Most PM courses are just video lectures on frameworks you'll forget in a week. You watch, you nod, you never actually do the work a PM does day-to-day.

Here's the thing: PM skill is built by shipping artifacts under real constraints, not by memorizing acronyms.

A few things that actually move the needle if you're trying to break into or level up in product:

1. Do a teardown of a product you use daily. Write down what job it's doing for the user, where the funnel leaks, and one metric you'd move first. This is basically a take-home interview exercise — practice it for real.

1. Run 3 real user interviews this month. Not surveys. Live conversations. You'll learn more from 3 unscripted interviews than from 10 hours of "how to do research" videos.

1. Write one real PRD, even for a fake feature. Force yourself to define the problem, the non-goals, and the success metric before a single line of "solution." Most PRDs fail because people skip straight to the design.

1. Track retention, not just signups. Any PM can point to a vanity growth chart. The ones who get promoted are the ones who can explain why users churn and what they shipped to fix it.

We built our cohort (Product Sprint Cohort) around exactly this — one real deliverable a week (teardown → research plan → PRD/roadmap → metrics dashboard), with feedback from people who've actually shipped. No lecture marathons.

If you're grinding PM interview prep or trying to level up in your current role, start with #1 today. It costs nothing and it's the single best rep you can do this week.