A year ago we worked with the community to scale the Introduction to Product Management course. It was delivered across the country in classrooms, but it could not meet demand. With a waiting list, rooms being hard to find, and product managers already busy with day jobs, we started to explore online learning.

This year we ran our first pilot of the Introduction to Product Management course for 119 people in government on FutureLearn. This was delivered over 3 weeks, and asked learners to spend 3 hours a week on the material. We worked very closely with the content design community, who had been through this process with their Introduction to Content Design course.

In this post, I’m going to talk about why and how we built the course as people worked remotely, what we learned from it, what surprised us and what we’re doing next.