Week 01 · Days 1–5
PM Foundations
Understand what PMs actually do day-to-day and learn the core mental models you'll use all bootcamp.
Portfolio deliverable · A 1-page 'PM Operating Philosophy' doc
What does a PM actually do?
Lesson: The PM role across company stages
The PM role shifts dramatically by company stage. At an early-stage startup, you're doing user research, writing specs, and sometimes QA-ing builds yourself — generalist mode. At a scaleup, you specialize: growth PM, platform PM, core product PM, each with a dedicated team. At big tech, the role narrows further but the stakes and process overhead grow. For consumer/growth roles specifically, the throughline is: you own a metric (activation, retention, referral), you run experiments to move it, and you partner closely with design, data, and engineering. Read 1-2 of the resources below and note 3 differences between startup and big-tech PM work.
Task: Map your target companies
List 10 consumer/growth companies you'd want to work at. For each, write 1 sentence on what their growth loop looks like (referral, content, paid, viral, etc.)
Core frameworks: JTBD & RICE
Lesson: Jobs To Be Done
Jobs To Be Done reframes products around progress, not features. The core idea (from Clayton Christensen's milkshake study): people 'hire' a product to make progress in a specific situation. Every job has three dimensions — functional (the practical task: 'help me track my spending'), emotional (how the user wants to feel: 'in control, not anxious'), and social (how they want to be perceived: 'responsible'). Great consumer products nail all three. When you do competitive analysis or write a PRD later in this bootcamp, JTBD helps you ask 'what job is this replacing or improving?' instead of just listing features.
Lesson: RICE prioritization
RICE is a simple scoring model for ranking competing ideas: Reach (how many users does this affect per quarter?), Impact (how much will it move the needle — score 0.25/0.5/1/2/3 for minimal to massive), Confidence (how sure are you, as a %, given your evidence), and Effort (person-months/weeks to build). The formula is (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort. The output isn't gospel — it's a forcing function that makes your assumptions explicit and comparable, and gives you a defensible answer when someone asks 'why are we building X instead of Y?'
Task: JTBD interview yourself
Pick an app you use daily (e.g. Spotify, Instagram). Write out the functional, emotional, and social 'job' it's doing for you.
Growth metrics 101: AARRR
Lesson: The Pirate Metrics (AARRR)
AARRR ('pirate metrics', coined by Dave McClure) breaks the user lifecycle into five stages: Acquisition (how do people find you?), Activation (do they have a great first experience — the 'aha moment'?), Retention (do they come back?), Referral (do they tell others?), Revenue (do they pay, directly or indirectly?). Most consumer apps lose the majority of users at Activation or early Retention — not Acquisition. As a growth PM, your first job is usually to find the biggest leak in this funnel, not to drive more top-of-funnel traffic into a leaky bucket.
Task: Funnel-map a consumer app
Pick a consumer app and write out what you THINK their AARRR funnel looks like, with rough numbers/guesses for each stage.
User research basics
Lesson: Qualitative vs quantitative research
Quant tells you WHAT is happening at scale (e.g. '30% of users drop off at step 3'); qual tells you WHY (e.g. 'they don't understand what step 3 is for'). Use surveys/analytics when you need statistical confidence across a large population; use interviews when you need depth and don't yet know what questions to ask. The biggest interview pitfall is the leading question — 'Would you find a feature that does X useful?' almost always gets a polite 'yes.' Better: ask about past behavior ('tell me about the last time you tried to do X') rather than hypothetical future behavior.
Task: Write a 5-question user interview script
Write 5 open-ended, non-leading interview questions for understanding why people use (or stopped using) a habit-forming app like a fitness or budgeting app.
Synthesize: Your PM Operating Philosophy
Deliverable: PM Operating Philosophy doc
Write a 1-page doc covering: (1) what kind of PM you want to be, (2) the 3 frameworks from this week and how you'll use them, (3) one app you'll use as your 'practice subject' for the rest of the bootcamp.
Advanced Challenge: Define your AI-native PM thesis
Write a half-page thesis: what does 'AI-native product management' mean beyond 'add a chatbot'? Cover at least: how AI changes the discovery/activation funnel (not just adds a feature), what new metrics matter for AI features (e.g. task completion rate, trust/accuracy, fallback-to-human rate), and one example of an AI product that changed user behavior in a measurable way. This becomes the opening framing for your portfolio.