Certified Product Manager Foundation

Who this is for

• You have just taken over a product

  You came from support, operations, business analysis or sales. You know how to execute, and you pay the price of agreeing in meetings to terms each person there understands differently.

• You work alongside the product

  Engineering, design, marketing, sales or support. You take part in decisions without answering for them, and you need to know what the product manager decides, what they do not, and why.

• You are heading for the CPM-E

  Enterprise asks for decisions, and decisions rest on a base. Foundation is the step that closes the gaps in the fundamentals before you face an exam of judgement.

What you take with you

• A permanent verification code

  Anyone confirms your credential at pmcert.org/verify, without having to ask you for anything.

• Approval that does not expire

  A credential you earned does not lapse, asks for no annual renewal and charges no subscription.

• LinkedIn and a public profile

  Add it to your licenses and certifications section, or share the link to your profile.

• A certificate with your score by domain

  In PDF, showing how you performed in each area assessed.

What you need to know

Seven domains, drawn at random from a bank written for this exam. Read each one and see where you stand.

• The product manager role

  What the role is and what it is not: it answers for the product outcome without having a team reporting to it, and its object differs from the project manager one. Where ideas come from, and why organising them is the work.

• Customer, user and persona

  Who the people around the product are and what each representation of them is for. Whoever pays is not always whoever uses, and treating both as the same person builds a product that pleases at purchase and frustrates in use.

• Market, competition and segmentation

  Where the product stands and against whom: direct, indirect, substitute and potential competitors from a described case. Top-down and bottom-up estimates, and why one accumulates more error than the other.

• Discovery and validation

  How the problem is learned before building: the four stages of the customer development model, the question that reveals and the one that leads, and why qualitative and quantitative validation answer different questions.

• From idea to solution

  The instruments that turn an idea into something verifiable, and the purpose of each: minimum viable product, low and high fidelity prototypes, alpha test, beta test and A/B test. Not every minimum viable product involves building the product.

• Agile work and delivery

  How the work happens after the decision: the marks of an iterative and incremental approach, the three elements of a user story, and the principles of lean experimentation.

• Product life cycle and metrics

  What changes over the life of a product: the four stages, the market signals that identify each one, and why the arrival of many competitors marks maturity rather than growth.