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 of 3-6 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. 

You’ll learn how modern product teams work: UX, product management, and development collaborate throughout the process to identify opportunities, decide what to build, test assumptions, design solutions, and deliver working software—rather than passing work from one role to the next.

You’ll practice emerging industry approaches—including the Product Operating Model and Dual-Track Agile—that connect product strategy, continuous discovery, design, and software delivery.

You’ll make product decisions with evidence: Your team will assess user, business, ethical, and technical risks; test assumptions through short experiments; gather user feedback; examine product analytics; and adapt based on what you learn.

You’ll explore how AI can support each role—using it to accelerate research, ideation, product strategy, design, coding, and testing while learning where human judgment, evidence, and collaboration still matter.

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

You’ll have room to learn. You are not expected to be an expert in all three roles. You can try unfamiliar work, ask questions, make mistakes, receive support, and apply what you learn in the next product cycle.

You’ll leave with portfolio-ready artifacts, a working product, and a product case study—plus concrete stories you can use to answer behavioral interview questions about collaborating across roles, testing assumptions, making tradeoffs, navigating conflict, responding to evidence, and keeping a team moving forward.

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 as a team, and justify the decisions behind a product you designed and developed to meet business, design, and technical goals.

This course is new, here is the syllabus. 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 Stephanie with ideas!