Maximizing your Impact as a Product Leader
Your Customers and your Business deserve exceptional Products
Your Product Leaders deserve the support to bring them to life
Great product leaders are pivotal in creating exceptional products. They possess a profound understanding of both product strategy and the needs of their target customers, effectively bringing them to life for their teams. Utilizing design thinking tools, they empathize with customers, identify critical opportunities, and use feedback throughout the lifecycle to optimize outcomes.
Unfortunately, the role of the product leader is all too commonly misunderstood by the enterprise. Training and job descriptions tend to focus on backlog management and planning mechanics rather than the strategy concepts, product discovery techniques, and feedback generation approaches that result in successful products.
This program paints a picture of great product leadership, teaches the concepts and skills that bring it to life, and supports learners as they apply it to their day-to-day work.
“The ‘Maximizing Your Impact as a Product Leader Program’ has truly transformed my team! Its weekly structure embedded new learnings into our daily routine. The impact has been significant, not only for me but also for our stakeholders. Their overwhelmingly positive feedback highlights the effectiveness of the course.
Conversations with my Product Owners have been brimming with excitement as they share how much more effective and confident they feel in their roles”
About the program
At Shaping Agility, we're obsessive about product strategy and unlocking every individual's potential to make a difference. Our program is an immersive, applied learning journey for Product Leaders. Starting with mindset and advancing to toolset, we comprehensively address all aspects of their role across the lifecycle.
The program introduces concepts in manageable segments, practices them in real-world scenarios, and creates opportunities for students to apply these skills in their daily work. Our approach rests on three core concepts:
Applied team-driven learning: Each product leader cohort learns and practices together in a weekly cycle. They learn from each other, not just the facilitator.
Practice, not just theory: Extended exercises enable students to practice applying the new techniques to their own products in a supportive environment
On-the-job consolidation: Weekly assignments encourage students to apply their new knowledge in their work, supported by facilitated 'office-hours' sessions
Who is it for?
This program is predominantly for practicing Product Owners and Product Managers. Cross-functional cohorts blending in Designers, Business Analysts, and Architects regularly benefit from shared learning and the opportunities to understand role synergies.
This is not “an introduction to agile” - the focus is product leadership concepts set in an agile context. It also works best if most members of the cohort are existing practitioners - many of the activities and homework assignments are designed for application to current work in the learner’s context.
“I loved the practical activities. I’m a tactile learner, and so practicing helps embed the learning”
”Course led to good discussions highlighting gaps that need to be addressed”
”Useful practice sessions and discussions to tie everything back together”
“Lots of practical advice and interesting discussions prompting me to think more deeply”
Program Structure
The program runs over an eight-week period for cohorts of up to twenty students.
Each week begins with a two-hour facilitated workshop, which introduces the next set of concepts and brings them to life through exercises and group discussions.
Each workshop concludes with an 'on-the-job' assignment for students to put their new ideas to work.
Two 'office-hours' sessions are held each week, during which interested students can bring the results from their assignment work to receive feedback and guidance on the challenges they are encountering when applying new techniques.
Week by Week
Week 1 - Product Leader Roles: Contextualize your responsibilities, key collaborations, and impact through the lenses of Customer, Team, and Product.
Week 2 - Product Strategy: Explore how markets, segmentation, and lifecycle position shape your product bets and investment focus.
Week 3 - Design Thinking and Discovery: Strengthen your discovery habits by pairing market insight with structured research at every stage of the double diamond.
Week 4 - Strategic Initiatives and Features: Sharpen your initiatives with clarity tests and product trees—then pitch with Feature Canvases that resonate.
Week 5 - 'Implementation Ready' Features: Find the right balance of detail as you move from strategy to execution, supercharging acceptance criteria with BDD.
Week 6 - Great User Stories: Leverage Story Maps to break down your features through the eyes of the customer and understand their role in feedback generation
Week 7 - Right-Sized Stories: Understand the technical and customer motivations behind splitting stories and add new techniques to your repertoire
Week 8 - Iterations and Execution: Learn the secret of 'just in time' story detail, gather actionable feedback while iterating, and learn from the way customers use your product