Comentários e feedback de alunos de Trabalho de conclusão de curso de gestão de produtos de software da instituição Universidade de AlbertaUniversidade de Alberta

I think it was a wonderful experience.

I liked the theory introduction of Course 1 when we learned about the Agile Manifesto and we have been teach why processes, requirements, planning and monitoring matter. Personally, it was a nice review for what I have learned in my mastering and, earlier, when taking my Bachelor’s degree.

I also enjoyed the Course 2, specially when it came to Agile methodologies explanation. I learned many things about Lean and Scrum practices that I hadn’t known or I hadn’t remembered by that time.

Course 3 is, by far, the one I enjoyed and learned more. In my mastering thesis I used a lot of usability techniques, I also studied many of these and I kinda enjoyed the way wireframes were emphasized. The exercise to draw a wireframe was awesome. It was really fun to do it and check what my colleagues did. It was also nice to learn about user stories standards and acceptance tests, I am using a lot of what we learned in my current job.

Course 4 was cool, too. I liked to see many techniques working together, such as WBS, User Story points, Pert Charts and so on. However, I felt a little bit lost when I was taking the course, not knowing exactly where was the exact place of each technique. I am very experienced with project management, so it was not that hard, but I was wondering about my colleagues who were seeing these subjects for, maybe, the first or second time in their lives. I think it could be the most tiring course, even though the topics were pretty important and very well explained.

Course 5 was a good one. It’s not everybody who gives attention to monitoring and retrospectives. As far as retrospectives is concerned, it was really nice to learn every step we should go over in this kind of meeting. I have been working in this field for a while and I have never seen a project retrospective taking place, so it was nice to learn about this and realize it could work if we put some energy on it.

Course 6. The Capstone Project. It was amazing. By far the best course of these six. Every week was pretty good, with a good amount of scenarios and practices. I loved the “RPG” style of the simulations, also, it was really nice going over each sprint, checking, working and changing the plans accordingly. You guys from Alberta rocked, as far as this capstone is concerned.

I wish you could put more of this kind of practice along the whole course. Sometimes the exercises of the courses 1 to 5 were too much theoretical, so it would be nice to see this kind of “capstone scenario applied to that”. Also, I think it would be nice to take a “Capstone Part 2” course where other problems could arise and we can face harder practices. I noticed as you guys from Alberta that the forum was a little bit quiet. I think one way to make it more active is to put the students in situations that they are not so sure about, so they will be “obligated” to discuss. I think this “advanced capstone” could do that. This is my suggestion, I hope you think about it!

Finally, it was a pleasure to be with you and learn everything I learned. I don’t regret that I decided to take the whole specialization. Also, i want to say thank you all my colleagues who spent time checking my answers and my mistakes. I learned a lot from you too, guys!

This course would be great if it weren't for "peer-reviews"!!! There are plenty of people out there who simply cannot be bothered to go through peer reviewing as they should and just give out random points!!! It's extremely disappointing spending all the time, effort and money on what could be a great course, to then have someone give you unfair reviews. And the worst of it all Coursera does absolutely NOTHING about it!!! The best you can get from them are some automated template answers. They can't even bother to edit student's name on these templates! Very disappointed!!!

With only two days class many people said they are Scrum Master or Product Owner, with this specialization you can be a good Software Product Management.

This a fantastic specialization, I lean a lot of thinks trough the 6 courses: process, requirements, planning, metrics and practical experience. Definitely a 5 star score is deserved, because the specialization have great material, video, exercises and off course fantastic teachers and participants, The more you know about a subject, the easy you can explain it, and with this specialization I acquired much more confidence in SPM.

My favourite part of the specialization is the capstone, because you can practice all the things learned, also I enjoyed the pair assignments, because while you do the reviews, you can also reinforcing the knowledge.

I think that for the next iteration, you can improve:

the decision tree, becase they do not have subtitles, and for not native English speakers this can be a little difficult. Also some times many days pass with your assignments in "grading in process" state.The metrics course need more practical assignments, because many people have problems with the burndown charts and the PDF was not enough, maybe a step by step video.

Again, thanks for this class, I really enjoyed and learned many thinks.

