Giff Constable

As a product leader, you're not expected to be an accountant. However, finance is the common language at the C-suite and board. To succeed, you need fluency in relevant aspects of corporate finance. Without it, you won't be taken seriously. This class will expose you to the essential areas in a rigorous manner. The class is a mix of lecture and structured exercises/cases based on real scenarios. We'll then constantly tie our financial analyses back to strategic product decisions. Ultimately this is a product leadership class, just with a focus on finance. Class 1: Learn how an income statement tells a story and feeds into product decisionsClass 2: Best practices for modeling, using models for alignment, and communicating your analyses to the C-Suite/boardClass 3: Revenue models, packaging/bundling, and pricingClass 4: Business valuation, differences in owner/investor classes, and why this is crucial for product leaders to understand The classes themselves are 90 minutes, with an additional weekly Q&amp;A session (optional) and take-home assignment. Each week there is a modeling exercise. We begin classes 2, 3, and 4 with a detailed examination on an optimal way to approach the analysis. Our focus isn't on the spreadsheeting but rather (a) how to think through critical risks, opportunities, and assumptions, (b) forecasting possible scenarios, and (c) examining how it might be best presented to a senior audience. The Q&amp;A sessions are open-ended. Topics we've covered in past include:- how these concepts can help you diligence a company you are thinking about joining- differences b/w how these concepts might apply in startup vs scale-up vs large-enterprise contexts, as well as innovation vs product-improvement contexts- real examples of how making a financial case enabled an important project to get approved- a challenge a member of the cohort is tackling at work NOTE: this class is a "partner" class with my Modeling Business Impact class on Maven (https://maven.com/giff-constable/intro-to-business-modeling) — it doesn't matter which one you do first.

If you want to succeed in the C-Suite and in front of a board...

We're going to examine several mock P&amp;Ls, find relevant insights, and then debate critical decisions you would make as a product leader given the insights you've spotted.

Class 1: How does an income statement tell a story?

We're going to touch upon modeling best practices, dive into a detailed scenario, and discuss the (oft-misunderstood) best way to share your analyses with executives and board members.

Class 2: Best practices for modeling and communicating your analyses

It's increasingly falling upon product leaders to (re)design how a company makes money. We will examine the pros and cons of different revenue models, talk through a real-life case where product had to change an established revenue model, and then get hands-on building an analysis for a board on a proposed pricing change.

Class 3: Revenue models and pricing

Class 4 cracks open the black box of how businesses are valued, the different classes of business owners, and how this can help you become more strategic with your roadmaps and more aligned with your CEO and board.

Class 4: Business valuation and what this means for product leaders

Course syllabus

90 minutes of hands-on, case-based learning and group discussion around one core topic. For this cohort, classes will be held Oct 3, 10, 17, 24.

Tuesdays: 90 min class

A chance to meet with Giff and other peers in the cohort and dive deeper into anything covered in the Tues class and the take-home exercises.

Fridays: 60 min optional Q&A

The best way to learn these concepts is to do them. After each class, you'll be given a structured assignment and classes 2, 3 and 4 begin with a detailed walkthrough on a recommended approach to each one.

Take-home assignment

Course schedule

Mid-to-senior product managers who want to speed their path to a leadership role.

New product VPs who want to shore up gaps in their skillset and be more successful in the hot seat.

Design and engineering leaders who want to increase their influence over strategic business decisions.

Who is this class designed for?

What will you gain by taking this class?

Be seen by the CEO, the board, and other execs as a strategic business thinker, not just a product thinker

Build fluency, and thus credibility, in the common language at the C-suite

Build more compelling cases for your product initiatives, improving alignment with other execs

Expand your "systems thinking" beyond product features to the entire business model

Ultimately, level up a critical skillset you'll need in order to succeed as a product executive

Get hands-on learning the essential financial skills you'll need to succeed as a product executive.

Cohort 5

Cohort 7

"Spreadsheets? Booorrrrinnnng." Not so! Financial and "impact" modeling is a critical tool for any actual or aspiring business executive, and it is both strategic and creative. Whether you are in product or business development or marketing, etc, having this skill will allow you to: 1. make better priorities and decisions2. think through upside and risks more clearly3. better align with stakeholders and peers This class is about learning by doing. In the first class, I will lay a foundation. After that it's all about practice. Each week you will have an exercise to attempt before the next class. You will be given a set of assumptions and then you have to dive into a spreadsheet. In our live session, I will walk you through my solution and open things up for discussion, sharing tips and pointers along the way. EXERCISES:Pre-watch video and simple "starter" challenge Exercise 1: model out a business development partnership and decide whether it's a good idea. Exercise 2: you, the CMO, and CEO disagree on the timing of a marketing campaign around a big product launch. Project out the results and create a decision making tool. Exercise 3: model out the impact of a potential acquisition your CEO is considering. Exercise 4: model out the impact of investing in internal tools for your software engineers All of our work will be in the "open" across the cohort so that you can see multiple approaches to solving the same problem. NOTE: This class can be seen as a "partner" class with the Financial Fluency for Product Leaders class on Maven (https://maven.com/giff-constable/financial-fluency). It doesn't matter which one you take first.

