Workshop 1

Strategy and Principles: Connecting the Dots

Using the Decision Stack as a mental model to drive efficient and aligned decisions within your role, team, and organisation.

Workshop overview

The Decision Stack is a mental model which helps align organisations from top to bottom, and bottom to top – increasing decision-making velocity and quality throughout! Currently being used around the world in large complex organisations as well as fast-paced start-ups, this Decision Stack Workshop will help you connect the dots all the way from vision/mission through to every daily decision made in our companies. Leaders can make the necessary connections between existing theories around vision, strategy, and execution layers and understand how important they are to a cohesive approach. Individual team members can truly understand how their work connects to the bigger picture – and how to challenge their leadership where that clarity is lacking.

Using a mix of short lectures, hands-on activities, and group discussions, Martin Eriksson will teach you how to consider your full Decision Stack and deep dive into the two most challenging aspects: defining your strategy and defining your principles. Most importantly this workshop will help you understand your role in bringing these concepts back to your team in order to drive alignment and make better decisions.

What we’ll cover on the day

What is the Decision Stack – understanding it as a mental model

Defining Strategy and Product Strategy – understanding your role in defining strategy at any level of the organisation as well as practical tips for defining your product strategy

Product Principles – how they work and what they might help you achieve – along with practical activities to help you draft your principles

How to bring the product strategy and principles thinking back to your organisation – making a plan for working towards clarity within your team and the wider company

Key takeaways

How to own strategy at any level and how to help your team own strategy together

How to use principles to make and codify decisions

How to collaborate with your team to drive efficient decision-making in your organisation

Things to note

In order to make the most of this workshop we will be sending some simple pre-work questions to consider prior to the workshop.

Please remember that strategy (company, product, or otherwise) is nuanced and complex. This workshop will provide some tools and ideas for you to get started, but you probably won’t walk away with a perfectly crafted strategy.

Martin Eriksson - Your Product Strategy and Product Principles Instructor

Workshop 3

Essential Toolkit for Product Managers

This workshop is designed to give you the key techniques that you need in order to navigate the fast changing, complex environment of product management. We will cover essential tools that product managers need in order to excel in 4 key areas of product management.

1. Framing the problem

No team wants to build a product that no-one wants. Not only is this a waste of time and money, but it is a huge waste of precious human potential. We are prone to fooling ourselves into believing that we really do know what customers want. As a result, we spend most of our time adding new features, iterating on our products and blindly following product roadmaps that actually get us nowhere at all.

How might we avoid building things that no one wants?

2. Managing Demand

To succeed as a Product Manager you have to help your team focus. In an ocean seemingly full of urgent and important options, there will be some very high Cost of Delay opportunities. It’s all too easy to get distracted and confused – and miss the opportunity. You’ll have to handle demanding customers, under-pressure senior executives, impatient sales & marketing people, nervous investors and many others who want it all.

How might we utilise our team’s capacity to work on the most valuable ideas for our organisation? How might we manage conflicting priorities from multiple stakeholders?

3. Breaking Work down

Even when we know which outcomes we’re shooting for, there are hundreds of different paths we could take. And all of those potential journeys start with a first step. Breaking down work to small enough pieces improves flow and visibility and for this, you’re gonna need some sharp tools for slicing problems and solutions.

How might we decide which path to take and where to start so that we can deliver value to the customer early?

4. Forecasting and Roadmaps

Often, before the starting gun has even fired there are a bunch of people asking: “So, how much do you think this is going to cost? And, when do you think it will be done?”

How might we answer these questions and not make promises we can’t keep?

Key take-aways:

Understand at a deeper level what a product needs to do - jobs to be done

Prioritisation for pros using cost of delay

Tools for breaking work down

Basic forecasting techniques that will enable product teams to manage stakeholder expectations

Özlem Yüce - Your Essential Toolkit for Product Managers Instructor