In addition to our full-length workshops and series, we offer stand-alone half-day and 90-minute sessions for clients who need focused training on a particular topic. We often deliver these as part of a larger event like an offsite meeting or internal conference.
If nothing on this list seems quite right, we often craft customized sessions for our clients. Contact us to discuss your particular situation.
Half-day Sessions
These can be done as stand-alone workshops or combined into a full day or even a custom series. Virtual and in-person options are avaialble.
Leading Through Complexity: Empowerment, Adaptability, & Creative Leadership
Today’s leaders face the daunting challenge of navigating an ever more complex business landscape, where the old ways of leading fall short. This complexity not only demands a new level of adaptability but also requires a leadership style that balances the pursuit of business results with the fundamental human need for empowerment and creative expression. This core half-day session in our series addresses this challenge head-on by introducing participants to the Cynefin framework for navigating complexity, the Three Jobs model for managing empowered teams, and the Leadership Circle for personal leadership growth. By the end of the session, leaders are equipped with the tools and insights to lead with confidence in unpredictable environments, ensure their teams achieve peak performance, and foster a culture that brings together busi- ness success with a deeply human-centric approach.
Crafting Purpose and Vision: The Heart of Effective Leadership
The skill most highly correlated with effective leadership is the ability to create clarity through strong pur- pose and vision. This is as true for a project as it is for an organization. Unfortunately, the typical purpose or vision statement is too vague and “corporate” sounding to inspire and to set as a clear foundation for strat- egy, goals, and execution. In this session, you’ll learn the characteristics of effective and ineffective mission, purpose, and vision statements, as well as a method for reliably harnessing the creativity of a group to write a great one.
Creating High-Performing Teams & Org Structures
Establishing the optimal team and organizational structure directly impacts a company’s ability to succeed, but it’s a complex puzzle. Without the right structure, teams work on the wrong things, get stuck waiting on others in order to deliver anything of value, and never get into the flow that is the hallmark of all great work. This workshop reveals how leaders create the six conditions for effective teams and introduces strategies for effective organizational structures that emphasize the importance of collaboration within teams for complex tasks and coordination across teams for ordered tasks, thereby enhancing overall team performance and organizational agility.
Coaching for Growth
As leaders try to be less directive, to avoid the micromanagement everyone hates, they can end up adopting a hands-off approach that provides neither clear direction nor growth for employees. Turns out coaching is a skill most leaders haven’t had a chance to develop. And just asking more questions doesn’t do the job. In this session, you’ll learn and practice a coaching approach leaders use to catalyze individual and team growth, broader and deeper thinking, and greater collaborative capability. This session is consistently rated among the most immediately applicable and transformative concepts we teach leaders—coaching skills really are a multiplier!
Giving and Receiving Feedback
Solving complex problems often hinges on effective feedback, yet many struggle with how to give and re- ceive feedback well. This gap can hinder personal and organizational growth, as feedback is crucial for iden- tifying areas of improvement and innovation. This workshop introduces a simple structure to ask for and receive feedback that builds trust, celebrates progress, and gives insight into possible improvements. Partic- ipants leave the workshop more comfortable and confident in asking for and providing feedback, improving problem-solving capabilities and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
Giving Inspiring Presentations
Leaders often need to give presentations that not only inform but also inspire and motivate their teams. It’s a crucial skill that can sometimes fall flat in execution. The ability to craft and deliver talks that grab and keep attention is key for any leader, as it directly influences team engagement, motivation, and alignment. This session helps leaders hone their speaking skills, emphasizing the creation of a clear narrative, engaging storytelling, and impactful visuals, all designed to captivate and resonate with your specific audience. By mastering these techniques, leaders enhance their ability to share vision, drive change, and foster a culture of innovation and collaboration within their teams.
Leading Effective 1:1s and Team Meetings
In today’s fast-paced work environment, ineffective meetings can significantly hinder an organization’s pro- ductivity, leading to frustration and a waste of valuable time and energy. Anyone leading a meeting can enhance their facilitation skills, transforming meetings from time-consuming obligations into powerful plat- forms for collaboration and decision-making. This session helps leaders go from merely “running a meeting” to using the DAVID approach to actively guide discussions towards meaningful outcomes. By adopting these strategies, leaders will not only improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their meetings but also foster a more engaged, motivated, and cohesive team dynamic, ensuring that every meeting becomes a valuable opportunity for progress, innovation, and connection.
