Product Academy

The Product Academy is an ongoing program of activities to develop and support product management within your business. It is aimed at larger organizations with 50 or more product people and typically runs for at least a year.

Why have a Product Academy?

• Improve performance. Make ongoing improvements to product management in your business by increasing the success of your product people and their products.
• High-quality expert support. Our partnership approach means Product Focus can build a deep understanding of your product management challenges and context, and so provide high-quality recommendations and relevant expertise.
• Demonstrate commitment. Show employees the company’s commitment to building a credible and professional team.
• Raise profile. A Product Academy program raises the profile and visibility of product management across the business at all levels.
• Deliver world class product management. Learn from product management experts and global leaders.

Format

There are two options for the delivery of training and workshops as part of the academy.

The first is called Learn, Certify and Activate. It starts by having all your product people attend our flagship certification course. This gets everyone familiar with best practice and talking about product management in the same way. This can be customized for your business as long as the core modules are covered.

This is typically followed by a series of workshops to activate best practice and tackle specific issues. These workshops can include how product management tools fit into key processes and develop templates and exemplars for use in the business.

The second option is Workshop-based certification. Instead of starting with certification training, the academy delivers a series of in-depth workshops that are heavily exercise-oriented. These cover our full syllabus enabling participants to complete their certification.

You can see the full family of Product Focus services in the diagram on the right and where the Product Academy fits.

Your own Product Academy?

A popular option is for the product management leadership or L&D to set up a Product Academy for their business. This typically includes a mixture of services from Product Focus and other support from within the business or third parties. Aspects can include skills assessment, tracking attendance and certification as well as linking continuous professional development to career progression within product management.

Ongoing support from our Toolbox

All product people will get access to the online Toolbox, which contains all our best practice resources, tools, and templates as well as a huge range of high-quality content. This gives product people access to the support they need when they need it.

Example workshops

Workshop topics depend on your approach to the academy.

For option 1: Learn, certify and activate the topics of activation workshops depend on your needs. Previous workshops have included:-

• Product roles and responsibilities
• Product vision and strategy
• Strategy and investment
• In-life optimization
• Doing better discovery
• Effective business cases
• Product plan review
• Business Case masterclass
• Launching products

For option 2: Workshop-based certification, the workshop topics are provided by Product Focus.

In both cases, workshops consist of two 3-hour online sessions on separate days with some homework in between or a day-long session on-site. Workshops can be customized to incorporate information on processes and templates used in your organization.

A partnership approach

Many companies value our partnership approach. We see this as a long-term relationship where we build an understanding of your business challenges and context, so we can provide ongoing and relevant support, guidance, and expertise.