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Product Visioning and Strategy: Preparing for Agile Execution

The Productization of a Vision: Linking Operations to Strategy

Having a clear long-term vision is crucial for any organization to guide decision-making, but translating that vision into business goals, metrics, and product roadmaps requires a well-thought-out strategy that balances and aligns four key pillars: performance measurement and goal setting, team structures and empowerment, rewards and incentives, and corporate culture. This course will take Chief Product Officers and their direct reports into how they can close the gap between long term vision and big ideas and unleashing product design that delights customers and stakeholders.

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What You Will Learn

  • Understand what must be featured and down-selected onto strategic goals/strategic plans/ or strategy maps including: company goals, customer needs, values, metrics (KPis or OKRs), business strategy, initiatives, big ideas, differentiation strategy) and more.
  • Drill down into each of the four pillars and how they must reinforce one another. What are the timeless principles you should employ when considering: 1) performance measurement, setting goals, 2) establishing team structures, org charts and empowerment, 3) rewards, punishments and incentives, and corporate culture (norms, values, behaviors and assumptions).
  • Understand the power of incentives to inspire your product teams.
  • Bring the vision into focus by identifying clear, actionable milestones that align with the strategy and move towards achieving the vision in a tangible way, with time-bound stretch goals set over the next 1, 3-5, and 10 years (for existing, adjacent and new markets).
  • Motivating product leaders by establishing clear objectives and key results (OKRs) for the next year and quarter, ensuring they are meaningful and focused, with key results that balance output, outcome, quality, and learning for sustainable progress.
  • Activate the cascading OKRs throughout the organization by considering the teaming strategy that best fits the company's structure, customer value streams, and product/service architecture, with decision-rights and decentralization mapped to accountability and "do and review cycles."
  • How to message and communicate the four pillars and their connection to your strategy to all stakeholders.
  • How chief product officers and their product managers can establish healthy “do and review cycles” that drive transparency and accountability.
  • Drive consistent behaviors of the teams by understanding and managing the rewards and punishments pillar, with a "fail fast and learn fast" orientation celebrated and not discouraged in the compensation and rewards system.

About This Course

A big picture, clear, long-term vision for any organization (start up or incumbent organization) is crucial for guiding all decision-making. However, translating that vision into overarching business goals, metrics and derived product road maps requires dedicated effort and a well-thought-out strategy. Company performance is either hindered or enabled by a set of connected systems, policies and behaviors that will either accelerate towards the vision or create significant resistance or worse.

One effective way to align an organization's operations with its vision is by implementing a an organizational architecture template that centers around what we call the four key pillars: performance measurement and setting goals, team structures, org charts and empowerment, rewards and incentives, and corporate culture. These pillars are grounded in a micro-economic understanding of human behavior and are essential for fostering long-term growth and performance. It is important that they are all balanced and work together in harmony. Product development that’s faithful to the vision and big ideas will either be met with four pillars that enable successful new products to thrive or damage your brand with all stakeholders like Wells Fargo did.

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At A Glance

Expert Instruction
Build Skills

Self-Paced
‍Progress at your own speed

4 Weeks
2-3 hours per week

Free or $249.00
For the full program experience
Discounted to $224.10 when you purchase the full Product Visioning and Strategy: Preparing for Agile Execution Professional Certificate Program.

10 Professional Development Units (PDUs)
Earn PDUs toward your Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Mangement Professional (PMP) certification

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Your Instructor

Daniel Forrester

Daniel works with CEOs, boards of directors, and C-suite leaders across the country, helping them align around a clear strategy while understanding reputational and cultural risk.

What Our Students Are Saying

This is a great course to learn the technical aspects of Agile project management and John Johnson is a coherent and concise lecturer delivering high quality lessons. I took the verified track as I will be handling more projects in my role as a university learning developer.
Neill Wylie
I enjoyed the course and learned a lot. The only thing that I might suggest is highlighting new terminology in a separate "dictionary" as some terms were new or maybe industry-specific and I sometimes lost my concentration when trying to figure them out. I liked that the class used real-world examples and suggested further reading and videos.
Serena Bonini
This course will definitely give you a real-world approach on using Agile and all the kinds alike - from the comparison between Traditional, Agile, and Lean, the overview of each method. This course also dives into the framework Agile uses, such as Scrum, DAD, LeSS, and all the pros and cons each of them has. Simply said, highly recommend!
Kevin Samuel
The "paid" track has additional information and I like the PPT slides, bonus! This is helpful if you need to go back and review information later, maybe referencing another course or work issue. Whatever your role, I think this is really helpful for anyone in software! I think the final is great because you do go back and look things up that you may have forgotten early on in the first week. You can save your answers and go back. I needed that flexibility. I like the casual aspect of this course.
Kimberly Eck
The course teacher/instructor in the videos was delivering the information in an inspiring way. The slides and the summary tabs were very helpful. The course is a good introduction to agile on a high level. Basic terms, roles, and frameworks are explained and compared. The test questions in the final exam supported the learning progress, as many of them were presented in a form where the student has to apply the knowledge, not only repeat what he/she has learned/heard.
Ninja Leikert
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Syllabus

Week 1

Framing the future

From the psychology of mental time travel, to the power of reflective thinking, we will frame why vision matters for bottom line results and employee retention. We will also look back in time to the longest lasting organizations on earth and discover what the past can teach us about taking the long view.

Week 2

Confronting “Short-termism”

Companies routinely cut marketing, research and development and bigger bet projects to achieve short term targets. They do so at a huge costs to all stakeholders. Long-term strategy matters to the bottom line and as a motivation for employees.

Week 3

Getting the Big Ideas Right and Communicated

We will delve in multiple techniques for long-term thinking including the five archetypes of vision and hone in on why “big ideas” linked to concrete, sensory language are so much more effective than vision statements. We will teach you to avoid blurry vision and explain how Kennedy’s “moon shot” helped tens of thousands of NASA engineers to connect their work to putting a man on the moon by the end of a decade.

Week 4

Communicating and Activating a Bold Vision

Vision without activation will hurt your credibility with employees and stakeholders. activation requires unique tools and thoughtful repetition. Go deep inside the techniques that draw employees towards the vision and inspire action and motivation for years to come. Even the best vision statements require repetition and then need to be understood within the larger context of the strategy map that guides the company.

Job Outlook

Project Manager jobs are expected to grow by 33% over next 10 years

PMI.org

Program Project Manager income is $60k to $100k based on industry

Payscale.com

You can earn $10,000 more as an Agile Project Manager

Payscale.com

Corporate Endorsement

Supporting US military efforts require accuracy and efficiency. We are passionate about it. In keeping with the integrity of our Nation’s military men and women, it is imperative that we provide them the best technology imaginable. The Agile Project Management program provides clear direction to channel team efforts in a more concise manner. I highly recommend this program to any organization relying on teams to get things done.
Debbie Gray, Director of Human Resources, GTMR Inc.
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