Resolving Individual and Team Conflict
Unresolved conflicts in the workplace lead to decreased productivity, low morale, and slower decision-mak- ing. These issues persist because individuals often lack the tools to navigate conflict effectively. But conflict isn’t inherently bad, in fact, integrating conflicting ideas is critical to great leadership, team work, and decision making. This workshop introduces three simple but highly effective tools that help leaders resolve conflict in a way that improves outcomes and builds trust. By applying these strategies, participants will learn to trans- form conflicts into constructive dialogue, fostering a more collaborative and resilient team environment.
Setting Personal and Team Goals
Many individuals struggle to set and achieve personal or professional goals, often setting vague ambitions that lack clarity and fail to inspire or drive meaningful progress. This challenge stems from a lack of under- standing about what makes a goal truly empowering and how well-crafted goals can enhance motivation and performance. In this workshop, we’ll explore the power of goal-setting through personal stories, re- search-backed strategies, and interactive exercises, focusing on autonomy, mastery, purpose, clarity, feed- back, and the right level of challenge. By employing these principles, participants will learn to set compelling, achievable goals that not only boost their performance but also align with their personal and professional growth aspirations.
Effective Stakeholder Engagement
Complex work benefits from early and frequent stakeholder engagement. Unfortunately, for most teams, stakeholder engagement is largely reactive and often unhelpful. In this session, we dig into 3 key skills for effective stakeholder engagement: (1) how to identify who to talk with, how often, and about what aspects of your work; (2) how to present work-in-progress to stakeholders in a way that’s most likely to get valuable feedback; and (3) how to structure a feedback session to it’s engaging and helpful.
Product Management in a Complex World
Most product development treats the world as predictable. “If we just do good analysis and planning, we’ll have killer products that sell well and make a difference.” However, the world isn’t predictable, it’s complex. In this session we share how to distinguish between predictable and unpredictable problems, and we derive a more effective model for product development in a complex world. This gives organizations a clearer path to success.
90-minute Sessions
Our 90-minute sessions can be stand-alone or combined into a half- or full-day workshop or a series. For example, “Modeling Value” and “Prioritization Beyond the Spreadsheet” combine nicely into a half-day workshop about focusing on the most important work.
Typically, 90-minute sessions are delivered virtually, but in-person options are possible, especially for large events or with multiple sessions combined together.
The Product Owner Role in Scrum
The Product Owner role in Scrum is the one that most shapes whether the team will have a meaningful impact. It doesn’t matter how good a development team is if no one wants what they build! But the Scrum Guide mostly handwaves around most of the Product Owner’s work. In this session, we examine the role of the Product Owner in Scrum in the real world. What do they do? When do they do it? What’s their responsi- bility with each of the Scrum artifacts and events? And when the PO role gets split among multiple people, as is often the case in larger organizations, how do you ensure everything gets done and information doesn’t get lost between the roles?
Customer Interviews & Customer Profiles
Have you fallen victim to one of the classic product management blunders? The most famous, of course, is not talking to customers at all. But only slightly less well-known is talking to customers and asking them what features you should build! In this session, we look at how to get customers talking about the things they know best: their own context, problems, and goals. We introduce a way of approaching customer interviews that’s efficient and fun, and we give you a canvas for capturing and sharing what you learn about your target customers so you can build alignment across your teams.
Collaboratively Drafting a Compelling Product Vision
Most vision statements are vague wastes of time. People roll their eyes when someone references the vision or talks about creating or updating it. But a good vision helps create engagement and focus. Engagement because we want to know why our work matters. Focus because a good vision should help us prioritize. In this session we’ll share our proprietary method for collaborative vision drafting that allows everyone to con- tribute without falling victim to the lowest common denominator outcome too many of us have experienced.
Finding the First Slice of a Complex Initiative with Feature Mining
Many Agile practitioners are comfortable working iteratively in small slices once there’s a basic foundation, but struggle with where to start on a new project, product, initiative, or other big idea. Participants in this session will learn how to use our Feature Mining technique to find early slices of any big idea that provide value, learning, and risk-mitigation. Our clients have used this successfully for all kinds of software products, for combined software and hardware systems, and even beyond software in such areas as park construction and office remodeling. In some cases, initiatives with apparent significant up-front infrastructure require- ments were able to ship a valuable slice to customers after just one or two sprints.
User Stories, Splitting Features & Stories
User stories can be one of the best tools for bringing the customer perspective all the way down into the details of the work, increasing motivation and just making it more likely you’ll build the right thing. But for many teams, what they call user stories are actually tasks or components forced into a template (a template, by the way, that we mostly don’t recommend even for real user stories). And when it comes to splitting sto- ries small enough to complete in a few days? That can feel too hard or too time-consuming. In this session, we cover how user stories are intended to work and how to use a simple set of patterns to split features and large stories into small ones, maintaining the user perspective the whole time.
