Workshop Overview
Product Management Foundations is an overview course intended for individuals who hold the title of Product Manager, or have some working knowledge of the product development process. The intention of this course is to help product managers develop a broader understanding of their role. It seeks to answer the questions:

• What are the core functions and primary responsibilities of a product manager?
• What does good product management look like?
• How do product managers know if they are adding value?

As such, the course is tightly focused on running an effective core team that is centred around inquiry-driven development process. You will improve your understanding of customer problems and perspectives, solution testing, delivery mechanisms, and team process.

What we’ll cover on the day
Product Management Foundations is a full-day workshop that is comprised of nine modules. Each module includes a lecture component on theory and practice, interspersed with up to three hands-on activities. This ensures that you are afforded an opportunity to apply and work with concepts in a setting that will answer questions and facilitate critical thinking. The following modules will be covered:

• Learning mindsets: How inquiry breaks down at different points through the product development lifecycle
• Goals alignment: How to create effective goals and align the team and organization around them
• Design thinking: What design thinking is and how product managers can break down what is needed for product understanding
• Persona development: How to effectively create personas and use them in product processes
• Lean testing: Unpacking types of lean tests and how to implement them for maximum learning
• Interview guides: Writing interview guides that do not bias or lead the subject
• Wireframes and prototypes: Using visuals at different fidelities to facilitate the right conversation
• User stories: Creating an effective communication mechanism for efficient and transparent delivery
• Core team communication: How to think about “culture as product” and foster a team that that is geared towards continuous improvement

Things to reflect on before the workshop 
Before your training workshop, we ask that you take some time to consider the following questions. The more time you take to consider your current situation, and the issues and challenges you face, the more you’ll gain from your training:

• How was your role described to you when you first got started?
• What have you learned about product management since taking the job?
• How well do you feel you understand your customers?
• Do you think you have a healthy team culture?

Key Takeaways
At the end of the workshop, you will be confident in your understanding of the role of a product manager, including a firm grasp of the concept of design thinking and how it is important. You’ll have a clear understanding of where the customer sits in the product practice, how to define and prioritise your customer personas, and how not to bias your customer research. You’ll go back to the office feeling confident in your ability to facilitate a goals conversation, and how to structure hypothesis for lean tests.

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Designing Great Products with Agile Teams

This class helps cross-functional agile teams work together more effectively. The class is based on the idea that product development is largely the process of discovering the right thing to build. Too often though, teams focus on delivery and treat discovery as someone else’s problem. Lean UX is the process of discovering the right thing to build and equally important, discovering that together as a team.

The class introduces key concepts and helps teams take the first steps towards change. Teams learn how to frame a business problem, understand user needs, and design and test a solution that delivers business value. Through the process, participants learn proven approaches to integrating UX into an agile process, and discuss ways to surmount common obstacles that arise in cross-disciplinary agile environments. It gives teammates of all experience levels and
disciplines an opportunity to come together around real practical solutions.

This class is intended for everyone who works on a product team—engineers, product managers, QA people, scrum masters and more. It distils the latest insights on the topic into a fun, high-energy learning experience that creates results.

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Ideal Agile development teams build small valuable chunks of functionality. But, that’s easier said than done. Not all products or features are small and breaking them down into small buildable parts is challenging. And, even when you do, how do the people building those small parts not lose sight of the big picture?

Story mapping is a simple practice for telling the story of a whole product or feature starting by telling the stories of the users who’ll use it. In this fast-paced workshop you’ll learn the concepts of story mapping by building a map collaboratively with others. You’ll learn advanced techniques for slicing a map to find small viable product releases, and then how to build your product using smaller stories without losing sight of the big picture.

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Designing Product Teams with Intention: Crafting your Successful Team

It’s time to give teams the same attention and craft we give our products. In this one-day workshop, Christina will share lessons from top companies in Silicon Valley that apply to anyone who functions as part of a team: equally applicable to managers and peer leaders, these approaches will make your team thrive. Awesome products come from awesome teams, so it’s time to stop doing business as usual: learn how to design a team for maximum impact.

Christina knows how to design and inspire diverse teams to work together, going all out in pursuit of a single, ultra-challenging goal – this course is an intimate opportunity to learn her proven results-forward methodology for product team design. Christina will take you into the factors that inform strategically crafted product teams, and address the core question: why do some product teams break while others thrive?

You will consume many Post-its as you explore:

• Cultural tensions facing teams
• Cadences of winning product teams
• Setting norms, and why they matter
• How to use OKRs to help teams define, tackle and realize big goals in a methodical way (leaving nothing to chance!)
• Organisational learning and teams
• Feedback for individuals and for teams: how regular check-ins can keep you on track to success

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