From Product Manager to Business-Minded Product Leader in the AI Era
Elena Leonova
ex-Product Exec @Spryker, Commerce, eBay
Learn to drive the business outcomes through product in the AI era.
You’re already good at product: discovery, roadmaps, and working with teams. But as AI makes more execution work faster, the value of senior product leaders is shifting upstream. The harder question is no longer just “What should we build?” It’s “What should the business invest in - and why?”
This 6-week course helps you become a business-minded product leader. You’ll learn to diagnose what the business needs from its model, capital structure, financial KPIs, and market context; connect customer value to revenue, retention, margin, and strategic advantage; compare product and AI opportunities as investment choices; and make explicit trade-offs about where capital and capacity should go.
You bring a real company and apply the work each week. You’ll leave with a business diagnostic, investment model, strategic bets, AI investment thesis, and executive-ready strategy recommendation.
Taught by Elena Leonova, former CPO at Spryker and VP Product at BigCommerce, drawing on 15 years leading product across VC-backed, PE-backed, and public companies.
What you’ll learn
Learn to make strategic product decisions grounded in customer value, business reality, and economics - not feature logic alone.
Read a company’s business model, capital structure, unit economics, strategic pressures, and KPI tensions -not just its product and roadmap.
Source or estimate CAC, gross margin, payback, and other critical metrics even when finance doesn’t hand you the numbers.
Leave with a one-page Business Diagnostic of your own company or case-study company (Point A).
Translate a product initiative into expected business impact, ROI, payback, and opportunity cost using defensible ranges.
Compare competing opportunities as uses of the company’s capital and capacity—not as a list of equally important priorities.
Leave with a Strategic Bet → Investment Decision model built around a real initiative.
Define a clear Point B and translate it into the 2–3 strategic bets most likely to move the business there.
Make the trade-off behind each bet explicit: what you will fund, what you won’t, and what must be true for the bet to work.
Leave with a 3-bet strategy with explicit trade-offs, assumptions, and alternatives.
Evaluate whether AI should be a product capability, economic lever, monetization play, strategic moat, or category shift.
Model AI’s impact on customer value, pricing, margin, defensibility, and investment—and decide whether to build, buy, or defer.
Leave with an AI Investment Thesis: what to fund, what to defer, what not to pursue, and why.
Choose between competing bets when resources are constrained, evidence is incomplete, and there is no obviously correct answer.
Work with assumptions, ranges, confidence levels, trade-offs, and kill criteria instead of waiting for perfect data.
Leave with a defensible Decision Memo for a real, in-flight strategic decision.
Present a complete strategy from business context and opportunity through strategic bets, economics, trade-offs, and investment choices.
Defend your assumptions and recommendations under live executive-style scrutiny without falling back into feature-level explanations.
Leave with an Executive Strategy Pack ready to adapt for a leadership, strategy, board, or interview conversation.
Learn directly from Elena
Elena Leonova
Founder & CPO, OneRank.io, ex-CPO @ Spryker, VP of Product @ BigCommerce
Who this course is for
Senior & Principal Product Managers
Strong at execution, ready to understand the business and shape more strategic product decisions.Group Product Managers & Directors
Own broader strategy and trade-offs, and need stronger business and financial decision-making skills.Heads of Product & Product Executives
Lead product strategy and connect decisions to economics, investment choices, and board expectations.
Prerequisites
Strong Product Management Fundamentals
You’re already comfortable with discovery, roadmaps, prioritization, and working with cross-functional teams.
Experience in a Senior Product Role
Best for Senior/Principal PMs, Group PMs, Directors, Heads of Product, and leaders with meaningful product ownership.
A Real Business to Analyze
Come with your company or a case-study company. You’ll apply the course to its strategy, economics, product bets, and AI opportunities.
What's included
Live sessions
Learn directly from Elena Leonova in a real-time, interactive format.
Lifetime Access to All Materials
Keep the recordings, frameworks, templates, and examples so you can reuse them as your scope and responsibilities grow.
Business-Minded Product Leadership Projects
Build a business diagnostic, investment analysis, strategic bets, AI investment thesis, and executive-ready strategy.
