Learning Design Club

Creating great learning experiences at tech startups

Teamshares

Bloom Institute of Technology

Teachable

GitHub

Codecademy

Parth Shah

Founder of Learning Design Club, Former Director of Education at Teamshares

You often have to balance what employees tell you what they want to learn and what the business needs from an employee.

Figure out the right learning outcomes for an employee

Most company offsite sessions are BORING! What's the ideal way to use people's time during these sessions?

Design engaging team and company offsites

Onboarding in a startup is often super disorganized. We will share tools and templates to make that way easier.

Create the ideal onboarding experience

We’ve all been in working environments that lack purpose, focus on the wrong issue(s), fail to address ingrained group dynamics, or become hijacked by conflict and difficult personalities. By the end of this two-week, live, online course, you’ll be able to contribute to or lead a working environment that: - Cultivates shared meaning around the content of their work.- Makes productive use of difference and conflict.- Focuses on the actual/real challenge at hand — both internally and externally.- Makes meaningful progress toward achieving their goals.- Offers a sense of belonging to all team members.&nbsp;The Facilitation Leadership Lab is a live, online, cohort-based course for rising and established leaders who want to sharpen their facilitation skills in order to unlock their organization’s potential, accelerate their career path, or grow their consulting practice. You’ll practice these skills and frameworks in a simulated, lab-like environment, and receive personalized feedback, 1:1 coaching, and access to a peer-learning community. Facilitating organizational change isn't magic -- you can learn the skills that will help you turn stuck organizations into thriving ones, and accelerate your career. Enroll today!

🔮 Facilitating organizational change might seem like magic — it’s not.

You’ll learn techniques and frameworks for everything that needs to take place before the gathering: building trusted relationships between the facilitator and participants, identifying the core group challenge, determining the purpose and ideal outcome(s) of the gathering, and setting the agenda.

Session 1: Setting the agenda

You’ll learn the skills — active listening, reframing and reflecting, addressing conflict, generating movement, and closing — to hold the space necessary for a successful gathering.&nbsp;

Session 2: Holding the space

You’ll cultivate the interpersonal practices — building an awareness of one’s intersectional identity and personal conflict orientation — as well as key skills like managing challenging principals to navigate complex facilitations and difficult conversations.&nbsp;

Session 3: Building understanding across difference

This session takes us from facilitating a gathering in the room to solving a problem in the world. You’ll learn skills and frameworks for diagnosing the present problem, building utopias and dystopias, and piloting strategies to help organizations think beyond their current reality and build a collective vision for the future.

Session 4: Visioning & world-building

✏️  Course syllabus

Session 1: Saturday, February 1, 12:00 - 4:00 pm ESTSession 2: Sunday, February 2, 12:00 - 4:00 pm ESTSession 3: Saturday, February 8, 12:00 - 4:00 pm ESTSession 4: Sunday, February 9, 12:00 - 4:00 pm EST

February 1 - 9 

In between the two weekends, participants will be given ‘homework’ that they can use to practice the skills they’re learning with course participants and deepen their understanding of the frameworks.

‘Homework’

📅 Course schedule

Rising or established leaders who want to level up their facilitation skills and transform their organization

Coaches and consultants who want to grow their practice with proven facilitation tools and frameworks.

Sick of bad processes preventing your organization or community from achieving its goals? This is for you!

🤔 Who is this course for? 

What you’ll get out of this course

You’ll learn proven facilitation tools and key concepts like agenda setting, active listening, relational anchoring, reframing and reflecting, conflict de-escalation, managing challenging principals, diagnosing the present adaptive challenge, and identifying ideal outcomes.

Actionable facilitation tools and frameworks.

A successful facilitation requires more than a rubric — it is an embodied craft that requires practice in dynamic contexts. You’ll practice these tools and frameworks in a simulated, lab-like environment, and receive personalized feedback, and 1:1 coaching.

Improve your craft through guided practice, peer learning, and personalized feedback. 

Facilitating change in organizations is hard, often lonely work. Leaders need peers to learn from and with. This course is your passport to a thriving peer-learning community and privileged access and discounts to future offerings from the instructors.&nbsp;

Join the Facilitation Leadership Lab peer-learning community.

You'll have the opportunity to engage 1:1 with the instructors in a free coaching session after the workshop is complete.

