How this works
More Than 25 Training Modules compose into three courses
Over the years I’ve developed a cirruiculum of more than 25 modules covering leadership, hiring, and product excellence. Each module is a chapter in a training workbook, and each includes in-classroom exercises, homework, and tools leaders can take with them after.
Working together we’ll build a workbook of the right subset of these modules for the course that I’ll teach at your location. The attendees will leave with new skills, stronger relationships with each other, and, most importantly, what they need to teach others what I taught them.
An Immersive course is one to two weeks with a team, live practice, homework, and artifacts they keep using.
A short course is one or two days: enough to make a meaningful change in one or two focused areas.
Sign up for Office Hours and let’s start diagnosing. Experince says we’ll quickly converge on a course that will have the biggest impact on making your org even more world-class. We will then shape the material to the leaders and the work in front of them.
We’ll then find dates that work for everyone and arrange travel. I’ll insist on spending some time with a representitative sub-set of your leaders before the training, to further calibrate and customize.
What's it cost?
Highly negotiable. I would rather have deep alignment and get to travel to fun places than haggle over expensive fees. I’m not in this for money; but fees or equity drive bi-lateral alignment. If your location is somewhere interesting that requires me to travel outside of the US, my fee is generally nominal on top of you paying for my travel expenses.Course
Leaders of Leaders Training
Everyone’s a leader, so this is for those who want to become even more impactful: Influencing without authority, being principled, clear communication, driving accountability, dealing with conflict, people-management as a profession, and mechanisms that scale trust.
Immersive Course: about two weeks with your top leaders, or your bench.
Short course: one or two days on the layer that is actually broken.
Example modules:
The Pyramid of Excellence
Relationships, trust, healthy conflict, commitment, accountability, results. The diagnostic that stops you fixing the wrong layer.
People Management is not a Hobby
Stewardship as real work. Lower pyramid layers only get built by people who treat management as a profession.
Principled Leadership
Write the how, not just the what. Decisions that stick because the principles behind them are explicit and debated.
Mental Models
Named, portable lenses so the team sees the same problem the same way.
Feedback: SBI
Situation, Behavior, Impact. The conversational craft that makes conflict and peer accountability survivable.
One-on-Ones as a Mechanism
1:1s as the system for trust, reality, feedback, and delegation over time; not calendar filler.
Good Intentions are not Enough
Mechanisms: owners, cadence, inspection, and defaults that turn heroics into organizational behavior.
Accountability Through Dates
Date sanctity, paths to green, and status that tells the truth.
Leading Change: D x V x F > R
Dissatisfaction, vision, first steps, and resistance. How change actually moves.
Organization Operating Systems
Scheduler, memory, interfaces, kernel, taxonomy, and fitness functions.
Everyone’s a Leader
The word leader is not a synonym for manager.
An individual contributor who ships great code, closes a critical deal, or writes a policy that changes how the company operates: that person is leading. A people manager who holds a team accountable, develops careers, and creates clarity amid chaos: also leading. A CEO who sets direction for thousands: leading. An intern who sees a broken process and fixes it without being asked: leading.
Everyone can be a leader. The only question is how well.
This course is not about becoming a manager. It is about becoming a better leader; specifically, a better leader of leaders. The skills in this handbook apply whether you have two direct reports or two thousand. They apply whether your title says “Director” or “Principal Engineer.” They apply because leadership is a craft, not a job title, and craft improves only through deliberate practice.
Course
Product Leadership Training
Operational, engineering, and product management excellence together. Customer truth, written clarity, technical quality, and execution that survives contact with reality.
Immersive course: about two weeks with execs, PMs, and builders on a real product problem, from working backwards through the plan. The outcome is an execution plan that will nail it.
Short course: one or two days on one or two areas the team stuggles with today (crafting product vision, pushing quality upstream, operational excellence, product management skills).
Example modules:
Builders Create the Magic; PMs Provide the Environment
Establishes the shared mental model and lexicon. Builders create the product; PMs create the conditions for magic.
Influence Without Authority
Applies principled influence to the PM’s daily work.
Prioritization and Tradeoffs
Decision-making under constraint, including saying no.
Influencing Builders (Human and AI)
Trades compliance for ownership.
Influencing Up and Out
Clarity to executives and one experience standard to every other function.
Shared Meaning, Not Shared Words
Replaces false alignment with explicit definitions and decisions.
Working Backwards from the Customer
Customer before technology as a tenet, and the mechanism from the required FAQs to running a series of reviews.
Product Outcomes and Product Strategy
Moves PMs from activity to outcomes, and from roadmaps to choices.
Crafting Delightful Customer Experiences
Treats delight as a requirement, not a polish pass.
Teaching
Scales product excellence by building PMs who can create more PMs.
Building Product Culture
Turns individual skill into a system.
Course
Hiring Systems Leadership Training
Most companies are just “Ok” at hiring. This is strage as who gets hired and who doesn’t matters more to company culture and outcomes than any other factor. Hiring is the highest-leverage work a leader does. This course teaches entire companies how to build hiring systems that are excellent, and teaches leaders who hire the skills to be raising the bar with every hire.
Immersive course: about two weeks with human resource leads and hiring managers. The output is a re-engineering of your company’s hiring system.
Short course: one or two days with hiring managers and bar-raising interviewers.
Example modules:
Hiring First
Philosophy first: excellence in organizations starts and ends with hiring, before scorecards and committees.
The Hiring Operating System
Lifecycle, roles, and mechanisms. Spin the ship up. Do not let it stop.
Role Definition and the JD as Hypothesis
Crafting job descriptions (and onboarding docs).
Sourcing and Screening
Running the funnel. A resume is a proxy; squelch the noise and amplify the signal.
Stop Interviewing for Opinions and Theater
Interviewer confidence is not evidence. A strong opinion is useful only when it is attached to specific observations.
Becoming a Bar Raising Interviewer
Becoming excellent at hiring means becoming excellent at making the signals better.
The Debrief is not For Making Friends
Running debriefs. No observation, no signal. No signal, no decision.
Close, Onboard, and 30/60/90
Closing candidates and onboarding new hires.
Hiring Mechanisms That Scale
Building Hiring Systems that ensure everyone you hire is also excellent at hiring.
Plans That Don't Fake the People
Hiring that depends on unnamed headcount is a fake plan. Inspect recruiting, offer, and ramp the same way you inspect a ship date.
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