The PO Board & Continuous Backlog Refinement
Almost everyone we talk to describes backlog refinement (or grooming) as a laborious chore that no one en- joys. Most of the time, they’re describing a weekly meeting where the team moves through Jira tickets one at a time. In this session, we’ll share a way to visualize the product backlog that turn backlog refinement into a calm, sustainable practice that involves team members at just the right time for just the right conversations.
Managing Stakeholders
Most product managers find themselves in a reactive mode with their stakeholders. And in a big organi- zation with dozens of stakeholders for any initiative, that can fill up a PM’s inbox and calendar. Scrum isn’t much help—the Scrum events really aren’t the right place for most stakeholder interactions. In this session, you’ll learn a model for visualizing who your stakeholders are, how often you should interact with them, and what you should talk about. You’ll pick up strategies for nudging unhealthy stakeholder relationships into a healthier place. And you’ll turn stakeholder management into a sustainable and proactive part of your work.
Modeling Value
What do you mean when you say a feature is valuable? Is it the same thing your stakeholders mean? In this session, you’ll learn our 5-step method for modeling and communicating about value. It’ll become clear what’s worth doing, what’s worth doing first, and what’s not worth doing at all.
Prioritization Beyond the Spreadsheet
Too often prioritization is treated as a math problem–assign the right values to the right attributes and let the spreadsheet tell you what to work on first. Good decisions are rarely purely quantitative. They involve unquantifiable characteristics. And the way to make that kind of decision better is to tune your intuition, not a better spreadsheet. In this session, we share five categories of prioritization “heuristics” (decision-making guidelines) with several examples of each category. Move beyond WSJF to make better decisions and help your organization focus.
Moving Beyond Consensus
In many organizational cultures, consensus reigns supreme, and every consequential decision gets bogged down in meeting after meeting. The desire to engage all stakeholders and hear all voices is well-intentioned. But decisiveness is key to an effective business. Fortunately, there are ways to incorporate a range of perspectives and still make decisions quickly. In this session, we look at several ways to move beyond consensus for better delegation and group decision-making.
Product Assumption Testing & Experiment Design
A standard team of professional knowledge workers at a U.S. corporation costs about $100,000–200,000/ month (fully loaded) to run. For product managers, that means every time you prioritize work, you’re placing an expensive bet that the things a team will work on will lead to a positive ROI. In this session, we’ll teach our favorite set of tools to de-risk those bets by placing small, fast bets to learn if we’re on the right track.
Value Innovation
Most of what people call “innovation” we’d call incremental, technical improvement. A tell-tale sign of that category of improvement is that competitors can quickly copy it. Real innovation comes through discovery of unmet problems, new customer categories, and whole new product lines that are difficult to copy. In this session, you’ll learn our favorite strategies for finding true value innovation.
Product Strategy
How do you derive and communicate about strategy when you know that any good strategy is really a series of educated guesses? In this session we’ll share our Strategy Steps approach, which helps you get clear on your theories about how you’ll deliver an impact over time, your theory of how the business model makes sense, and the steps you’ll take to incrementally test your way to your strategic outcomes.
Agile Roadmapping
Roadmaps get a bad rap, but they’re just a visual tool to help people make decisions. When done poorly, they’re over simplified and imply too much certainty. This session introduces an agile roadmapping pattern that helps tell a multi-faceted story of why certain features and benefits are forecasted to be delivered at certain times. The pattern has multiple variations that allow you to communicate effectively to a range of different stakeholders without feeling locked in to specific deliverables far into the future.
Presentation Skills for Product Managers
A huge part of any great product manager’s job involves influencing stakeholders. Having the right data to make your point is important, but data doesn’t convince, stories do. In this session, we’ll teach our favorite structure for turning any presentation into a focused, compelling story arc that keeps stakeholder’s interest and helps you persuade more effectively.
Example Mapping & Scenario Writing
The single best way we know of to align around the details of a user story is with a set of well-chosen con- crete examples. Abstract acceptance criteria and traditional specifications can’t come close. In this session, we’ll practice the example mapping technique to quickly find the right examples to express the behavior of a story, and we’ll look at how to express selected examples as clear scenarios using the Gherkin language.
Writing Expressive Gherkin Scenarios
For any particular example, there are myriad ways to express it as a Gherkin scenario. And some ways are much better than others. In this session, you’ll learn to recognize good and bad scenarios, and you’ll practice hitting the sweet spot with the scenarios you right.