Learn a skill essential to being a successful executive

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

Tuesdays 12:00pm-1:00pm EST

Estimated time to work on the exercise models ranges from one to three hours a week.

Weekly projects

Aspiring business executives in product, bizdev, marketing

Anyone who wants to add more analytical rigor to their decisions and the debates about priorities.

If you already get the value of modeling, but want to practice and see other approaches.

Who is this course for

What you’ll get out of this course

As a leader, you need to be versed in examining the upside and risks of any initiative, and you need to be able to teach your team how to do this as well.

Learn a critical skill for any business executive

Practice designing a spreadsheet to be used as a tool for alignment, collaboration, and less politics. And see examples on how to do this.

Turn spreadsheets into tools for alignment and collaboration

Modeling is about thinking through systems. One former student said, "this really about learning how to think." It's why we don't just focus on one type of initiative.

Practice thinking through any kind of problem

Learn how to model out the financial impact of business and product initiatives. 

Cohort 1

Cohort 2

[class enrollment by application only] No lectures. What if you could practice the trickiest parts of being a product executive ahead of time and, in doing so, learn from an expert and your peers on other approaches? This class takes a realistic scenario and over 6 weeks forces you make those hard decisions and have those tough conversations. You and your peers will play the CPO at a growth-stage software company. I play everyone else, from the CEO to a board member to C-suite peers to a PM reporting to you. Instead of talking abstractly about what one might do, you're going to do it. We'll play it out and you'll get feedback from both me and your peers. In turn, you'll give feedback when someone else is in the hot seat: how might one do it differently? Using Specific Scenarios for General Leadership TrainingI don't believe we learn from theory nearly as well as do from practice. While the below 6 topics seem very specific, they are chosen to expose critical, and difficult, aspects of being a product executive. In working through these scenarios, you'll end up thinking through general leadership values and approaches. What We'll CoverIn our scenario, you've just joined an exciting growth-stage software company. On your first day at work, the board announced that your business is merging with a competitor of similar size. Your new boss is the CEO of the other company, not the one who interviewed you. The new CEO has decided to keep you as the product leader and intends to integrate the two companies rather than run them separately. Now you have two product suites, two different teams with different cultures, and a whole bunch of new C-suite peers that you haven't spent any time with. What You'll Have to Solve1. Kick off as CPO at a new company with big strategic decisions looming, a roadmap is disarray, and a major acquisition just closed2. Create a 30-60-90 day plan for the CEO3. Handle fear and flight risk within your team around layoffs given the recent acquisition4. Deliver a proposal to the CEO and CFO on a new structure + cost implications for your 60-person team (located on two sides of the ocean);5. Decide how to handle a senior PM who's relationship with their team's engineering lead has gone bad6. Handle a situation where a CxO peer is not performing and the lack of accountability is hurting your part of the business7. Create an artifact to set expectations at the C-suite on product timelines; handle a CMO who is frustrated with your timelines and a VP of Sales who wants to control priorities.8. Present to the board and/or individual board members, per the CEOs request The ClassThe class is capped at 10 people. We will meet for 75 minutes each week for six weeks, with an optional hour-long roundtable on Fridays. There will be prep materials to read going into each class, including the first one. Who Can Take The Class?You must be at one of the following levels in either prod mgt, design, or engineering: VP, Director, Principal, or GPM level (or about to move into one of those roles). Class is by application only. There is a code of conduct below.

Practice the hard stuff before you're in the hot seat

Before each class there will be pre-reading materials so that we can spend more time in action rather than reviewing context.

Pre-reading

6 Classes, Consecutive Wednesdays

To apply for the class, you must be VP, Director, Principal, or GPM level in product management or design.

Senior PMs or Designers with 6+ years of experience may apply and will be reviewed for fit on a case-by-case basis.

By having actual conversations, even if role-played, you'll think through your leadership values and get feedback on your style. You'll get to see how others might approach a situation and expand your perspective on what might be good and possible.

Evolve your leadership style and learn from others

We'll be practicing not just how you interact with your reports and other members of the company, but also other high-powered executives and board members in our mock company.

Improve how you communicate with C-Suite and Board members

We practice so that when a challenging situation hits, as it inevitably and constantly does, you're not seeing it for the first time. Instead, you've thought through possible approaches both from your own instincts as well from your cohort peers.

Prepare for the hard situations

The class is by application-only. It's important that each cohort be made up of experienced practitioners who can learn from and help each other both during the class and into the future.