I really like the whole Specialization "Product Management". And particalarly the "Capstone" module. I think it is very useful for beginners as well as for experienced Product Managers and Business Analysts. It provides structured knowledge and gives a possibility to practice the skills. Also, it was very usefull for me to participate in peer-graded assignements - to see different solutions and approaches to the same problems by other students. Particularly, I had chance to improve my skils in creating requirements. Also, I learned how to provide feedback to sprint and release plan, build a burndown chart, take part in reprospective and many more things that I use on my "real life" projects. This course is excellent. I often recommend it to my friends who would like to learn or systematize their knowledge in Product Management and Business Analysis. Thank you, Coursera Team and University of Alberta Team! :)

I must say that I am completed astonished with this course. When I started it I wasnt so sure that an online course would enlight me with new knowledge because I consider myself a specialist in agile practices but it turns out that I've learned a lot. The teaching style of the course was amazing since the begining. The teachers have explained detailed facts that I was used to ignore and now I can see that they were useful and important to follow.

Great course. You are immersed in a pseudo-realistic experience working with a real software development project. Overall very well done. One of the more enjoyable capstone courses that I have taken.

So far this is the best and most useful course, I've taken with Coursera. I will recommend it to my colleagues and friends. Very interesting and highly motivating!

I couldn't decide what I liked best during this course, whether that was the content, the way it was presented or the interactivity of the material! Great job!

This one was amazing (but I would suggest to use 2 peers instead of 3...)

The course is a real-life simulation of the Product Management role on a small product. The stakeholder and team meetings simulations (decision trees) are excellent, and provide a good way to understand what would happen based on your decisions. Unfortunately, after the third week the course becomes a bit repetitive. The graded exercises become similar to each other, and very few unexpected or challenging situations happen.

In summary: excellent wrap-up for the SPM specialization, unfortunately lacks challenges in the second half of the course

Whilst I found the course useful, it is more about project management than product management. I did appreciate the refresher on project management, but I would have expected more on product management itself (as the course title is product management). Furthermore, there are many peer reviewed assignments, which should be a good thing, but there are so few people taking the course that after submitting your assignments, there are no or not enough assignments to be reviewed and not enough people to review your own assignments. If you are interested in agile project management, this course is for you.

First, I am very happy with the specialization. I like the format, I have learned a lot, and as a result I feel confident and look forward to applying this corpus of knowledge to my next job.

Thank you to the team who has put these all together. Thank you also to the peer students. I learned quite a bit by reading some of the contributions.

The assignments are practical even though some are too much (and very well) prepared (to make our life easier). They have helped me get immersed in the actual role of a project manager. As a matter of fact, I am using some of what we have learned on a personal project; I wrote user stories and could see how powerful and useful they were to discuss with the developers. Then, I kept the rhythm of sprints in my mind to pace the velocity of the project and the developers' works.

I am super satisfied I enrolled. There were aspects I already knew or had similar knowledge, coming from an engineering background. But I am a novice when it comes to the process of building a software. The whole set up, especially the simulations have helped me gain practical insights on 'the how' all these come together. The role plays are invaluable. The testimonies (interviews) of professionals of the industry are invaluable. It is like a concentrated internship, and even, not all internships teach you as much.

At the beginning I was skeptical with the peer grading exercise. The quality of feedback and discussions is variable but all in all, I like it when co-learners are as eager to learn too and take the course seriously. At the same time, this is the mere reflection of the real wold: people are in it for different reasons.

What could be done differently:

Availability of course teachers/moderators. I saw that many questions from students were left unanswered so that was a discouraging factor to post more questions on the discussion portal.

As is, the specialization is already very good. To take it to the next improvement step, maybe keep it current and show it is current, responding to or even anticipating industry needs.

Last, a minor detail that did not get in the way of leaning: the delivery (speech), the 'acting' in much of the courses and capstone is very natural, very credible. When that was the case, it was enjoyable and made the learning easier. Sometimes, the delivery was too fast, less easy to follow; but fortunately the transcription was there to support... It is a question of preference but offering both options (oral/video and written) is a big plus I believe, and I am glad you do because it makes the specialization accessible to many people in places around the world where internet access does not always allow watching video easily.

I really appreciated the effort you made on making this last step of the specialisation an immersive experience. It helped me to switch from a theoretical mode to an IRL mode where you can really understand the concepts when in a realistic context. I’m very excited to apply what have learn here in my job. It’s also great to have managed to cover almost all the items studied during the specialisation. Not only that really help to assimilate each concept but it also put each concept in perspective in a realistic time line. Thank you for taking extra effort to tune the difficulty level in order to make accessible for part time student. Nevertheless a good understanding the course content is mandatory and sometime several assignment submissions will help you to keep it in your mind. Even though a lot of effort have certainly been put in the exam quizzes, sometimes submissions get blocked and that's very frustrating. I can understand the technical constraints and when your assignment is freeze for a couple of days that's not a problem. But when it is blocked for more than 2 weeks that is really a pain and it's quite annoying not to be able to get in touch with a tutor or a technical contact. Thanks to your willingness to create some kind of community around this specialisation, it solved partially the lack of professor feedback! It was pleasant to recognised fellow learners across exams and feedback. I didn't have time to spend on forum nevertheless I felt as a part of a whole. You really manage to create a good balance between video, reading and exercises. I have never been bored by a sequence and it is not only due to the inner quality of each content but also to the mix of content type.

