and nonprofit.

This course explores the concepts, roles, and responsibilities associated with both product management and brand management., It will also cover how strategy and business models intertwine to shape the nature and success of a product and business. Tools and methods will be introduced that enable a business to better understand and define itself, and to recognize its position in the market environment. 

The course will also cover planning, development, and marketing tools that product and brand managers use to make decisions on how to deliver the expected value to customers and stakeholders and differentiate from the competition. These tools will help you address common strategic and tactical challenges across the product lifecycle to make a product or service successful. In addition to covering theory and applications, the course will use a business simulation to help students understand how the functional areas tie together. 

The course will cover a variety of contexts: corporate and entrepreneurial, for-profit and not-for-profit, products and services, business-to-business and consumer products, digital and physical products. Further, the course will build on your knowledge of marketing, engineering, accounting, and manufacturing, showing how product managers and brand managers work cross-functionally and play critical leadership functions to make products and services successful.