Build a trusted peer group

The Chief Product Officer job is tough. With a small group of peers, you'll role play through real scenarios and practice hard situations.

Creating a new product or big new feature inside a company comes with an entirely different level of difficulty compared to optimizations. The good news is that there are battle-tested techniques to increase the odds that you will be successful. We all know the failure points:1. We get caught up in our vision and don't tune closely into what the customer and market really need2. We fail to navigate the politics of innovation and funding inside our companies3. We fail to ruthlessly test critical assumptions about our entire business model, and thus turn small failures into big ones This class is designed to show you methods for overcoming these failure points. Because this is better learned in a hands-on way, you will practice on your real work. And while it's a 5-week class, you should walk away with immediately-applicable takeaways each week. The methods we'll cover are grounded in years of practical experience. I've seen them work as a Chief Product Officer overseeing a 150-person product team, and as a consultant working directly with companies like Mayo Clinic, Steelcase, Time Inc, and Hearst to improve how they innovate. My books on these topics are faved by the likes of Eric Ries and Steve Blank and used in companies, accelerators, and universities around the world. You will bring your own project into the class, done in a way that protects your confidentiality. You will run it through a rigorous gauntlet of activities over several weeks that should hone: &nbsp;&nbsp;* How to ensure strategic alignment and financial impact&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;* How to do effective customer research and discovery&nbsp;&nbsp;* How to design, test, implement, and utilize experiments&nbsp;* How to set up an ongoing cadence of effective decision making and risk management&nbsp;* How to can navigate stakeholders and the politics of innovation Tuesday classes will be a mixture of sharing examples and tips, as well as hands-on practice time. Each week, there is also an optional roundtable session to ask questions, get feedback on your work, and learn from each other. WHAT WE WILL COVERPre-class: decide on the idea you are bringing into the class and also decide if you can work in “public” or if your idea needs to be mostly confidential (see Statement of Confidentiality below). The class has been designed for either to work. Class 1: Workshop our risks, impact, and alignment. Activities: assumptions and risk mapping, strategy mapping, value/impact statement (including financial impact).&nbsp;&nbsp;Take-home assignment: create a mini-model on the financial impact of your idea. Class 2: Customer discovery/research. Activities: demo best practices, discuss recruitment methods and challenges, create research plan and interview guide.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Take-home assignment: at least 1 customer interview or observation. Class 3: Risk refinement and decision-making. Activities: practice research synthesis, create a risks dashboard, make continue/kill/pivot decision&nbsp;&nbsp;Take-home assignment: at least 1 customer interview -or- 1 colleague interview, update risks dashboard. Class 4: Pre-Product Experiments. Activities: discuss examples of pre-product experiments (as opposed to A/B testing), brainstorm exercise, completion of experiment template for your top idea.&nbsp;&nbsp;Take-home assignment: at least 1 customer interview -or- mini-experiment, update risks dashboard. Class 5: Innovation politics. Activities: discussion of stakeholder management, pre-mortem exercise, risk assessment and mitigation plan, and analysis of next steps. Statement of Confidentiality: Because I want students bringing real ideas into the class in order to make meaningful progress on real work, I understand that some of these ideas might be confidential in nature. Students will have the ability to tell me in writing if the idea is confidential in nature. Students will then have the choice of working either in private or in a way viewable by the cohort. I, Giff Constable, commit to preserving the confidentiality of all student ideas marked in writing as confidential. The details of ideas marked as confidential, as well as the artifacts created during the class, will not be disclosed to other students nor anyone outside of the class except by the student’s own volition. In other words, I will keep my mouth completely shut and you can decide how much you want to share. -- NOTE: When you enroll in this course, you’ll receive $1,395 in free credits to level up your workflow with Superhuman, Linear, Sprig, Dovetail &amp; Gamma (see FAQ for details)

Going from zero to one is daunting...

Class time for sharing best practices and workshopping methods.

Tuesdays

Optional roundtable to ask questions, get feedback on your work, and learn from each other.

Fridays

You are in charge of a big new product feature and want to knock it out of the park.

You are trying to create an entirely new product or business line within your company.

You are a product leader wanting to teach your people how to de-risk downside and maximize upside on new initiatives.

Students are asked to bring their actual work into the class (or something they are hoping to work on), so all of our activities should feel directly actionable.

Immediately impact your real work

We'll cover and practice how to do effective customer discovery (UX research) in a very practical way that can lead to huge insights.

Learn best practices on discovery and research methods

You'll pick up examples of how to run experiments before big investments in engineering work, and design your own.

Design meaningful experiments

We'll be talking about when and how our methods, frameworks, and artifacts can be used to improve alignment and manage politics.

Improve how you navigate the politics of innovation

Maximize the odds of success for big new product initiatives by improving customer discovery, experimentation, and stakeholder management.