May 13 – December 10, 2024
Apply by April 19, 2024
Growth hack your product management career with guidance from a curated community of Executives in Residence who are dedicated to helping the next generation of product leaders become their best. Take advantage of this unique opportunity to learn from their expertise, hear how they forged their career paths, and receive advice tailored to your goals.
The program provides workshops on best practices in product management and how to position yourself for that next big promotion or career jump.
In addition to teaching topic-focused workshops, each month Executives in Residence will host office hour sessions, moderate online group discussions, and lead book clubs highlighting titles chosen by them as being game changing for your career. This multi-faceted approach will help you apply what you learn during the course to your projects at work and to your career development.
Program Highlights
- 14 Executives in Residence — industry experts guiding your learning and giving personalized career advice
- Live online workshops, office hours, and book clubs
- In-person orientation and graduation at UW Seattle to spend time with your classmates off-line
- Ongoing online discussions with Executives in Residence and your classmates
- 3-6 sessions per month, 1-1.5 hours per session
- Experienced peer group of product management professionals
Content Overview and Schedule
Sessions take place at 8-9am, 12-1pm, or in the evening to maximize the downtime during your day. The program manager, your guide throughout the course, will send calendar invites with instructions for how to join each live online session to help you keep you organized. Carve out the time to intentionally focus on your career path and gain a competitive edge.
Workshops
Topic-focused, informative sessions led by industry experts
Live online workshops provide direct access to seasoned professionals who bring real-world experience and insights into the latest trends, strategies, and best practices within the industry. Workshops will foster meaningful discussions, collaborative problem-solving, and networking opportunities with your peers.
Office Hours
Open-ended informal talks pertinent to your career
Tap into the brain trust of the Executives in Residence. Come with questions, leave with expert advice on ways to stand out to employers. Share experiences with your peers and gain insights into the objectives they are pursuing in their own careers.
Book Club
Discuss must-read, career-enhancing books
The books included in the program will spark ideas, strengthen your leadership skills, and expand your knowledge of product management best practices and the tech industry overall. Each title has been selected by one of the Executives in Residence who will share what resonates with them most about the book and how they have been able to apply it to their career.
All books are provided at the beginning of the program so you can read them on your schedule to prepare for the live online sessions.
Online Discussion Group
Stay connected to your classmates and build upon the momentum you’ve gained in the scheduled sessions by joining in the ongoing online chats. The group conversation is moderated by different Executives in Residence each month, so you’ll have the chance to ask them timely questions between scheduled sessions.
Download the PDF version of the full calendar of class sessions here.
See what is scheduled for each month of the program below:
*Events and speakers subject to change
Monday, May 13, 4pm
UW Seattle Campus
Meet your classmates and program staff at the in-person orientation at the UW Seattle Campus and start building connections.
Workshop: Customer Insights
Friday, May 17, 12-1:30pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Jessi Alva
Learning about customer insights is fundamental to being an effective product manager. By leveraging customer feedback and data to inform your decisions, you can create products that are more valuable, relevant, and successful in the market.
After participating in this workshop, you will be able to:
- Define the different types of customer insights.
- Learn how to gather and analyze customer insights.
- Be aware of the legal and privacy concerns for gathering and sharing customer data.
- Understand how to leverage customer insights within the product development lifecycle.
Office Hour: Hiring and Developing Talent
Monday, May 20, 4-5pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Jessi Alva
Book Club: The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed by Alberto Savoia
Friday, May 31, 12-1pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Marcello Majonchi
May Online Group Discussion
Executives in Residence: Marcello Majonchi and John Yurcisin
Wednesday, June 5, 4-5:30pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Matt Carr
Career growth can be a daunting and opaque area. This workshop will provide strategies and encourage discussion amongst the participants to provide feedback to each other. After participating in the workshop, you will have a drafted Career Plan, the skills to help you with the immediate next steps in your career journey, plus seeds to plant to help in the longer-term.
Discussion will focus on:
- What makes the PM role so unique? – the PM as CEO of a product
- Deconstructing the PM role – the Top 10 skills for a successful PM to master
- Making sure you have “full lifecycle” experience – product inception/idea, product build, launch, go-to-market, operational management
- Navigating variations in PM roles
- PM career inflection points
- Stakeholders – those who influence your career growth and how to influence them
Office Hours: Career Management
Monday, June 10, 5-6:00pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Dave Fleischman
Book Club: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
Thursday, June 12, 4-5pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Matt Carr
Office Hour: Customer Discovery
Friday, June 14, 8-9am
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence John Yurcisin
Book Club: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Monday, June 24, 4-5pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Omar Shahine
Workshop: Balancing Product Roadmap
Friday, June 28, 12-1pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Sudha Elavarti
This workshop can equip you with the skills and knowledge to create powerful product roadmaps, enhance your ability to prioritize opportunities, and strengthen your communication and collaboration skills to ultimately drive product success.
