Methodological guidelines for practical classes on the course "Creating and Developing IT-Products"

Abstract

The IT sector plays an important role in Ukraine’s economy, as it generates 4.5 % of the country’s GDP and accounts for 12 % of exports. Simplistically, the Ukrainian IT industry consists of two parts: 1) service companies that provide custom software development services; 2) product companies that develop software to create their own products and subsequently bring them to market. The importance of product companies lies in the fact that, unlike outsourcing companies, which primarily create jobs for technical specialists, product companies require significantly more non-technical personnel for product launches, sales, and other business functions. Therefore, if an outsourcing company creates 0.16 non-technical jobs per technical employee within its company, a product company creates eight times more. The discipline «Creating and developing IT products» studies the theoretical and practical foundations of creating and developing IT products, such as stages of creation and development of IT products, specialists of the product team of an IT startup, product managers and their main functions during product development, minimum viable product, ways to validate ideas, methods for researching and influencing the target audience of the product, and basic terminology of the product IT sphere. The study of this discipline is directly based on such disciplines as: «Fundamentals of management», «Fundamentals of entrepreneurship», «Innovative entrepreneurship and startup project management», «Marketing», «Finance, money, and credit». In these methodological guidelines, the main practical tasks that are used in the course «Creating and developing IT products» are considered. Each section is devoted to a separate topic of the course. All sections are structured in the same way: first, the necessary theoretical information is presented, at the end of each section, homework is given. These methodological guidelines do not replace textbooks on the creating and developing IT products. For a more detailed study of the material special educational publications are recommended.