How to Launch a Product Management Student Club
One of the best times to start learning about product management is as a student, whether you’re a high school student, a college student, or you’re tackling a graduate degree. And, one of the best ways to learn about product management is to create a product management student organization on your campus!
To help you create a product management campus club, I’ve pulled together this in-depth step-by-step guide, based on my own experiences as a club founder.
But before we begin, let’s first talk about what kinds of benefits you’ll reap by creating a product management student club.
Why should I make a student PM club on campus?
Creating a club is one of the most rewarding things you can do as a student, both personally and professionally.
One of the great things about creating a student interest group is that you get to meet other interesting people who are eager to learn about the same things that you’re interested in. Learning is more fun when you can learn with others! By founding a student club that’s focused on product management, you’ll make lifelong friends and you’ll build lasting connections.
Another reason why you should create a product management student club is that you’ll have the unique opportunity to help others grow. As a founder, you’re in charge of leveling up your officers and teammates, and you’re in charge of your club members’ professional development trajectory. People will reach back out to you 5 years later, thanking you for helping them succeed in their product management careers.
And of course, leading a product management student organization will make your resume stand out in a fiercely competitive market. Very few product management candidates can say that they’ve led their own PM student organization before.
By founding a PM club, you’ll demonstrate key skills like setting a vision, determining a strategy, executing on complex initiatives, aligning various stakeholders, iterating on feedback, and measuring outcomes. These skills will take you far in your own career towards product management.
Furthermore, leading a product club as a student is a great way to bolster your PM portfolio, regardless of whether you’ve had any PM internships.
As part of your PM portfolio, you can craft a compelling writeup about all of the following, based solely on your PM club leadership experience:
How you selected a market segment
How you discovered and prioritized user pains
How you hypothesized solutions
How you validated your hypotheses
How you shipped an initial version, measured results, and gathered feedback
How you’re prioritizing a roadmap of future improvements
These skills apply whether your club is focused on delivering a curriculum, or running a quarterly hackathon, or bringing in speakers to events, or connecting students with internships, or kicking off various product consulting projects with local companies.
On top of that, founding a PM club is a fantastic way to network with actual PM professionals. You’ll have an excuse to reach out to them for various reasons, whether it’s to ask them to speak for you, to serve as judges for events, to run resume review sessions, to have coffee chats with members, or any other set of student club related activities.
Product managers love giving back to the community, and they love helping students. By founding a student organization with a focus on product, you’ll find new mentors and champions for your career and for the careers of your members!
Take it from me - I founded a student club in the past. I’ve experienced all of these phenomena firsthand, and I highly recommend founding and leading a student organization. The memories are truly unforgettable!
How do I create a compelling PM student organization?
So, let’s say you’re excited about creating your own product-focused student organization. What’s the best way to get started?
Before we get into that, I want to clear up a couple of misconceptions.
First, you don’t need to have everything ready by some specific deadline, where if you miss the deadline your club will automatically fall apart.
Instead, think of it more like a rolling process. You’re going to ship in small increments and you’ll iterate over time, so don’t stress too much about having a perfect club right out of the gate.
Second, while it’s generally helpful to have some officers or teammates to help you run the club, it’s completely possible for you to launch a club on your own, as long as you have people who are interested in what your club has to offer.
It’s true that you may not be able to register immediately as an officially recognized student organization on campus, since many student bodies require you to have a minimum number of officers. But, even then, you can launch an unregistered club and still do great things.
Now that we’ve gotten those two myths out of the way, let’s dig into what it takes to make a student product club successful.
Step one: define the target audience for your PM club
The most critical thing is to first define “who is the target audience?”
In product management, we always have to define our target audience first, because otherwise we won’t know which pain points to solve. Different audiences have different pain points, so it’s crucial for product managers to pick the right audience.
Similarly, you have to clearly define your target audience. Your target audience shouldn’t just be “students” or “people interested in product”, it should be a little bit more refined than that.
As an example, what kinds of time commitment are you focusing on? Are you looking for members to dedicate 10 hours a week to the club, or are you looking to keep it casual? Are you looking for members from specific majors or groups, or are you looking to reach a broader audience?
You need to make this distinction because that then defines “what kinds of pains” you’re going to tackle! As an example, consider a computer engineering major who has already completed a PM internship. Their needs are going to be more focused on full-time associate product manager roles, and therefore they’ll want you to conduct lots of mock interviews and to host lots of coffee chats with recruiters.
But, a political science major who’s just interested in understanding software products may not need or want such an intense focus. They may want some more introductory material, such as guest speakers who discuss “how do products get built”, or a casual book club to read more about technology in general.
