People Discovery: build happy high-performing teams by using your product skills

Sascha Brossmann

Excellence & Impact for Product Leaders

Turn your product skills inwards to become a high-impact leader

Research is clear: most teams underperform. To make it worse, many organisations struggle to define how their employees will be successful at teamwork. People are complex – they require work to make the work work. :)

This can be hard even for seasoned leaders. As a rookie manager, the challenge becomes even more daunting: suddenly you're facing entirely new problems that require equally new skills. It often feels like assembling your parachute while already falling.

It does not have to be that way.

I've been that manager. Muddling through, failures along the way. Until something clicked:

As product people we habitually point all our skills outward, at users. Our organisations and the people we work with remain a blind spot.

This changes fundamentally when we reframe what we already know.

People Discovery turns our skills inward: to understand the people we work with, surface needs and capabilities, and convert that into trust, cohesion, and visibly better work. A win/win for people and performance.

With that we can approach our teams and organisations like a product: human-centric, outcome-focused, agile, strategic, intentionally designed.

It profoundly changes the game. Like to see how?

What you’ll learn

Build on your product skills to excel at team-building, improving performance, seeing what others are missing and enabling impactful change.

Accelerate your management expertise by turning discovery & co. inwards
Teams and organisations as product – from accumulated accidental management decisions to intentional design
Map your product skills to concrete leadership situations – a mental model ready to apply tomorrow

Learning to see what others are missing: mental frames to power your sensemaking in teams and organisations
Bottom-up awareness: discover who is here, what they bring, and what they need to make great work happen
Context awareness: modeling the business environment that governs every team's purpose and fitness

A component framework for great team charters – and how to prioritise them. With deep dives (team principles, communication, meetings, …)
Facilitating inclusive agreement in empowered teams
Applying behavioural design: rituals for cohesion and performance

Use case: hiring, recruiting, reteaming – meet the team, probe the culture, …
Use case: onboarding – accelerate new relations, understand the organisation, …
Use case: development and evolution – foster team fitness with discovery-informed practices already exercised

Getting over the "coach vs. judge" manager role crunch
Making sense of team issues – tools and models for seeing, framing, understanding, and getting unstuck
Designing enabling interventions that empower good change

Moving from stakeholder management to constructive relationships
A product-friendly lens for complex change
Bonus nugget: enabling agentive AI with explored key principles (intentionality, explicity, …)

Learn directly from Sascha

Sascha Brossmann

Contact

Fractional CPO · Executive Advisor · Community Builder

See all products from Sascha

Who this course is for

New managers coming from a product, design, tech, or related role who want to hit the ground running.
Experienced managers looking for new ways to improve both team performance and talent attrition.
Senior leaders discontent with the status quo who want to align human flourishing with business impact.

Prerequisites

Senior product-related experience
You have senior work experience in a product-related role. You're confident with your skills so that you can start building on them.
Ideally: you have a team to get right into practice
Both a team you're leading or one of equal peers (e.g. exec team) works. No team? We will also use roleplay and an AI team for course work.

What's included

Live sessions

Learn directly from Sascha Brossmann in a real-time, interactive format.

High-touch/high-availability

The course generally follows a high-touch/high-availability approach, using both synchronous and asynchronous formats. I strictly limit additional commitments when running a cohort so that I can stay maximally responsive to my students.

Shape the course to your needs

The syllabus isn't a waterfall plan but an agile roadmap. You get plenty of feedback opportunities to help me manage the course like a modern product and tailor it to your needs.

1:1 coaching – free for the first cohort

Individual coaching sessions that help you get from insight over action to tangible results while keeping sensitive topics private.

Facilitated mastermind sessions

Guided reflection and sparring in your peer group enables you to both broaden and deepen your understanding while co-creating solutions to obstacles you encounter.

Community of practice

Stay accountable and share insights with like-minded professionals.

Ready-to-use resources

Templates, frameworks, exercises & co. that you can start using with your team right away. Plus all the references to take a deep dive when you want to.

Lifetime access

Go back to course content and recordings whenever you need to.

Inclusion discounts (out of work, disabilities, low-income region, …)

Building better companies requires leaders from more varied walks of life. Not just the most privileged ones. As someone with an invisible disability I'll happily level the playing field for you. Let's shatter those glass ceilings. Reach out for a discount!

Maven Guarantee

Your purchase is backed by the Maven Guarantee.

Course syllabus

Week 1

Aug 31—Sep 6

Kick-off

Aug
31
Cohort Kick-Off – Key Ideas · Course principles in action: cohort agreement
Mon 8/314:00 PM—5:30 PM (UTC)

People and business discovery

Sep
3
People and business discovery
Thu 9/34:00 PM—5:30 PM (UTC)

Week 2

Sep 7—Sep 13

Getting to effective agreements that stick (1)

Sep
7
Agreements that stick (1)
Mon 9/74:00 PM—5:30 PM (UTC)
Sep
10
Agreements that stick (2)
Thu 9/104:00 PM—5:30 PM (UTC)

Schedule

Live sessions

3 hrs / week

90 min events each Monday & Thursday — Monday sessions focus on _opening_: introducing _new_ knowledge and helping you get started with applying it. — Thursday sessions focus on _expansion_ and _closure_: going broader or deeper, answering questions, solving challenges, and improving your practice. — Schedule up for discussion – get in touch!

Mon, Aug 31
4:00 PM—5:30 PM (UTC)
Thu, Sep 3
4:00 PM—5:30 PM (UTC)
Mon, Sep 7
4:00 PM—5:30 PM (UTC)

Projects

2-6 hrs / week

No sterile laboratory exercises disconnected from your work. As far as possible we _integrate course work directly with your job_. Ideally with your actual team. You don't have one right now? We're also using highly effective role play in the course and a synthetic AI team to help you practice.

Lessons (async content)

1-4 hrs / week

Lessons focus on references for everything featured in live sessions and on additional content. Occasionally they will contain preparatory materials.

Testimonials

We learned so much from you! (…) We're a real executive team now.
Tatyana Eeliseva
CEO, HealthCaters
(…) professional and friendly from start to finish, being extremely thorough to provide a service tailored to our requirements. Their leadership workshops provided the opportunity for managers to reflect, explore and challenge the status quo, which ignited unity and a greater understanding amongst our leaders. Thank you.
Diane Richardson
Head of HR at Quidco
acework(*) has been instrumental in helping our member companies address a very real and very pressing pain-point – transitioning technology teams to remote work. From successful management strategies to plugging into global talent, their insights and expertise have been invaluable.
(*) Sascha led acework's advisory programme
Jonathan Lê
Training Director, New Media Manitoba
We started the ‘Remote Leadership’ workshop with curiosity. All of the over 30 managers attending provided very positive feedback and wanted more. Everyone shared the same clear impression of how crucial it is for us to deepen the topic. That's why we are including acework in our leadership program.
Anke Cristale
Head of HR, VSB Group
I wish I had had lecturers like you back then at my business school!
Madini Liebscher
entrepreneurship school participant