Prompt to Product: Building MVPs with AI

In product management, your most humbling moment occurs when you take your product to real customers. That’s when theory meets reality, and your core assumptions are put to the test. Rarely is the product you scale the same as you first imagined. Product managers must ruthlessly define a minimum viable product (MVP), quickly take it to real customers, and rapidly iterate. Today, with the growing number of AI enabled “no-code” tools, it has never been easier to quickly develop a working prototype without having any computer science or coding skills. Understanding how to quickly prototype using the most current tools available is becoming a must have skill for aspiring entrepreneurs and product managers that are building internet enabled products & services. This course gives students hands-on experience using AI to develop working prototypes for real customers. Students will be assigned to teams of ~ 4 students and be given a problem faced by the CBS community. Although the final problem will vary from section to section, an example problem statement that the students may focus on is “As a CBS MBA student, how can I help MBA students find valuable employment opportunities that require MBAs beyond those industries that commonly invest in on-campus recruiting.” During the course, students will design, build, and launch an MVP and use customer feedback to refine and improve their product. Leveraging no-code AI-powered tools, students will learn how to transform product requirements into working software, and, importantly, iterating on customer feedback. The course teaches emerging skills in prompt engineering and AI-assisted development—capabilities that are quickly becoming essential in the modern product manager’s toolkit. The course culminates in the development of a working prototype and a formal recommendation to CBS leaders on whether resources should be invested to scale the product. Although this course requires the use of generative AI ‘vibe-coding’ tools, students are permitted to use any tool that they prefer (and will not be required to use a specific tool, as was the case in the first iteration of the course). This means that the course will NOT go deep in learning the nuances of any specific tool, but rather will focus on best practices on HOW to use the tools to achieve the desired outcome - namely building a solution that will be used by customers. Do not take this course unless you are comfortable with some degree of self-learning with your classmates. PREREQUISITE OR CO-REQUISITE: The pre-requisite (preferred) or co-requisite (accepted) for this course is the 3 credit Product Management course (MRKT B8636). The pace of the class will be swift, and we will refer to concepts learned in that course to build an MVP in 6 weeks. If you do NOT meet the pre-requisite or co-requisite, you may request a waiver by completing this waiver request PRIOR to registering for the class: https://columbia.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dd4G9IwmJdsYWl8. The waiver is intended for students with existing Product Management experience, such as those who have held a role as a product manager in a technology company, worked in a PM adjacent role and are familiar with PM frameworks, or have founded a technology start-up.