By the end of the workshop, you will be able to:
- Apply a framework for building balanced product roadmaps considering all stakeholder needs.
- Analyze and prioritize opportunities from various sources (business, customer, hackathons, data) to ensure resources are allocated effectively, maximizing impact.
- Develop strategic narratives that connect roadmap initiatives to product vision and business goals to gain buy-in and support.
- Communicate roadmaps effectively to diverse stakeholders using frameworks and visuals.
- Collaboratively refine and adjust roadmaps based on feedback and changing priorities.
June Online Group Discussion
Executive in Residence: Robert Neer
Tuesday, July 9, 5-6pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Srishti Sofat
Vision without execution is “hallucination.” In this session we will talk about how a PM can be more results oriented and the tools, process, and attitude required to deliver results in a cross-functional and global organization.
Office Hour: Open Q&A
Wednesday, July 17, 4-5pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Matt Carr
Book Club: Hidden Potential by Adam Grant
Friday, July 19, 8-9am
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence John Yurcisin
Workshop: Creating, Implementing, and Iterating on Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for an Effective Product Lifecycle
Tuesday, July 23, 5-6pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Alam Ali
Product Managers are responsible for defining the right functionality for a product and/or business. One of the most effective ways to do this is to measure success and iterate fast. To be able to do this, defining the right metrics is key. The right metrics are not easy to define. Learning now to build metrics/OKRs in a practical, realistic way is a key to the success of the product. This workshop will provide a brief overview of OKRs and the methodology to create and maintain them, a hands-on exercise to create OKRs, and feedback on the OKRs created.
Book Club: Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model by Marty Cagan
Wednesday, July 31, 12-1pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Robert Neer
July Online Group Discussion
Executive in Residence: Alam Ali
Office Hour: Product Strategy
Friday, August 2, 12-1pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Rob Katz
Workshop: Being an Owner: Nurturing an Owner’s Mindset in Product Making
Friday, August 9, 12-1
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Omar Shahine
This workshop is designed for senior product managers who want to cultivate an ownership mindset in themselves and their teams. An ownership mindset is the attitude of taking personal responsibility for the success of the product, proactively identifying and addressing problems, and being fully engaged in the work. An ownership mindset can generate energy, drive impact, and foster a culture of excellence and innovation.
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Define the concept of ownership and explain its benefits and implications for product managers.
- Recognize the signs and symptoms of a lack of ownership mindset in themselves and others.
- Apply strategies and techniques to overcome obstacles and cultivate an ownership mindset in their work.
- Use the ownership mindset to generate energy, drive impact, and deliver excellence in product making.
- Model and promote the ownership mindset in their teams and across the organization.
Book Club: Think Again by Adam Grant
Wednesday, August 14, 12-1pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence: Karim Meghji
Workshop: Human-centered Product Practices: Customer Discovery
Thursday, August 22, 5-6pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Robert Neer
Product managers must have confidence and conviction that their product is solving meaningful customer problems in ways that work for the business. How do you gain that conviction?
Many product managers find their energy largely consumed with activities deep in the software development lifecycle: user-story creation, acceptance criteria development, non-functional requirements, grooming, bug triage, and other day-to-day collaborative efforts in the BUILD phase. How do you know you are leading the team to build the RIGHT thing, anchored in customer insight and meeting a real, meaningful customer need in a way that drives business outcomes?
Through this workshop you will better understand the mindsets necessary for conducting effective product discovery, learn and practice techniques and approaches to conduct unbiased discovery, form hypotheses, and approach validation. You will gain confidence that your products will be successful and exceed your customer’s expectations.
As more and more of the product lifecycle can be automated and augmented with AI, Product managers who bring their uniquely human skills to the role will thrive and create the most successful products. These human skills are critical in effective customer discovery, driven by listening, synthesis, creativity, empathy, experimentation and validation. This workshop will give participants a discovery framework and active practice in key techniques.
Office Hour: Leadership Skills
Wednesday, August 28, 4-5pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Srishti Sofat
August Online Group Discussion
Executives in Residences: Jessi Alva and Matt Carr
Book Club: Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
Monday, September 9, 12-1pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Jono Luk
Workshop: Command the Room: How to Convince Your Audience They Need What You Have
Friday, September 12, 5-6:30pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Jono Luk
As much as product managers should know how to build things or lead teams that do, they should know how the product is used and the value it brings to their customers. Knowing what their customers view as important leads to better product development.
This workshop will take you through the list of “things that customers and businesses could care about” as the starting place to anticipate the potential plays and have discussions that lead to positive outcomes. These same “care abouts” will help with better prioritization and trade-off decision making during the product development lifecycle since you will be able to better account for what the customers/businesses need.
By the end of the workshop, you will know:
- How to position product capabilities in terms of what the customer needs.
- How to find ways to land and then expand (either because your customer says “I don’t need [your solution]” or “I can’t change [my existing solutions] now”).
- How to read the room and find carrots in a discussion.
- How to think about prioritizing core engineering work based on the conversation strategies above.
