Part 1: Communication, the lifecycle and the PRD

Module 6 · Sat 15 Aug

Communication is the PM's leadership tool - it's how you influence without authority. It's more than words: clarity, repetition, empathy, tone and non-verbal signals all count.

Framework: audience → objective → approach. Core team, dependency teams, executives and the outer circle each need a different message, tone, channel and cadence.

• Communication changes across the lifecycle: ideation → MVP → phased rollout → GTM → general availability → experimentation.
• A PRD is the team's product agreement: summary, problem, personas, metrics, functional and non-functional requirements, risks, rollout, timelines. Class examples: PM Voice Coach, Lyft lost-and-found, Shopify + QuickBooks connector.
• PRD = product and business. TRD = technical depth. Knowledge base = reusable context. Research comes first; the PRD is its written output. LLMs can draft PRDs if you steer them.

Class case - Angel One: brokerage fees are capped by regulation, so growth needs more users and more trading. Live mock-trading sessions on YouTube grew ~10x organically, so the team brought live streams into the app, with moderated live chat, so users could learn and trade in one flow.