1:1 Coaching

Accelerate your career, unlock your organization’s potential, and build better worlds with proven facilitation skills. 

Kate Krontiris

Charley Johnson

Cohort 2

Cohort 4

Do you work with (or are) a cofounder leading product in a small startup (10-100 people) or a product line in a bigger company? Do you feel you are facing daunting expectations to build and deliver? And you are not sure you'll be able to meet them? Do you question if you know what you need to succeed? and feel the need to learn what “excellent” looks like fast? Do you think you are not getting great results fast enough? Can you clearly define success and chart a path to it? Do you feel the need to figure out where to start and make things better fast? Do you have a new project that you need to plan and deliver? Are you new to your role and need some expert guidance? If two or more of these statements apply to you, this course will help you. Imagine if you could: ✅ Identify your biggest challenges and problems when it comes to your product and team ✅ Learn how to plan and act following product management best practices ✅ Build your confidence and your skills so you can make changes that make a difference ✅ Understand the product management maturity models and take yours to the next level 🔥&nbsp;All alumni have the opportunity to join our private community with their peers and growth opportunities!

Do any of these seem familiar?

Learn product thinking and the key questions any founder or product person needs to answer to deliver results

Applied Product Thinking in Early-stage Startups

Introducing you to the highest value product frameworks and concepts for you, your career and your team

Product Frameworks & Concepts

Coaching to apply the lessons and define next steps for you

Next Steps

Course syllabus

<ul><li>Readings and learning material</li><li>Self-paced personal projects to apply what you learn</li></ul>

Asynchronous Weekly Project & Workbook

<ul><li>1 hour class + 30 minute Q&amp;A</li></ul>

Weekly Workshops

We work on what's most important to help you move forward. We can review your projects together and set you on your way to success.

Q&A Sessions

Course schedule

Cofounders and product leaders responsible for product and engineering teams at companies with 10-100 employees

New product managers and leaders working with small teams who want to fast-track their impact and career growth

Non-product people (e.g., engineers, designers, marketers) who need to act as the product person to cover for a gap on the team

Who is this course for

Learn over 20 product frameworks developed and used by top organizations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Stanford, but adapted for startups.

Understand the holistic modern product process for startups at various stages (Seed to Series B)

Evaluate your biggest challenges and create a plan using frameworks related to Product Discovery, Prioritization, and Development to get to Product Market Fit.

Create a plan to get closer to product market fit using best practices, frameworks, and models 

You'll expand your horizons and see the big picture more clearly. Then achieve quick wins to increase your impact and reduce stress and doubt

Start your highest impact actions based on your current challenges and circumstances

You will have multiple "aha" moments where you learn better ways you and your team can do things. Instead of many theories, take the few with the highest value

Gain multiple high-impact insights for yourself, your product, and your team

Understand the skills great product managers need and identify your next step

Learn the fundamental skills of great product people

Learn how to use AI (e.g., v0, Replit, Claude, ChatGPT) to improve your speed and quality of your work to get results faster

Learn where and how AI can help

Develop your most important product skills, gain confidence, and take your product team to the next level

David Jorjani

3x Head of Product (2 Acquired), U of Toronto Instructor, Organizational Coach

Cohort 11

Feb 2025

Most people think that corporate partnerships are about selling and pitching, it’s really about listening, planning, and collaborating. Position your startup to work with corporates and win that first pilot, proof-of-concept, or deal.

Stop pitching and start listening

<ul><li>Knowing who is the customer is not always as easy as it seems and picking the right markets to focus on is life or death for your startup.</li></ul>

What markets do you want to reach?

<ul><li>You'll be able to identify key decision makers in your target customer and tailor your message to speak directly to them. </li><li>﻿You'll practice finding and listening for keywords that point to their biggest pain points which keep them up at night.</li></ul>

How do you map stakeholders?

<ul><li>See what it takes to get people over the hump and try before they buy. </li><li>Find ways for you to introduce new concepts and behaviors into a big company culture.</li></ul>

De-risking your solution

<ul><li>Demonstrate the case studies or proof points you need to keep growing and eventually scale!</li></ul>

Get the social proof to scale

Let's plan to test, learn, and iterate right away in your business.

Weekly projects

Course Schedule

Founders and CEOsYou want to be more strategic in your approach when identifying the best markets and industries.

