Product Management Workshops That Mean Business
Product Management Challenges
Here at Sequent Learning, we regularly speak with Product Management executives around the world about their latest challenges. Faced with increased competition and aggressive profit goals, Product Management leaders can’t afford missed milestones, and certain concerns keep cropping up:
- How can I improve the team’s performance?
- How can our product managers stay on top of changing customer needs?
- How can they develop more innovative products and services?
Regardless of industry, product managers navigate similar obstacles as they work towards common objectives with their cross-functional teams. Often due to poorly defined roles or inconsistent processes, their days are consumed by tasks that belong elsewhere, leaving them with little time for the customer research and strategic thinking that should be among their highest priorities. They may even be unclear about who their ideal customers are. If a Product Manager doesn’t understand who their customers are, they can’t understand their needs and thus can’t possibly build effective products.
Experience-Based Training
Our Product Management workshops are designed and taught by professionals who have grappled with the same day-to-day challenges that attendees currently face. Half of our two-day training is devoted to interactive exercises directly applicable to issues back at the office to help the information “stick”.
The Product Manager’s Desk Reference, based on over 20 years of benchmark research, provides the foundation for our Product Management workshops and offers attendees a framework for employing best-in-class practices.
Our Product Management Essentials workshop deals with the entire product lifecycle—from the customer and market insights needed to fuel the discovery process through post-launch performance management that spans the growth, maturity and decline phases. It offers practical tips for guiding cross-functional teams as they:
- Cultivate market insights
- Evaluate product concepts and define requirements
- Develop products, regardless of which development methodology is employed
- Launch and commercialize new products
- Track ongoing performance and balance the marketing mix
Path to Innovation
A companion, one-day Product Strategy & Roadmapping workshop addresses what is perhaps today’s top business concern: How can we innovate for competitive advantage? It helps product managers understand how to use the proper tools, data, processes, and mindsets needed to be successful and how to identify the right opportunities to avoid costly failures.
The workshop outlines a process for laying the analytical groundwork needed to nurture creative insights that align with corporate competencies and goals. Attendees are taught to perform a clear-eyed study of target markets and their companies’ strengths—enabling them to identify realistic opportunities for innovation. They also learn how to gain organizational support for their vision, then develop, launch and manage the resulting products.
Sequent Learning Networks product management workshops are grounded in real-world experience and deliver measurable returns on the time and dollars invested. Our certification process for attendees who successfully pass a follow-up exam—annually reviewed for relevance by Product Management executives—validates that they have absorbed their training and are prepared to use it in their jobs each day. This is training designed to last.