Volkswagen Group

Awin

QS Top Universities

Mihaela Draghici

Product Leader | Creator of the Language Mapping Blueprint

Cohort 1

Opening Cohort

First cohort

Product Leader with 15+ years experience

Your team sounds aligned. But decisions don't hold.

I help you design your teams shared language system

Fix the language gaps that break product decisions

Diagnose

Expose

Define

Embed

Where to apply this

Who this is for

Your team is already making decisions.

Diagnose and fix language-driven decision failures in product teams.

Language Mapping System

Decision clarity under pressure

When this is for you

What we work on

Outcomes

Develop decision clarity, judgment, and cross-functional fluency.

1:1 Product Leadership Coaching

Gain Strategic Engineering Advantage in the age of AI

Engineering Director 20 years experience

Daniel Ghilea

Engineering Director 20+ years experience

A half-day workshop, designed for senior engineers who want move from the "how" of engineering to the "why" of business impact and get a competitive advantage in a time when AI is making pure execution less differentiated. ----At senior level, the ceiling is rarely technical. You’re a strong engineer. You're already great at execution.You write solid code and review code at a high standard.You solve hard technical problems.You design scalable systems. You ship complex features.ButYou may struggle to:<ul><li>Connect architecture decisions to revenue or risk.</li><li>Challenge roadmap choices using business language.</li><li>Influence prioritisation without positional authority.</li><li>Translate technical language into strategic urgency.</li><li>Participate meaningfully in discovery discussions.</li></ul>The result?That limits your influence, your growth, and your impact as a strategic contributor.Because no one trained you in product thinking from an engineering lens. To move into strategic alignment, you need to stop treating product sense as a "PM skill" and start considering it as a technical optimisation for business impact.This workshop is designed to bridge the gap between code and commercial reality.

Learn how to connect technical decisions to business impact, speak clearly in strategy talks, and influence what gets built, not just how.

Understand what product sense really means

Understand the hierarchy of decision layers: Strategy To Roadmap To Backlog

How to choose and implement the right metrics

Speak the language of product and business confidently

Senior Engineers &amp; Tech Leads already making architecture decisions who want more influence over product and roadmap decisions.

Aspiring Staff / Principal Engineers who need to move from execution to shaping technical and product strategy.

Engineers stepping into leadership who are expected to contribute to business and roadmap discussions, but were never taught how.

Misaligned language is why product decisions fail, not strategy

<h2>Product teams don’t fail because of lack of talent, effort, or even strategy. They fail because they don’t mean the same thing when they use the same words. “Priority.” “Discovery.” “MVP.” “Ready.”</h2>Each function - product, design, engineering, sales, marketing - uses these terms differently. And no one notices the gap. So decisions that look aligned are actually built on different assumptions. Roadmaps get debated endlessly. Stakeholders feel unheard. Teams execute fast… on the wrong thing. Over time, this cost compounds. This is not a communication issue. It’s a language system failure. I call it language debt. And I can help you fix that. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to identify and fix the invisible language gaps that create misalignment in product decisions. I help you design your teams' shared language system:<ul><li>Identify the words that create the most friction.</li><li>Map how each function interprets them.</li><li>Align on working definitions that drive decisions.</li><li>Turn language into a shared system.</li></ul>By using the Language Mapping Blueprint. You’ll move from vague discussions and recurring friction to clear, shared understanding, where decisions are faster and teams actually move in the same direction.

Build a shared language system to make faster, clearer, aligned product decisions.

Diagnose hidden language gaps in your team

Turn vague discussions into explicit decisions

Facilitate alignment in high-stakes conversations

Create a repeatable system for language alignment

Product leaders scaling cross-functional teams.

Senior Product Managers stuck in endless alignment loops with stakeholders.

Engineering, Design, and Business teams working together under pressure.

Why your teams don’t align and how to fix it

See how misaligned language leads to delays, rework, and weak decisions across functions.

Understand the cost of language debt

Learn to identify misaligned terms like “MVP” or “done” and where they create friction in your team.

Spot language debt in your team

Understand why meetings fail and how shared definitions, not discussions, create real alignment.

Why more alignment meetings don’t work

Learn how clear definitions improve prioritisation, trade-offs, and cross-functional decisions.

Use language as a decision tool

Walk away with a practical method to map, define, and test shared language in your team.

Mihaela Draghici Fix the language gaps behind bad product decisions