Consulting and Coaching
Essential Product Management Workshops
Choose from seven proven high-impact, tailored workshops to accelerate your product team’s performance. Never abstract theory or high-level coaching – workshops are designed to so you can immediately apply techniques to advance your goals, address your current challenges and utilize interactive exercises to address timely company initiatives. Each workshop has been battle-tested in the real-world and includes rich materials such as readings, preparation exercises and easy-to-use frameworks. To drive accountability, a post-workshop follow-up program ensures results and allows for adaptation as the team learns what works and does not in your unique environment.
To request a copy of all available workshops, case studies, and more information, please fill out the contact form.
"Transitioning a traditional company into a technology platform company is never easy. While we’d successfully put a strong Director-level Product Management team in place we were struggling to align our IC Product team, the technology team and broader stakeholder group around the new direction. Ken’s Strategic Pillars Workshop enabled us to articulate our vision, what differentiated us in the market, and focus on where we had to invest to win. Furthermore, he helped us advocate effectively within the organization to turn confusion into excitement and developed a process to evolve our direction in a disciplined way to learn from the market."
"After our company was acquired our team quickly grew to over 60 product managers – with a varied level of strategic and execution skills, backgrounds ranging from scrappy start-ups to process-heavy enterprises, and very different understandings of the strategic and collaborative role of the product manager in the modern technology organization. The PM’s Skills and Career Development workshop came in two parts. The first refined six key areas of essential skills among our leadership team to gain alignment of expectations and a common language we could all share. The second rolled out the framework to the broader group, set expectations and defined an ongoing process to support our team in their long-term professional growth."
"Like many growing companies were are faced with a series of conflicting requirements - from legacy customers, current customers, and potential customers. We were having trouble getting alignment on a process that would satisfy all of the stakeholders. Ken helped the team converge on a solution to balance these conflicting requirements that satisfied everyone's needs. The first step was to establish the key company-wide goals that could be use to guide the prioritization. The second step was to define a portfolio management framework with clear roles and responsibilities, decision making and escalation processes, and overall resource allocation targets. Step three was to establish a product roadmap."
Product Executive-In-Residence
Ken offers a range of longer-term consulting arrangements – from occasional part-time consultation to intensive project-based engagements – leveraging his 25 years of technical, marketing and business experience. He is passionate to help people and companies succeed and to see superior product management practices utilized everywhere. Consulting engagements are tailored to meet each client’s specific needs, for example:
- One-on-one mentoring of new executives, or coaching and growing high-potential IC team members.
- Designing simple but powerful processes and frameworks to drive objective decision making in complex environments.
- “Fire-starting” green-field initiatives to spark innovation and accelerate new opportunities.
- Interim VP Product. Establishing a strong product function in scaling companies and setting up an environment to attract a permanent leader.
Whatever you need, contact Ken to explore an engagement that meets your needs and budget.
Notable Achievements as Product EIR:
- Interim Head of Product for a mobile social networking product with 4 million monthly active users and 400,000 paid subscribers. Removed major process and resource bottlenecks, delivering the first substantial product release in almost 2 years. Rebuilt morale, implemented new delivery and usability validation processes, identified significant subscription revenue optimizations, and hired Product Managers and Data Analysts; including a full-time VP Product from a major consumer brand company.
- Led a reset on a client’s vision, business strategy and product roadmap, creating a clear path to accelerating profitable revenue growth, global expansion, and broadening of the brand’s appeal. Adopted and executed by the CEO, it became a center-piece in a $90 million partial acquisition of the company.
- Contracted to diagnose slower than anticipated growth in a post-IPO education technology company’s subscription business. In collaboration with executive and staff, reset the focus from one-off transactions to creating a loyal, recurring paying user base via improved onboarding and retention-based features.
- Scaled an enterprise client’s customer on-boarding process from one to ten per month, previously a barrier hampering growth. Defined predictable process and timeline, roles and responsibilities, an enhanced toolset, and standardized components. Lowered per customer development cost by 60%.
- Developed a globalization blueprint for a $4 billion per year ecommerce client, a shared-platform across six markets, saving tens-of-millions of dollars in development cost and an accelerated time to market.
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Helping to build great products and strong product teams.
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