Class is in session
5.0
(3 ratings)
5 Weeks
·Cohort-based Course
The Chief Product Officer job is tough. With a small group of peers, you'll role play through real scenarios and practice hard situations.
Class is in session
5.0
(3 ratings)
5 Weeks
·Cohort-based Course
The Chief Product Officer job is tough. With a small group of peers, you'll role play through real scenarios and practice hard situations.
Course overview
[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 Training
I 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 Cover
In 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 Solve
1. Kick off as CPO at a new company with big strategic decisions looming, a roadmap is disarray, and a major acquisition just closed
2. Create a 30-60-90 day plan for the CEO
3. Handle fear and flight risk within your team around layoffs given the recent acquisition
4. 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 bad
6. Handle a situation where a CxO peer is not performing and the lack of accountability is hurting your part of the business
7. 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 Class
The 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.
01
To apply for the class, you must be VP, Director, Principal, or GPM level in product management or design.
02
Senior PMs or Designers with 6+ years of experience may apply and will be reviewed for fit on a case-by-case basis.
Evolve your leadership style and learn from others
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.
Improve how you communicate with C-Suite and Board members
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.
Prepare for the hard situations
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.
Build a trusted peer group
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.
12 interactive live sessions
Lifetime access to course materials
In-depth lessons
Direct access to instructor
Projects to apply learnings
Guided feedback & reflection
Private community of peers
Course certificate upon completion
Maven Satisfaction Guarantee
This course is backed by Maven’s guarantee. You can receive a full refund within 14 days after the course ends, provided you meet the completion criteria in our refund policy.
Product Leadership in Practice
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5.0
(3 ratings)
Miraj Chokshi
Carolina Paula
Daniel Pardes
Brian Orloff
Cindy Liang
Giff Constable has coached hundreds of actual and aspiring product leaders as both a practicing executive and as a highly-rated teacher at NYU's Stern School of Business, Product Faculty, and also in private workshops to companies like Mayo Clinic, Priceline, Hearst, American Express, Steelcase, and many more.
Giff Constable was the Chief Product Officer at Meetup, the CEO of Neo Innovation, and VP of Product at Axial. He is also the author of Talking to Humans and Testing with Humans. Both books are used as core curriculum in university entrepreneurship and product programs around the world.
In 2021, Giff ran a version of this class as an experiment to test out a different approach to teaching and learning product leadership. The students — a diverse group of VPs of Product and GPMs — universally said it was the best professional educational experience they had ever had. He's thrilled to bring the format back to life on Maven.
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2-3 hours per week
Pre-reading
1 hour
Before each class there will be pre-reading materials so that we can spend more time in action rather than reviewing context.
6 Classes, Consecutive Wednesdays
9:00am - 10:15am US Eastern
What happens if I can’t make a live session?
Will these 6 topics we role-play help me become a better manager/leader in general?
Code of Conduct
Be the first to know about upcoming cohorts