UMD, USMx: Modern Product Leadership

Product Managers are masters at internal sales, team building, delegation, and empowerment. They also know that great product management careers are not built alone. From envisioning a product strategy to correctly portraying the product roadmap, the process must be inclusive, interactive, and motivating with modern leadership techniques. As your products grow, you’ll also need to skills to manage teams of teams. This course will enable you to align product teams, product designs, and product development for speed and innovation at scale.

Product Managers have one of the toughest, most demanding positions in the modern product organization. They must be both visionaries and evangelists, as well as facilitators and coaches. Often they must communicate clearly and effectively across a wide range of audiences. To do this well means being the expert in a number of key competencies of leadership.

Modern leadership principles emphasize empowerment and ownership. Meanwhile products require teams to work together at scale. This course will starts by resetting on what is good leadership based on actual data and studies. Not half-proven theories or intuition. Drawing on actual research and met studies we’ll cover the key elements of what makes a good product leader based on work by Jim Collins John Maxwell, Peter Northouse, Melissa Perri, and more. One of the key findings is that a leader’s success is driven by their team, and how well that team aligns with the mission. Understanding this, we’ll show you how to maximize the team’s effect on the leader and vice versa.

Next we’ll dive into how to build the team. This is essential if you want to move the culture and practices of your organization to truly thrive. We’ll also go over principles of encouraging ownership and continuously replenish your leadership pipeline.

In the third week, we’ll look at the core influential competencies of a product evangelist. This means vision setting, roadmapping problems, setting goals and objectives, demoing effectively and more. We’ll also discuss the art of negotiating across departments and interests, and how to manage conflicts to resolution quickly through good leadership and problem solving.

Finally we’ll turn to frameworks for organizing teams at multiple scales of product development. Whether an aspiring product manager or Head of Product, this will enable better understanding of how leaders align teams. Starting with basic Agile processes we’ll move on to scaling techniques for integrating hardware and software teams of teams. We’ll also discuss how to deploy influence and guide the work with discovery frameworks and techniques at scale. Understanding core processes and trade-offs at scale is critical to leading products to success.