Workshop attendee
Tech Women Summit, Chișinău, October 2026
Everyone in the room felt safe and encouraged to ask any type of question. It was funny, it was inspiring, it was something new, interactive and definitely useful.
Cohort-based course
How Your Product Works: Technical Foundations for Product Managers
You know what your product does, but not yet how it works. In this hands-on course you spend three weeks in a real software product. You’ll build the technical judgement to speak with confidence, ask better questions, and spot risk early.
What you’ll be able to do
Trace a problem through your product, from the click to the database
Size a feature or an integration before it's promised
Answer your own data questions
Decide between technical debt and a new feature on evidence
- Format
- Cohort-based, 3 weeks
- Starts
- Tuesday 19 January 2027
- Effort
- 2.5 to 4.5 hours a week
- Live office hours
- Tuesdays, 5pm to 6pm GMT
One-time payment. VAT included.
Enrol
14-day refund from the cohort start, no questions asked
The free first mission runs as a live workshop in Lisbon on Friday 13 November 2026, 19:00, part of Portugal Tech Week. Come to the workshop
Built by Kinga, a lead product manager, and Tamas, a principal software engineer, previously at
Feedback from our workshops
Workshop participant
Wey Wey Web, Málaga, November 2025
The course offers in-depth content, clear explanations, and very practical guidance, and the instructors were very open to answering questions.
The course
For three weeks you’re the product manager at a company that sells a CRM. You run a real open-source CRM in a development environment, and each week a colleague brings you a problem. You solve it in the product, then apply the learnings on your own product at work. A free first mission, then two missions a week.
Before the course
Free, live at a workshop or in your own time
Mission 1
How a web application works: from a click to the database
Explain where a failed action broke, from the click to the database.
Run a real product in a development environment, and follow a failed save from the click to the database. Then give your bug report to an AI agent and test its fix.
Week 1
How your product works
Mission 2
How a web application works: the whole system
Name every service your product runs and every third party it sends data to.
Map the backend services, such as the background worker and the queue, and list every third-party service your customers’ data is sent to. Answer a prospect’s security questionnaire from a system map you drew yourself.
Mission 3
APIs, webhooks and integrations
Judge how much work an integration is and where it could fail, before your team commits to it.
Send API requests, break them on purpose and receive a webhook. Write a feasibility brief that says how much work an integration sales wants to promise would take, and where it could fail.
Week 2
From bug report to production
Mission 4
Bug triage: reproduce a bug and understand local storage and cookies
Write bug reports engineering can act on straight away, with the cause narrowed down.
Reproduce a bug only one customer sees by logging in as that user, compare the server’s response with what’s on the screen, and understand what the browser keeps in local storage and cookies, and when it goes wrong.
Mission 5
Software deployment: code review, CI checks and release
Tell a customer when a fix will reach them, and what could delay it.
Follow the fix you reported through code review and the CI checks and deploy it to a staging environment. Then ship and roll back a change of your own, and write the stakeholder update: where the fix is, when customers get it and what could delay it.
Week 3
The evidence, then the decision
Mission 6
SQL and product analytics for product managers
Answer a data question with your own query instead of waiting for an analyst.
Check that the events behind a number in the board deck fire, and answer with your own SQL query, so you don’t wait for someone else to answer a data question.
Mission 7
Technical debt or the new feature: make the decision, with an AI agent gathering the evidence
Decide between paying down technical debt and a new feature with evidence, and defend it in planning.
Use an AI agent to gather what you made in the earlier missions and check what it gives you. Write the decision brief, and collect your certificate.
When you finish
Course certificate
Finish the course and add your certificate to your LinkedIn profile.
Certificate of completionCohort-based course
How Your Product Works: Technical Foundations for Product Managers
7 missions completed · Little Parrot by productkind
Add to LinkedIn Profile
Details may change as we develop the course, you can influence it, just email us at hello@littleparrot.app.
What it costs
The course costs €800 from the second cohort. The founding cohort pays less, because you join before anyone has finished it and we’ll ask you for feedback. The earlier you enrol, the less you pay.
Early bird · enrol by Monday 14 December 2026
€490€800€310 off
VAT included
Enrol14-day refund from the cohort start, no questions asked
Includes
- Six hands-on missions over three weeks
- Four live office hours with Kinga and Tamas, recorded with transcripts
- The free first mission as pre-work
- Lifetime access to the missions and toolkit items
- Access to the course Discord channel for questions and discussion
- A certificate when you finish
- From 15 December, until enrolment closes on Friday 15 January 2027
- €590
- From the second cohort
- €800
Paying through your company? Email hello@littleparrot.app and we’ll send an invoice.
How the course works
Self-paced missions
Two missions a week, worked through whenever you have time, in a real product running in your development environment. You can ask questions in the Discord cummunity during the week.