As founder of Seazen.fr, a click & go platform for the use of solar boats in the French Riviera, I wanted to learn about Software Management Processes and Agile.

I found in this Mook useful learnings. Not only theoretical but also practices.

I was impressed by the quality of the training content. There are 3 levels of MCQ during the videos, after the module and after the courses. Most of the questions are different, you never have the feeling of copy pastes. This is a lot of work I imagine.

The peer review is a great concept both for having a feedback from your peers and for learning from the other works.

The videos were high quality, even with interactive videos trees.

The only issue is on the peer reviews for the course 6. As I progressed there were less peers work available for my correction. As a consequence, it took more time to get the certification despite the fact I already finished the specialization.

Bravo to University of Alberta

Guillaume

How successful Inukshuk was for me: Very. Although I am working as PO on hybrid (but mostly waterfall projects), many Scrum practices were forgotten, and then brought back trough this learning experience. I feel very confident about lessons learned and I can imagine myself put those in practice very soon. Also, Inukshuk stones representation is very good way, as I am visual type so that helps to connect modules. Mentors for this socialization were really excellent in summarizing so many different practices and metrics and methodologies in such a small period of time. Small and frequent quizzes throughout video lessons are excellent to test yourself and to keep focus. Additional material provided for the course were also very informative and interesting read! Would like tests to be more difficult, at least in a way to have more variety of questions, so they are not the same every time you repeat the test :)

I've been waiting for the end of the Capstone project to review all courses of the specialization. I want to check how they interact and how would the concepts be applied. I couldn't be more satisfied! This specialization is very complete and focused on the main topic "Software Product Management". Although there are several additional resources for us to deeply analyse a concept that interest us, the overall course gives you the necessary view of all options available without becoming to generic. I really recommend this specialization and congratulate all the team involved on developing this course. Thanks!

This is an excellent course setting. The feeling of actually interacting with your Engineering teams and stake holder through first hand interactions via simulated decision tree events, digging into the requirements elicitation phase, excellent study material and video tutorials and opportunity to review and receive feedback from experienced peers was a great feeling. There's so much to SPM learn for a novice and learning it the right way first time is important; and this definitely was an amazing learning experience.

It is a wonderful course. I learned a lot of new concepts and their applications. I am sure that the knowledge gathered from these courses will be very helpful in my work field. I am confident that I will be able to cope up with the software developers around the world. I will recommend everyone in the software industry to follow this course. Thank you very much for the awesome instructors. The curriculum is fantastic.

Nicely done. You get the opportunities to see a small software product development go through its phases, from requirements elicitation, release planning, sprints, demos with client, backlog refinements and retrospectives. Nice visual way to see everything put together. The project is fairly easy., consists of multiple small assignments that are all peer graded.

I have learnt so much from this specialization course . I am much more confident now to pursue my career into Product Management. The Capstone project gave a unique real life experience which will definitely help me to implement the learnings. Thank you to the whole team and University of Alberta for this encapsulating experience.

A very interesting experience, you have the chance to put everything you learned in previous courses to use, to test your knowledge, and check what you need to reinforce. You can see how all those terms and ideas work together in a more "real-life" scenario. I really enjoyed it. Thanks to all the people who made it possible.

Generally speaking, this was probably the best course on software product management that I know of. The level of engagement required from the students was well worth the time spent. The topics learned were really important and it provided a good insight into the finer details of a potential software project.

Excellent specialization that has been masterfully planned by the University of Alberta, with educational and pedagogical resources of excellent quality !! The methodology they use, plus their content and the experience of their tutors, make it a great experience of knowledge and learning.

Amazing Course, and the best Capstone project I have done so far. The idea of going trough all phases of the project as a member of the team is very well executed. This course is exactly what is needed to tie all the knowledge from the previous courses together and give it structure.

I learned really useful things about software project/product management and I hope to use these concepts to get a full-time role. The capstone was really intensive and there were a lot of assignments, but you will get to go through what happens during sprints.