So, be thoughtful about picking your target audience. And don’t worry - while we’re going to focus on our target audience, we’re not going to exclude other people from joining!
When you focus on making your club valuable for a specific set of students, you’ll find that other kinds of students who don’t fit that definition will also find your club valuable.
Paradoxically, by focusing on a specific kind of student, you’ll attract other kinds of students much more quickly than if you tried to go after “everyone on campus” as your target.
Step two: identify and prioritize your target audience’s pains
Now that we know which students we want to target, we need to determine what kinds of pains they’re facing.
Are they looking for an introduction to product management, or are they looking for intense projects with off-campus companies? Are they looking for interview practice, or are they looking for a community where they can bond with other product aspirants?
The best way to identify people’s pains is to talk to them! So, find some students who fit your target audience, and ask them what sorts of things they’re struggling with when it comes to product management.
Essentially, you’re conducting a user interview to determine what kinds of struggles people face, why those struggles matter, and how they make decisions about joining one club over another.
Of course, any given student segment will have more than one pain. So, once you’ve completed some user interviews, you need to prioritize the pains.
If you could only solve one single pain across all of your users, which one would that be? Why did you pick that one?
By prioritizing pains, you’re setting yourself up for success, because now you’re tackling the pain that matters most.
Step three: propose a solution
Once you’ve selected a pain, you can now propose a solution to that pain.
Say, for example, that we’re targeting business students who want to break into tech, but they’re concerned that they’re lacking technical knowledge.
Well, that pain might be resolved by having product management speakers discuss how they got technical knowledge.
Or, say that you have sociology majors who are eager to turn their ideas into real life through software. Maybe what they need is a hackathon, where you pair them with a volunteer software engineer for 24 hours to ship an app.
In other words, what we’re doing is that we’re crafting a value proposition. We’re creating a flagship offering for our student organization, and that offering is focused on a specific student segment for a specific pain.
Here are some ideas for value propositions:
A twelve-week curriculum where you assign reading materials and discuss live in small groups
Monthly speaker events where alumni product managers come by to share their experiences
A quarterly 72-hour hackathon to bring ideas to life
A six-week pitch competition where students pitch their product ideas to judges
Biweekly workshops where students critique each other’s resumes, cover letters, and interview responses
Say that you’ve decided on weekly meetings to level up club members. You can use Product Teacher’s PM Masterclass as the basis for each week’s curriculum, check it out below:
No matter which value proposition you decide on, be sure to focus on just the one key offering! Remember that you can always add more offerings later as your club grows.
If you do too much at once at the start, your quality will be subpar, and students will not want to join your product club as members.
Step four: create a plan for your PM student club
Once you’ve picked the one key offering for your club, you’ll want to pull together a week-by-week plan for the club.
By breaking it down into a weekly view, you’ll find that the work to launch a club is pretty manageable!
For example, let’s say that your club’s value proposition is going to be a quarterly hackathon.
If you’re doing the hackathon in week 10, then you might want to have your venue finalized by week 6, and you might want to have your judges finalized by week 8.
If that’s the case, you’ll want to work backwards. You probably want to have food and water at the hackathon, so you probably need to get logistics locked in by week 7, and you probably want hackathon groups to register by week 9.
Therefore, in week 1, you should come up with the theme for the hackathon. In week 2, you want to start marketing to students. In week 3, you need to start looking for venues. In week 4, you need to start looking for sponsors.
Once you have a plan, you’re no longer shooting in the dark, and you have a much clearer sense of how much work is ahead. After all, failing to plan means planning to fail, so make sure you pull together a plan!
Now you’ve got 10 weeks of work mapped out, and you can run forward with confidence on making sure that you execute on your value proposition.
Summary
Together, we’ve identified our target audience, prioritized the most impactful pain to focus on, proposed a solution, and crafted a plan to deliver that solution.
By doing so, you can focus on bringing your idea to life! And again - it’s not the end of the world if you miss school deadlines when it comes to registering your club or setting up events.
Just make sure that you know the deadline for the next cycle, and get ready for that one. Think of it like a rolling deadline!
And, here’s the cherry on top. By launching a product management student club, you’ve also practiced core product management skills.
Product management works exactly the same way: first you pick an audience, then you discover pain, then you prioritize pain, then you hypothesize a solution. Afterwards, you plan out how to build the solution, you then ship the solution, and you improve the solution based on its initial performance.
We’re so excited to see you successfully launch a student organization!
As a side note: Product Teacher’s mission is to democratize product management knowledge, and we’re always happy to find ways to collaborate with student organizations.
Whether you’re running a pitch competition, looking for speaker events, or have another idea in mind, don’t hesitate to send us a note at admin [at] productteacher [dot] com, we’d love to hear from you!