Business DevelopersYou want to find the right decision makers and establish traction by partnering with big companies.

Marketers and Product ManagersYou want to make progress even if you don't have product-market fit. We'll focus on how to get going.

Key outcomes

Be more strategic when it comes to market size and sectors, find the best industries and decision makers who need their products, then understand how these prospects think.&nbsp;

Get the right strategic footing

Conduct world class customer development. Everyone's got problems in big companies. So are you good at identifying them? That's the secret to great customer development that makes your product better and creates new channels for your business.

Solve Valuable Problems for your Future Customers

How do you ask people to take a bet on you? I'll share the importance of building a pilot program. Together, we'll go create one. You will de-risk your startup's product/service for decision-makers so they will advocate for you.

De-Risk your Solution for Decision Makers

You'll need social proof to succeed. Turns that first win into a compelling case study for others to follow

Develop Results that Produce Momentum

Discover the secrets to influencing decision-makers and designing a pilot program that gets a YES. (Now in a one-day workshop).

Vijay Rajendran

20+ years of investing in and supporting entrepreneurs on their journeys

Cohort 7

Cohort 8

An advanced-level course for senior and rising design leaders ready to address the most common challenges Design Leaders face. Learn how to build your durable design operating system to withstand scale, restructuring, evolution, and growth. Establish mechanisms and high-leverage activities that maintain quality and effectiveness for your teams and for the business. Course Topics + Content Build and activate high-impact teamsApply effective organizational design, strategic planning, and performance measurement Define and optimize your operating systemEstablish rhythms and rituals, shape a positive design culture, streamline processes and workflows, and build a robust reporting and communication strategy Identify the most effective design team structuresLearn how to choose the right team structures for your organization Activate your team’s strengths through organizational designAnticipate common challenges within and across teams and learn strategies for effectively addressing them Create your organization’s ideal design teamTogether, we’ll design and build your design team and organization 7 Live, Interactive Sessions, with timezone-friendly options for most APAC/EMEA/AMER locales - One Welcome Kickoff Session- Three Live, Interactive Learning Sessions including Q&amp;A sessions with guest experts- Two Office Hours / Q+A sessions with Kristin for personalized guidance- One Reflection/Wrap-up Session

Design Your Organization's Operating System 

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

If your events are recurring and at the same time, it might be easiest to use a single line item to communicate your course schedule to students

Tuesdays & Thursdays

Feel free to type out dates as your title as a way to communicate information about specific live sessions or other events.

May 7, 2022

Schedule items can also be used to convey commitments outside of specific time slots (like weekly projects or daily office hours).

Directors+ of Design and Operations leading teams across a portfolio of products and services.

Senior Leaders and Practitioners who are establishing, evolving, and leading a Design Organization or Operations practice.

Operations leaders who want to sharpen skills, learn new approaches and methods, and accelerate their organizations.

You'll learn how to establish mechanisms, routines, and high-leverage activities that maintain and enhance culture, quality, and community as you grow.

Best practices to build infrastructure that scales

<ul><li>Design and structure a high-performing design organization.</li><li>Effectively prioritize and plan work to maximize impact.</li><li>Utilize visual staffing tools to manage resources efficiently.</li><li>Implement accountability measures to maintain high-quality standards.</li></ul>

Build and activate high-impact teams

<ul><li>Establish effective rhythms and rituals that enhance team productivity and alignment.</li><li>Shape a positive design culture that fosters innovation and collaboration.</li><li>Optimize processes and workflows for greater efficiency.</li><li>Develop and implement robust reporting and communications</li></ul>

Define and optimize your operating system

<ul><li>Learn approaches and tactics that address common organizational and team challenges</li><li>Mitigate these challenges via a fixed vs. flexible framework</li><li>Gain new strategies to keep your team focused and thriving</li></ul>

Identify and anticipate the most common team and organizational challenges 

Guest Experience: Experienced leaders will join to share their stories and give examples of how they navigated similar challenges Instructor Experience: You'll learn directly from Kristin's first-hand experience establishing and leading multiple large-scale global design orgs

Access to first-hand experience and guidance customized to your unique situation

Included are multiple, moderated Q&amp;A sessions with Kristin and other industry leaders so that you can get expert advice on your unique challenges and aspirations.

Lightning Lessons

Creating great learning experiences at tech startups