Weekly Office Hours & Coaching
Bring your real strategy, business, career, or executive challenges and get direct feedback on how you’re approaching them.
Experienced Product Leader Peer Cohort
Learn alongside Senior PMs, Directors, Heads of Product, and other experienced leaders working through similar decisions.
Capstone: Present & Defend Your Strategy
Bring the work together into an executive-ready strategy and defend your assumptions, trade-offs, and recommendations live.
Certificate of completion
Receive a Maven certificate recognizing completion of the six-week program and capstone.
Maven Guarantee
Your purchase is backed by the Maven Guarantee.
Course syllabus
11 live sessions • 14 lessons • 7 projects
Week 1
Sep
15
LIVE: How Executives Diagnose the Business Before Setting Strategy
Tue 9/156:00 PM—7:30 PM (UTC)Sep
17
Optional: Weekly Office Hours
Thu 9/176:00 PM—6:30 PM (UTC)Optional
Reading the Business Like an Executive (Point A Assessment)
Week 2
Sep
22
LIVE: How Product Executives Use Metrics to Make (and Defend) Decisions
Tue 9/226:00 PM—7:30 PM (UTC)Sep
24
Optional: Weekly Office Hours
Thu 9/246:00 PM—6:30 PM (UTC)Optional
How Product Executives Read Financial Reality and Decide What Matters
Free resources
Schedule
Live sessions
2 hrs / week
Weekly interactive sessions combine teaching, case discussion, and hands-on work applying each concept to real product and business decisions. Optional office hours give you additional time for questions, feedback, and help applying the frameworks to your own situation.
Tue, Sep 15
6:00 PM—7:30 PM (UTC)
Thu, Sep 17
6:00 PM—6:30 PM (UTC)
Tue, Sep 22
6:00 PM—7:30 PM (UTC)
Applied projects
1-2 hrs / week
Apply the course to your own company or case study through concise weekly projects: business diagnostic, investment model, strategic bets, AI thesis, and executive-ready strategy.
Async content
1 hr / week
Short pre-reads, frameworks, examples, and templates give you the business and financial context needed to get more from the live sessions.
Testimonials
Working with Elena sharpened my strategic thinking at a crucial stage of my career. Her approach to pricing, P&L-driven prioritization and portfolio rationalization pushed me to operate with greater financial clarity and stronger executive judgment.
What I appreciated most was her ability to turn complex product strategy into actionable decision frameworks that improved how our team delivered outcomes.
Her coaching challenged me in the right ways and helped me elevate my impact as a product leader.
Ángel Hita Albarracín
Principal Product ManagerElena gave me the ability to think and communicate like a product executive. She breaks down complex decisions with clarity, connects product work to real business impact, and teaches the strategic mindset PMs need to rise. Her coaching reshaped our entire product organization — and my own career trajectory.
Volodymyr Lunov
Senior Product ManagerI realized I was missing strategic thinking until Elena taught me how to develop it. She gave me frameworks to decompose problems, see the bigger picture, and operate like an executive — not a product manager delivering features. Every conversation shifted how I approached my role. Elena didn’t just change my skills; she changed my mindset
Andrew Chekanov
Head of ProductElena transformed our product organization into a strategic, outcome-driven team. She taught us how to align roadmaps with value, use customer insights effectively, and think like executives. Her clarity, strategic depth, and leadership built the strongest product culture I’ve seen. Anyone wanting to become a stronger product leader should learn from her.”
Vasiliki Chatzivasileiou
Product LeaderElena is one of the most exceptional product leaders I've worked with. She pushes teams to think boldly and execute rigorously, always tying decisions to real customer and business value. Her strategic clarity and operational discipline are unmatched - she elevates everyone around her.
Pablo Kern
Customer Success LeaderElena’s session was filled with ‘aha’ moments — finally understanding how to frame features in business language, how to align roadmaps to outcomes, and how to think beyond the feature backlog. The ROI Canvas alone changed how we work. This is the kind of strategic education PMs never get but desperately need
Lightning Lesson Participants
PMs & Product Leaders from 5+ countries
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