How product teams build trust, alignment, and commitment to drive impact
This hands on This is a hands-on program designed for modern product teams who need to influence across functions, align around priorities, and increase strategic impact across their organisations.
Grounded in real-world examples, the class draws on experience from complex stakeholder environments to show how effective organisations align around decisions, priorities, and outcomes. Teams will gain practical frameworks for communicating clearly, facilitating productive discussions, and aligning cross-functionally.
This unique and powerful class moves beyond stakeholder management toward something far more durable: how effective product teams support decision-making at scale through trust, clarity, and mutual commitment, even when opinions differ.
Key questions addressed
This class is designed to help teams answer the following questions in their own context
- How can product teams build trust as the foundation for alignment?
- How can teams move from managing stakeholders to earning their commitment?
- How can teams communicate effectively to reduce ambiguity and drive decisions?
- How can teams use tools like the CREDiT model (Commonality, Reciprocity, Empathy, Difference, Trust), Mendelow’s Matrix, and Stakeholder Archetypes to build mutual trust and understand motivations, needs, and goals?
- How can modern tools, including AI, support synthesis and communication without replacing critical thinking?
CLASS CURRICULUM
What we cover
Building trust
Aligning towards commitment
From the curriculum leader
“After 15 years working in product and innovation,
I’ve come to believe that good communication and
alignment are the most fundamental skills in product
management. Strategy, discovery, and delivery suffer when
teams aren’t truly aligned. Alignment isn’t just a vibe - it’s not
smiles in a meeting or everyone nodding ‘yes’. Alignment shows
up in how decisions are made, documented, revisited, and
acted on under real pressure. This program moves alignment out
of the abstract and into something we can observe, measure,
and improve. When teams build mutual commitment through
transparent, collaborative processes, they lay the groundwork
for trust, better decisions, sustained high performance, and
continued progress even in the face of risk and uncertainty.”
Ryan MacCarrigan
Founder LEANSTUDIO, Product Coach, Consultant
Expected outcomes
You will leave this class equipped to:
- Define and evolve metrics that reflect real customer and business value, suited to their product context and industry.
- Align teams around shared outcomes by using metrics that clarify priorities and support better decisions as products scale.
- Design and apply effective metric systems, including North Star Metrics, leading indicators, and guardrails, in day-to-day product work.
- Assess whether metrics are encouraging the right behaviours and adapt measurement approaches when constraints, risks, and maturity change.
- Communicate metrics clearly and confidently to different audiences across the organisation.
- Combine quantitative signals with critical thinking and professional judgment to evaluate progress and make sound decisions across both traditional and AI-enabled products.
- Build a durable foundation for responsible measurement that supports continuous learning and sustained effectiveness as teams and organisations evolve.
Outcomes for your team
Teams leave this class equipped to:
- Build trust, clarity, and shared understanding in complex, high-stakes environments with competing priorities
- Diagnose real stakeholder scenarios to uncover whether friction is caused by a lack of trust, unclear ownership, or unresolved assumptions
- Create alignment across teams and stakeholders by establishing clear expectations and shared commitment
- Apply practical, repeatable approaches to stakeholder engagement and communication
- Facilitate productive discussions that lead to clear decisions and agreed next steps
- Communicate strategically and confidently, even when navigating ambiguity or differing perspectives
- Use proven frameworks and modern tools thoughtfully to support synthesis, clarity, and effective decision-making
"I would thoroughly recommend this workshop. We learned about a lot of useful frameworks that I think my team can implement even starting tomorrow. I especially appreciated learning how to prevent constant prioritisation changes and build better trust by keeping better alignment."
Catherine Chilton
Senior Product Manager at Brightspot
"There were a lot of high-value topics covered, and the facilitator did a good job trying to assess which ones were most relevant/useful for our group. I liked the variety of frameworks presented and discussed, the breakout room exercises, and feedback slots. I would recommend these sessions to others."
Tamsyn Brownie
Product Manager at EF Education First