When I started teaching product management at the university level, I made every mistake in the book. I tried to cram frameworks, methodologies, and case studies into a semester. My students could recite the Jobs-to-be-Done framework perfectly — but could not write a user story to save their lives.
That experience fundamentally changed how I think about education, and it directly influenced how we built nerds.family.
Theory vs. Practice
The gap between academic product management and real-world product management is enormous. In academia, you analyze successful products retrospectively. In practice, you make decisions with incomplete information, tight deadlines, and stakeholders who disagree with each other.
What Actually Works
Project-based learning. Give students a real problem, a real deadline, and real constraints. Let them fail. Let them argue about prioritization. Let them present to someone who will give them honest feedback. That is where learning happens — in the gap between what you planned and what actually happened.