Product Leadership

BOOK NOW | At a glance | What you’ll learn | Format | Cohorts | Why MTP?

Why choose Product Leadership?

Our Product Leadership course is designed to help product leaders create high performing product teams and a strong product culture across their organisation. If you’re looking to level up your product strategy skills and understand how to work with your senior leadership team to achieve exceptional product and business outcomes, then this course is your golden ticket.

We only run this course with two cohorts per year so spaces are very limited.

At a glance

• Duration: 1 month (part-time)
• Format: Remote, interactive training (online lectures interspersed with regular discussion, Q&As and group activities to encourage hands-on learning, using Zoom and other digital collaboration tools) + regular self-paced learning and out-of-class activities
• Cohort size: 10-25 participants with two trainers per live session
• Who is this for: Senior product people from a variety of career paths looking to elevate their product leadership skills
• Key skills learned: Key responsibilities of a product leader: building empowered product teams and working with the organisation to achieve better product outcomes
• Concepts covered: Being a good leader, building empowered teams, evaluation and coaching techniques, product culture, vision and product strategy, delegation and goal setting, dealing with conflict and dysfunction

What you’ll learn

Product Leadership is a part time remote training course taking place over 4 weeks. Using Zoom and other digital collaboration tools, you will participate in a series of topics that cover the theories and mindsets driving the core elements of the product leadership role.

Each remote session includes live online lectures interspersed with regular discussion, Q&As, and group activities to encourage hands-on learning. To keep you energised and engaged, expect warm-ups, icebreakers, and regular breaks.

• Week 1 focuses on you as a product leader: We’ll talk about what product leadership looks like and ways to think about creating focus in the role. We’ll look at various business contexts that may shape your roles and responsibilities and ways to create impact in these contexts. We’ll discuss tools and frameworks to help evaluate and improve your skills, as well as how to work with feedback. We’ll touch on bias and create a lightweight skills improvement plan.
• Week 2 focuses on your role within the team: We’ll cover the mindsets which are essential for high performing teams and what’s needed to empower product teams. We’ll talk about structures for teams and organisations, as well as ways to enable psychological safety. We’ll talk about managing product managers and coaching for exceptional performance. Using different tools, we’ll create actions to help support your product teams and product managers.
• Week 3 focuses on the role product leaders play within the wider organisation: We’ll look at ways to create a product vision and strategy, and your role in creating strategic alignment. We’ll talk about the ‘toolbox’ leaders can use to effectively manage and improve your process across the product development lifecycle. We’ll close the workshop by creating a prioritised plan that you can take back to the office tomorrow!
• Week 4 gives time for wider discussion on specific challenges: We know very well that product leaders come from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels as well as facing unique challenges depending on their specific company scenario. The final week will focus on your burning questions and allow for the trainers to customise the time to meet the needs of the class. This might involve covering a topic that is relevant to the group but not specifically covered in the content or digging much deeper into areas that the group wants to dig into.

Please note, in this course we won’t cover:

• Metrics and analytics
• Managing complex product portfolios
• Organisational transformation
• Governance, programme management, budgeting

That said – the final week is designed to address specific challenges within the group. If we find there is a group that would benefit from addressing some of the topics in more detail throughout the course we will dedicate time to these topics in that final session.

Due to the extended nature of the course, there will also be learning opportunities beyond the live sessions. These might include:

• Consuming additional learning materials at your own pace
• Taking part in async discussions with trainers and fellow course participants in our dedicated Q&A space
• Taking course activities and discussion points back to your day job to get hands-on experience which can then feed back to the group in the next live session (optional but recommended)

Who is this course for

Along with so many challenges product leaders face today, the road to product leadership is not linear or clearly defined within the industry. As a result, we have designed this course to help senior product people from a variety of career paths looking to elevate their product leadership skills.

At this stage in your career, you’ll be tasked with managing other product managers and product teams, you’ll have moved from the single contributor role and the day-to-day product management work, to a role that requires you to help other product people do their work while connecting it with the wider business goals.

Learning at a product leadership level is not about being told what to do, but about opening the discussion around the challenges of the role and learning from the other experiences in the room, both attendees and trainers. With that in mind, this course would also be helpful to those who have been in a product leadership role for a number of years or who have been in other leadership roles but have transitioned into product.

Stay in touch

Would you like to stay up-to-date with the latest from Mind the Product training? Join our mailing list and we’ll email you when we release exciting new workshops, send you monthly bulletins, and any other info we think might help you on your learning journey to product greatness!