Becki Saltzman

CEO, Applied Curiosity Lab. 4M+ course & workshop participants worldwide.

The Critical Thinking Tool Smart Leaders Shouldn't Skip

Applied Curiosity Lab

4M+ learners. Helping leaders think clearly and decide wisely.

Learn a simple distinction to use before you decide whether to trust, question, or investigate information.

Recognize What You're Really Looking At

Use a proven tool to navigate AI, data, stakeholder opinions, and conflicting information with greater confidence.

See What Others Miss

Apply your new tool to real-world scenarios to use immediately in meetings, decisions, and everyday work.

Practice on Real Work Examples

Use AI to make you irreplaceable. Build a system that works every time with prompts, skills, playbooks, and more.

Chief Product Officer, Executive Coach

McKinsey & Company

Instagram

Thumbtack

Harvard University

Yue Zhao

Chief Product & Technology Officer, Executive Coach, Writer

Jun26

Sept26

★★★★½ from students at Google, Anthropic, Stripe, Amazon, OpenAI, Twilio, Fidelity, and more. Want a sneak peek? Try a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://practice.theuncommonexecutive.com/">free AI exercise</a> that helps you with non-verbal presence from the course: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://practice.theuncommonexecutive.com/">https://practice.theuncommonexecutive.com/</a> _______<h4>You're a high performer. So why aren't you being treated like one?</h4>You deliver results. You get strong reviews. But in the meetings that matter, with the executives who matter, you're talked over, passed over, or simply not in the room.This is not about doing more work. It's how you show up.This course teaches you to use AI as a strategic partner who knows your stakeholders, your communication gaps, and your political landscape, and helps you navigate all of it.You'll learn the frameworks that experienced leaders use to command rooms, land ideas, and build the relationships that drive decisions. Then you'll build those frameworks directly into your AI so the next time you prep for a high-stakes meeting, draft an executive update, or map a tricky stakeholder, you have a prepared strategic partner already on your side.No coding. No intimidating connectors or API calls. Simple prompts and playbooks for your AI that transform how you show up.

Get heard. Get credited. Get promoted. With AI as your secret weapon.

Show up differently in every room you walk into

Say more with less

Walk into any high-stakes conversation fully prepped

Build the relationships that actually drive decisions

Become someone executives trust and sponsor

You're a Senior Manager, Director, or Principal IC at a tech company with 4+ years of experience

You do great work but aren't getting the recognition or promotion. You feel talked over in meetings or passed over for key opportunities.

You want AI to help you think and navigate, to be your strategic partners and secret weapon in corporate politics.

Make high-stakes product decisions with clearer logic, stronger conviction, and language that leadership can trust.

Product & Design Leader at Owtcome

Owtcome

Krasi Bozhinkova

Cohort - May 2026

Cohort - Sept 2026

The gap between mid-level and senior is not knowledge. It is judgment. The ability to make the call earlier, with less certainty, and explain why it matters in terms the business cares about.You may already have strong instincts, but instincts alone don’t earn trust. What gets your work second-guessed is not always that someone else is right. It is that they can connect the decision to adoption, retention, revenue, or strategic advantage more clearly than you can.This course is about closing that judgment gap. You will learn how to identify the real decision inside a messy debate, name the trade-off others avoid, and defend your logic before perfect data arrives. It blends product, design, and business thinking because role boundaries are disappearing and the expectation to make an impact has never been higher.The goal is to become the person leadership brings in earlier, trusts with harder problems, and gives a bigger scope.

Make high-stakes product calls with clarity to earn a bigger scope and influence

Frame the real decision behind a messy debate

Build for critical user needs without waiting for perfect data

Know when to improve, pivot, or rethink your roadmap

Connect every product and design decision to a growth loop

Design for AI-products beyond the interface

PMs, designers, and cross-functional leaders with 3-5 years of experience, working through ambiguity, trade-offs, and business outcomes.

Level of experience

Bring one live product, feature, or strategic decision to apply the course directly to your own context.


What to prepare

This course is designed for practitioners who want to make better product decisions in AI-shaped markets, not to teach a specific AI tool.

No technical AI background required

Mid to Senior level PMs stuck in execution mode who want to become the senior person leadership trusts to make the harder decisions

Designers who are strategic but can't articulate it and lose the argument when they don’t connect the decision to business impact.

Developers stepping up to own a product area, who need a repeatable way to make hard decisions with incomplete information.

You will move from using AI on faith to using it with judgement: spotting when it helps, catching when it harms, and knowing the difference.

Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy

Scientific American

Times Higher Education

Springer Nature

The Conversation U.S.

