FAQ

We do not offer refunds for our program as upon enrollment, you will receive immediate access to the full video-on-demand course program. We recommend thoroughly reviewing the course outline below to ensure the course content is a good fit for your learning goals before making the purchase.

Week 1: Distributed Systems Theory. When designing a large backend system, software engineer managers need to put some forethought into the design to ensure future scalability and minimal tech debt. In this module, you’ll learn the fundamentals of distributed systems, how to maintain shared states and concurrently operate, how failovers can be handled gracefully without affecting the entire product’s uptime, and how to evaluate the tradeoffs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.
Week 2: Designing Distributed Systems. When building global products, you need to look out for your users and ensure that your product continues to work as expected, even as various obstacles are thrown at it. In this module, you’ll learn how to design products to be reliable in the face of hardware or software faults, design backend services intentionally to avoid single points of failure, maintain geographic data replicas to minimize downtime when it happens, and meet product availability SLAs like “three nines” uptime.
Week 3: Optimize Tech Products for Hyperscale. As an engineering leader, you’ll be implementing growth hacks to scale your product. To accommodate a large, unexpected spike in demand, your product needs to be designed for hyperscale. In this module, you’ll learn how to use load balancers to scale your backend horizontally, enable caching to make vastly better use of the resources you already have, build CDNs to serve large amounts of static media, optimize storage utilization by using data deduplication, and use prefetching techniques like typeahead to improve the user experience.
Week 4: Product Strategy. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to designing good products. As the tech lead, it’s up to you to define the product strategy. In this module, you’ll learn the various frameworks for establishing defensible advantages, balancing 0-to-1 innovation and 1-to-N improvements, finding untapped supply and unfulfilled demand, building positive brand equity, aligning user incentives with company goals, and managing product portfolios using frameworks such as the BCG matrix.
Week 5: Business Strategy. When launching a product, one of the most essential questions is: how are you going to make money? To figure this out, you’ll have to advocate to choose the best strategy for the job. In this module, you’ll learn: how to use cost leadership, product differentiation, and blue-ocean strategies to build a profitable businesses; how to use the hunting model model to build a nine-figure business; different market entry strategies to ensure diversification; and how to create sustainable moats to prevent competitors from invading your market.
Week 6: Metrics and Experimentation. Metrics are a tech lead’s lifeblood. It’s easy to just root for your graphs to go “up and to the right,” but the proper use of metrics is much more nuanced. In this module, you’ll learn frameworks for breaking down the user lifecycle; how to translate company level metrics into product metrics; tricks to spot vanity metrics and instead identify north star correlated proxy metrics; metrics models for various business models including: SaaS, freemium, 2-sided marketplaces, user-generated content, & ecommerce; analyzing data distributions & significance testing; and picking samples to configure statistically valid A/B tests.
Week 7: Building Sticky Products. If you want to get people to use your product, you need to deeply understand their needs and be the voice of the user. In this module, you’ll learn frameworks for understanding intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, strategies to use self-determination theory to get users’ in a flow state, how to use variable rewards and randomness to keep users’ entertained, the seven pieces of gamification that make a product feel deeply satisfying to use, and how to minimize the 3 main types of switching costs: upfront costs, lack of portability, and social pressure.
Week 8: Growth & Marketing. Once you have product-market fit, it’s all systems go. In this module, you will learn how to use Cialdini’s six principles of influence to persuade users to engage with your growth campaigns, when to use direct response advertising vs. brand advertising, how to use CPM, CPC, and CPR to measure the effectiveness of your ad campaigns, how to use retargeting and remarketing pixels to patch leaky purchase funnels, and how to build products with a high viral coefficient and short viral cycle time to create viral loops that will lead to the hockey-stick growth curve you seek.

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