Live office hours
A group of other product managers on the same missions, and an hour of live office hours every Tuesday from 5pm to 6pm GMT to ask questions and discuss the week.
Applied to your work
After every mission there’s a short task on your own product, so you can apply what you’ve learned. Count on 2.5 hours a week for the essentials, 4.5 with completing all the missions.
Who teaches it
We design and build every mission ourselves and run the live office hours.
Kinga Magyar
Lead product manager
Kinga moved from luxury fashion into tech, joining Citrix as an account manager, then went to a coding bootcamp to understand how software works and moved into product management. She led teams on ecommerce, sales platforms and enterprise automation, most recently as a lead product manager, and has lived in six countries.
She organises the ProductTank meetups in Lisbon and is a certified executive coach. The course starts where she started: already working in tech, wanting to understand how software works.
Spoken at
Productized 2025Wey Wey Web 2025NDC Porto 2025Copenhagen Developers Festival 2025One Tech World 2025Geek Girls Portugal 2024
Tamas Kokeny
Principal software engineer
Tamas spent over 15 years as a software engineer and engineering leader, with technical roles at Datadog, Cazoo and Cloudera, and is a serial entrepreneur with a successful exit behind him.
He co-founded Green Fox Academy, a coding bootcamp that graduated over 3,000 people into tech careers, and ran it as Head of Education. He has mentored women and girls in software development for more than a decade.
Spoken at
Tech Women Summit 2026Wey Wey Web 2025NDC Porto 2025Copenhagen Developers Festival 2025
Feedback from our workshops
Workshop participant
NDC Porto, October 2025
Well prepared and planned and most importantly you gave opportunity to try by practicing. So far best workshop at the conference.
Workshop participant
Wey Wey Web, Málaga, November 2025
It was really inspiring and you are warm and generous tutors.
Is this course for you?
In our research with product managers, the same sentence kept coming up: “sometimes it does feel like I’m the least knowledgeable person in the room.” If that sounds familiar, here’s what changes: three weeks later you know how your product works under the surface, and you can follow a technical discussion and take part in it.
Yes, if
- You manage a software product with no engineering background.
- You can describe what your product does, but not how it works.
- You want to represent the business and the customer in technical discussions, and follow the trade-offs the team is making.
- You want to answer with confidence when a stakeholder calls something a quick feature, because you can see the work behind it.
Not really, if
- You want to move into an engineering role. This course won’t teach you to write code.
- You already read your team’s code and follow architecture discussions.
- You’re preparing for a technical product manager interview. This one is about the job you already have.
Frequently asked questions
Do product managers need to be technical?
Not in the sense of writing code. In our discussions with product managers, they kept coming back to the same outcomes: explaining how their own product works, asking better questions and spotting complexity early. They also said again and again that getting good at a programming language was not the shortest route there.
How technical should a product manager be?
Technical enough to follow an explanation, restate it accurately, ask what breaks and judge whether a proposed change is riskier than it sounds. You don’t need to design the architecture or choose the implementation. You do need to follow the trade-offs well enough to speak for the business and the customer while the team decides.
What technical skills do product managers need?
There’s no single list, but seven skills came up again and again in our research. Each one is a mission in the course above.
Will I learn to code?
You’ll read some code, and in the first mission you’ll give your bug report to an AI agent and test the fix it makes in your development environment. You won’t be learning a programming language, and nothing you change in the development environment reaches real users. Prototyping an idea with AI is one of the options for the task you try on your own product at work in the last week.
Do I have to be online at set times?
Only for the live sessions, and those are recorded, in case you can't make it. The missions are self-paced, so you work through them whenever you have time during the three weeks. The four live sessions are an hour of office hours each, on Tuesdays from 5pm to 6pm GMT: a kickoff, one in each of the next two weeks, and a closing session on 9 February. Bring your questions, or send them in advance, and every recording has chapters and a transcript.
How much does it cost?
€490 if you enrol by 14 December 2026, €590 until enrolment closes on 15 January 2027, and €800 from the second cohort, VAT included. You can ask for a full refund up to 14 days after the cohort starts, for any reason. The price section above has the details and how to pay through your company.
How long does it take?
Three weeks, plus the free first mission, which takes about two hours at a workshop or in your own time. Each week has two missions. Count on about two and a half hours a week if you do one mission per week and the task on your own product, or about four and a half if you do both missions. Some parts you can complete on the go from your phone. But you’ll also need to work on a laptop, because finish each mission with something you practised on a real product, rather than a set of notes.
Can my employer pay for it?
Yes. We invoice your company. Next to every Enrol button there’s an “Ask your employer to pay” link that opens a pre-written email for your manager with what you’ll learn, how much time it takes, what it costs and when the price goes up.
Join the January cohort
The cohort starts on Tuesday 19 January 2027, and the free first mission opens before then.
Enrol