February 2– May 27, 2027
100%
of the PMLA Class of 2026 would recommend the program to a colleague or friend
Program Highlights
Learn directly from Executives in Residence (EIR), accomplished industry experts guiding your personal learning journey and mentoring capstone teams. Past EIRs led product organizations at companies including Amazon, Oracle, SAP/Concur, Change.org, Angi.com, Arduino, Code.ai, and startups such as SumerSports and PlanHub.
- 4-month program, with online sessions scheduled weekly in the evenings
- Live, virtual class sessions led by industry executives
- 2 on-campus sessions: a half-day leadership skills training on March 13 and the final capstone presentation on May 27
- Peer-to-peer learning and collaboration opportunities through capstone project
- Capstone team meetings with executive advisors
- Ongoing online discussions with Executives in Residence and your classmates
Course overview
The program is delivered primarily through live, virtual sessions. Capstone teams collaborate throughout the course to create deliverables and build a plan that addresses the issues in the capstone case study, demonstrating applied knowledge of the material. The program culminates in a live presentation of each team’s recommendation before a panel of product executives.
The curriculum is built around a single immersive case study that runs throughout the program. Course material is structured to align with the four stages of the product lifecycle (Sense, Solve, Scale, and Sustain) and covers the key product leadership skills needed to sense and solve customer problems in ways that align with business strategy and long-term sustainability.
A half-day on-campus session adds a leadership layer, covering:
- Executive presence and communication
- Career trajectory and positioning
- Building a coherent career throughline
- Ownership as a leadership practice
Learning Objectives
By the end of this program, participants will be able to:
- Analyze a product’s commercial position within a portfolio framework.
- Distinguish real customer knowledge from assumption.
- Construct a solution-agnostic problem statement.
- Apply creative frameworks to generate novel solutions.
- Assess a recommendation’s resilience through scenario planning.
- Evaluate commercial viability through a PRFAQ.
- Diagnose breakdowns in leadership alignment.
- Articulate how accountability shifts when AI acts on users directly.
Program Design
The Product Management Leadership Accelerator is designed by Lead Executive in Residence Leslie Grandy
Leslie Grandy is a global, first-to-market product executive and board advisor with a 25+ year career delivering game-changing products for top brands—Best Buy, Discovery, T-Mobile, Apple, and Amazon. Throughout her career, Leslie has been at the front end of innovation, launching the first paid video streaming service, RealOne SuperPass, with over 1 million subscribers after co-authoring a patent for a system that provides integrated media; delivering the first Android mobile device, the T-Mobile G1, and the first cellular-enabled digital picture frame, the T-Mobile Cameo; and leading Best Buy’s Digital Innovation Lab. Leslie is the founder of The Product Guild, a product and innovation advisory services company through which she has advised both early-stage ventures and numerous publicly traded companies on innovation and new product development, including Starbucks, Oracle Power, and Red Robin Gourmet Burgers. Leslie is also an IDEO-trained leader in design thinking who inspires audiences to achieve their creative potential.
PROGRAM EXPECTATIONS
Working in capstone teams, participants apply course lessons to a real-world product challenge that demands genuine analytical judgment and a defensible rationale, rather than textbook or AI-generated answers. Capstone teams produce a deliverable at each product lifecycle stage, building toward a final capstone recommendation that reflects real-world product decision-making.
Outside of the scheduled weekly sessions, team members will be expected to continue developing their final recommendations through activities such as understanding product-market fit, testing hypotheses and prototypes, and validating assumptions. EIRs will be available as consultants to teams as they develop their recommendations.
ONLINE INFORMATION SESSIONS
Application and Fees
This program is designed for experienced product managers who are already leading product strategy and owning a product roadmap, in addition to delivering features. The curriculum moves quickly, assumes fluency with the product development process, and puts participants inside complex strategic decisions from the first session.
The case study at the heart of the program requires participants to draw on real experience — reading financial data critically, recognizing stakeholder dynamics, and making commercial judgments that only come from having shipped something and lived with the consequences.
That is why applicants are expected to bring recent, hands-on product leadership experience. The peer-to-peer learning that makes this program distinctive depends on a cohort where everyone in the room can contribute confidently.
ideal candidates have:
- Progressive senior role(s) within product management.
- A minimum of 3 years of experience in product management.
- Responsibility for the roadmap of one or more products.
- Experience shipping at least one version of a product from concept to launch.
Application Deadline: January 7, 2027
Receive notification: January 14, 2027
Program fee due: January 19, 2027
Program fee: $2,995
We offer the option to pay the fees in three equal installments. To learn more, please email us at [email protected]
Start Your Application
Upon completion of the program you will receive a verified badge from UW Executive Education to put on your LinkedIn profile.