SI 526:  UX + PM + Dev Collaboration Lab

This new Fall 2026 lab gives you hands-on practice collaborating across UX, product management, and development—whether you’re aiming to be an interdisciplinary “unicorn,” hope to wear multiple hats at a startup, or are still deciding which UMSI pathway to complete.

 You’ll work in a stable team (typically three students) and rotate roles across product cycles so every student experiences UX, PM, and Dev responsibilities and perspectives by the end of the semester.

Across the term, your team builds a web app that evolves through multiple timeboxed discovery-to-delivery cycles. 

Class sessions run like an agile studio: short instruction, hands-on team work time, and structured ceremonies (planning, reviews, retrospectives). 

While you will create artifacts that you can include in a portfolio— the emphasis is on learning how to collaborate: aligning around a product direction, making tradeoffs, navigating conflict, keeping momentum, and ensuring each teammate feels effective and valued.

This course is new, and the syllabus you see now is a good initial draft. I’ll be refining the Canvas site this summer and I’m genuinely open to student input on what would make the class most valuable. Feel free to email me with ideas! 

By the end of the semester, you’ll be able to produce a portfolio-ready case study and, more importantly, the kinds of concrete stories behavioral interviews ask for—how you collaborate across roles, handle conflict, align a team, and justify the decisions behind a product you designed and developed to meet business, design, and development goals.