Dr Sam Illingworth

Founding Scholars (August 2026)

You use AI every day at work, and you have started to feel the cost. It invents facts you have to catch, flattens your writing into the same grey voice everyone else is using, agrees with whatever you say, and quietly erodes the skills you are actually paid for. The hard part now is knowing when to believe what it gives you.AI is in the room for almost every professional decision, and the advice has not kept up. Most of it teaches you to prompt faster. None of it teaches you to judge what comes back.This course builds that judgement. Over four live sessions, taught through the humanities by a Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy, you learn to spot the four moves AI makes on you, name the hidden costs behind a confident answer, protect the skills you cannot afford to lose, and decide, every time, when to use AI and when to leave it alone.You practise on the work you actually do, running each method on your own AI tools, grounded in recent peer-reviewed research, alongside a cohort working through it with you. You leave with critical faculties you will use for the rest of your career.

Knowing when to trust AI is a skill. This is where you build it.

Catch AI fooling you before you act on it.

Protect the skills your work depends on.

Decide when to use AI and when to leave it alone.

A professional who uses AI daily for work, has started to quietly distrust it, and wants the judgement to know when to rely on it.

An educator or researcher who needs to think clearly about AI for their teaching, writing and students, beyond another list of prompts.

A manager, founder or team lead deciding how AI enters their team, who needs the judgement to govern it and explain it to others.

Make ambiguous decisions quickly, reduce risk, and sell the direction you choose

Former Amazon VP; 70+ patents; led 800+

OpenAI

Netflix

Anthropic

NVIDIA

Stripe

Ethan Evans

Former Amazon VP (15+ years); 70+ patents; led global teams of 800+

Cohort 1

Most professionals don’t struggle because they “can’t decide.” They struggle because decisions are messy: incomplete data, loud stakeholders, moving targets, and the fear of being wrong. The result is hesitation, endless analysis, or rushed calls that create churn and erode trust.This workshop gives you a practical system to make high-quality decisions fast, without gambling.You’ll learn a repeatable decision loop you can use immediately: Decide → Ship → Watch → Adjust. You’ll learn how to decide at ~70% certainty — moving with speed while staying grounded in signals, risk framing, and reversibility. You’ll leave with a monitoring plan for your next real decision so you know exactly what to watch, when to revisit, and what “success” looks like.And when things go sideways (because they will), you’ll have a crisis recipe that builds trust: clear ownership, clean communication, and fast learning instead of blame.Finally, you’ll get specific ways to use AI as a decision accelerator — to sharpen options, pressure-test assumptions, and surface risks — without outsourcing your judgment.

Become a trusted decision-maker: decide at 70%, ship, monitor, adjust — effectively handle crises and use AI to strengthen your judgment.

A repeatable decision loop

How to decide at ~70% certainty (without gambling)

A clear monitoring plan for your next decision

A “crisis recipe” that builds trust

Specific ways to use AI without outsourcing judgment

High-velocity ICs: Owns ambiguous work. needs a fast, safe decision loop to ship, monitor, and adjust without overthinking

People leaders: Makes calls with imperfect info, wants a repeatable system to decide, align stakeholders, and handle crises with trust

Cross-functional leads: PM/ops/eng/sales/etc, needs better decisions across teams, clear monitoring, and AI leverage without losing judgment

Agentic AI

Coding with AI

AI Workflows

Claude Code

OpenClaw

Vibe Coding

AI Evals

AI Transformation

RAG & Search

AI for PMs

AI for Engineers

AI for Designers

AI for Marketers

AI for Founders

Product Sense

Product Discovery

User Research

Prototyping

Growth

Analytics

Tech Foundations

Strategy

Influence

Leadership

Career Growth

Machine Learning

LLM Ops

Context Eng

Security

System Design

Figma

Design Systems

Visual Design

Design Strategy

Automation

Content Marketing

Demand Gen

Go-to-Market

Product Marketing

Positioning

Social Media

Brand

B2B Marketing

SEO & AEO

AI for Leaders

AI Governance

Communication

Management

People Operations

Exec Presence

Storytelling

Goal-setting

Personal Brand

Fundraising

Everyone

Operators

Data Scientists

Business Analysts

User Researchers

Customer Success

Project Managers

HR Professionals

Sales People

Lawyers

Finance

Investors

Real Estate

Educators

Creators

Executives and senior leaders who set strategy, lead teams, and drive organizational outcomes.

Broad professional audience — content relevant across many roles and functions.

Developing leadership skills — inspiring teams, building culture, navigating organizational complexity, and driving results through others.

Setting strategic direction, making high-stakes decisions, and translating vision into execution.