Workshop: The Science of Product
Tuesday, September 17, 5-6:30pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Dave Flesichman
Office Hour: Leadership Skills
Friday, September 19, 12-1pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Robert Neer
Workshop: Product Strategy: Learning from and Developing Successful Flywheels
Tuesday, September 24, 8-9am
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence John Yurcisin
This workshop will explore best practices of world-class companies and how they get their flywheels to spin, which will help you to think about sustainable product strategy. We will go discuss both for-profit and non-profit organizations – why and how they have developed flywheels, what triggers them, and how they are sustained. Learn the key elements to consider in crafting a flywheel as well as potential pitfalls and challenges in the process. This will be a practical workshop using real-life examples and offering applicable takeaways.
Book Club: Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success by Joshua Seiden
Friday, September 26, 5-6pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Dave Flesichman
September Online Group Discussion
Executives in Residence: Omar Shahine and Dave Flesichman
Friday, October 4, 12-1pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Omar Shahine
Workshop: Converting and Idea into a Successful Product
Tuesday, October 8, 4-5pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Marcello Majonchi
Office Hour: Open Q&A
Thursday, October 10, 5-6pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Alam Ali
Workshop: Setting Product Metrics
Wednesday, October 16, 12-1pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Karim Meghji
You cannot improve what you don’t measure; this is what motivates product managers in the relentless pursuit of finding, understanding, measuring, baselining and ultimately goal setting against their product’s metrics. When used well, product metrics can tell the story of the user – what delights them, what frustrates them, what engages them, and what keeps them coming back – in an objective, and high conviction way, such that product managers can make insightful, confident, and customer-centric decisions on what to do next to make their product better.
After participating in this workshop, you will better understand the vocabulary of metrics, the different types of metrics, why metrics matter, when metrics matter, and how to approach defining metrics for your products.
Book Club: System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Friday, October 18, 12-1pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Rob Katz
Office Hour: Open Q&A
Wednesday, October 23, 4-5pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Karim Meghji
Book Club: The Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine… And What Smart Companies Are Doing About It by Cynthia Rabe
Tuesday, October 29, 5-6pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Leslie Grandy
October Online Group Discussion
Executives in Residence: Karim Meghji and Jono Luk
Wednesday, November 6, 4-5pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Leslie Grandy
Workshop: Build Creative Confidence to Generate Breakthrough Ideas
Tuesday, November 12, 5-6pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Leslie Grandy
This workshop will offer tangible exercises to build creative muscle and empower you to uncover novel solutions, even when collaborating with generative AI tools. With the rise of computational creativity, boosting product managers’ creative confidence will ensure that the large language models and outputs of generative AI are deployed and interpreted imaginatively and ethically.
Participants will be introduced to the practice and science of creative thinking; individual and group activities will enable members to explore how to use the different techniques in their daily work. After participating in this workshop, product managers should understand:
- How to use multiple techniques (e.g., trigger mechanisms, storytelling, the MacGyver Method, and more) that can disrupt linear thinking and accelerate customer, business, and personal outcomes.
- How to intentionally break patterns and biases that limit creativity in their work.
- Ways to leverage human creativity in a world of generative AI.
Office Hour: Product Strategy
Friday, November 15, 12-1pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Jono Luk
Book Club: Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr
Tuesday, November 19, 5-6pm
Live Online Session with Executive in Residence Alam Ali
November Online Group Discussion
Executives in Residence: Rob Katz and Leslie Grandy
Executive in Residence: Srishti Sofat
Graduation and Workshop: Responsible & Ethical AI/Tech
Tuesday, December 10, 4pm
In-person at UW Seattle Campus
Executive in Residence: Rob Katz
As PMs in 2024 and beyond, we are all facing the unprecedented change posed by AI technology. For AI to best realize its promise, it’s important for its development to be guided by Responsible AI principles and best practices.
Attendees of the December capstone event will get an overview of the opportunities facing PMs when building with AI and the imperative to ensure that responsible AI principles are best practices are incorporated into the product/engineering lifecycles. We will do an interactive workshop called “Consequence Scanning” to give you some real-life experience in applied Responsible AI. Workshop participants will learn how to assess AI ethics risks and opportunities and how to mitigate them as part of the product development process.
Application and Fees
The program is for ambitious, experienced Product Managers who want to invest in their knowledge of industry best practices and their ability to advance their career goals.
Applicant Requirements
- Have held or currently hold the title of Product Manager for a minimum of 3 years
- Recently or currently personally responsible for one or more products
- Experience shipping at least one new product or feature
Receive notification: April 26, 2024
Program fee due: May 1, 2024
Program fee: $1,950
Discounts are available for UW and Executive Education alumni, non-profit organizations, and companies sponsoring 3 or more to attend the program together. For group enrollments, please contact [email protected].
Upon completion of at least 80% attendance to the program you will receive a verified badge from UW Executive Education to put on your LinkedIn profile.