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 Development Excellence
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:
Work backwards
Start with the customer experience, then invent what has to be true. Narratives and FAQs that force the thinking.
Written product thinking
Use narratives, tenets, and crisp metrics so product decisions are inspectable.
Quality and tradeoffs
A shared language for architecture, quality, speed, risk, and technical bets.
Cadence and accountability
Turn product intent into mechanisms, dates, paths to green, and decision records.
The 5Ps
Purpose, Principles, Priorities, People, Plan. Inspect any plan and see which P is missing.
What the PM job is
Builders create the product. The PM creates clarity and commitment, and protects one coherent customer experience.
Course
Building Hiring Systems
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:
Have a Plan (the 5Ps)
Hiring that depends on unnamed headcount is a fake plan. Inspect recruiting, offer, and ramp the same way you inspect a ship date.
The Hiring Operating System
Bias is the default; interviewer confidence is not evidence. Role outcomes, independent signal, written feedback, and debriefs from observations.
Behavioral questions
Past behavior over theater. Learn how to use behavioral interview techniques to make the hire/no-hire decision as objective as possible.
Loops
Desiging and running interview loops. Effective debriefs.
From Job Description to 30/60/90
Define 12-month success, replace years-of-experience with repeated demonstration, onboard before day one, and inspect the packet at 90 days.
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