What People Are Saying

As a product leader at a rapidly growing team, I wanted to empower the senior members of my team to fully understand and successfully implement best practices for managing their products. I saw education as a key focus, to increase both the confidence and capabilities of the team, but also to dramatically increase the value that their products delivered to our customers and to the business.

Based on the recommendation of a seasoned product leader, we engaged with Product Growth Leaders for their Fundamentals of Managing Products program. The combination of their expertise in product management and their application-focused and coaching-led approach had a significant impact, not only improving the confidence and capabilities of our team, but helping us create a product management playbook that has improved our work product and increased the value our products are delivering.

Throughout the process Steve and Grant have become trusted advisors to me and my team. I would highly recommend Product Growth Leader’s Fundamentals of Managing Products to any product leader looking to boost the confidence and capabilities of their teams while creating a standard product playbook for your organization, and I look forward to engaging them again to continue the maturing of our product management organization.

Whether a new or seasoned product manager, you'll benefit from learning from the original product management guru: Steve Johnson

Folks who know me know that I'm an advocate for product management as a profession.

Some 12+ years ago, I was already a seasoned product manager, with some nice successes (one particularly major one) under my belt when I took Steve's course.

It was the first time ever that I heard someone illustrate the strategic nature of the role. It validated what I had experienced and accomplished... especially how I resisted being turned into an asset to support sales and product support, and instead a strategist looking to the future. It was a bit like therapy! But these priorities were indeed the correct ones.... and I can tell you that the company I worked for benefited about 10000x more as a result of my taking the more strategic and longer-term view... which wasn't necessarily what was asked from me at times.

As a product leader experienced with a variety of product team and company sizes I know first hand how difficult it can be to drive stakeholder alignment. It is an art and science. Getting the data is the easier part (the science), the bigger struggle more often is with the art of driving consensus and getting the business to align and collaborate. That’s the stepping stone for me to help build the organization’s confidence in me and my product team.

That’s what prompted me to dig into my PM tool box and then I found Product Growth Leaders.

I’ve taken several Product courses throughout my career, but when I first looked at the ‘Fundamentals of Managing Products’ course it immediately hit home! It is constructed in a very business focused way, which means I can bring along my business partner and what better way to help stakeholders understand our world and how we function - and how we should partner.

There’s a plethora of PM courses and tools out there, but what stood out to me was how this course focuses on PMs to be successful strategically. The tools and templates are very objective and easy to use, and that in turn drives following a disciplined approach and maturing the PM process of your org. My favorite is the ASPIRE + SCORE tool for prioritizing new business opportunities.

Seasoned PMs know how identifying and prioritizing the next right initiative or roadmapping can become a political conflict, and using the Quartz Open framework and the tools helped me drive collaboration and alignment with my stakeholders, while helping them build the confidence in my Product team.

Thank you Steve and Grant!

This course provides a strong foundation for new Product Managers, and gets existing Product Managers to re-evaluate their processes. The content and templates are already being adopted by our team and we are starting to see the benefits. The pace of the course was just right, and I really liked the "flipped" teaching format where we view the content and do the exercises, and then have a peer discussion about our learning in the following week. Steve was an excellent coach, and put the content into context by drawing upon his own experiences in Product Managements, along with some interesting anecdotes!

I found the Fundamentals course easy to work into my day to day job. With a couple of classes a week and a small bit of work which I could apply to my current product manager role, I looked forward to the classes and discussions. As an instructor, Steve walked through the material well with lots of personal examples and useful comparisons. The material was well paced throughout the course. There were also ample templates to make the concepts taught in the courses easy to apply and provide a great starting place for any relatively new product manager or even those looking to align with standard practices.

I used the course as an opportunity to test out the templates with some of the real problems I face daily with the product team and got great engagement from both Steve and the other attendees of the course. Working with the other attendees was one of the main highlights as it led to interesting insights into problems that other product managers are dealing with.

Soon after I was hired as the Head of Product for a German enterprise applications company which had recently acquired other companies, I realized that our company needed to be transformed from customer-specific project-led solutions to standard market-led products. The focus of my team had previously only been technical product management with little or no focus on either product strategy or sales enablement.

Based on these needs, I explored options for training that would be pragmatic, high quality and could scale up my team fast.

I had taken product management training as a student many times, and one trainer far outperformed the others: Steve Johnson. I reached out to Steve who, together with Grant Hunter, offers hands-on, simple and applied training at Product Growth Leaders.

Steve and Grant have a wealth of experience. They helped my team understand their techniques with practical examples. They also gave us guidance on how to overcome objections from internal company stakeholders who were focused on short-term results rather than long-term financial sustainability.

Since English is a second language for our team members, we appreciated being able to watch self-paced videos followed by weekly coach-led peer review sessions.

As a result of the training from Product Growth Leaders, my team is more effective and has higher quality standards for our work in managing our company’s products.

We plan to stay connected to Product Growth Leaders and will reach out to them in the future for deep dives on specific topics. We enthusiastically recommend Product Growth Leaders’ training to other companies who also want to transform their companies to be more strategic, market-focused, and financially successful over the long-term.

When I heard that some of my colleagues were looking into doing training with Product Growth Leaders, I looked at their assessment and workshops and realized that it was exactly what we needed, for three reasons.

First, I had taken a course with Steve Johnson before, so he was a known entity that made it easy to trust the quality of Product Growth Leaders’ training content. Second, we wanted our product managers and product marketers to increase our alignment with each other with similar training and shared terminology. While each of our teams had discipline-specific training independent of each other, Product Growth Leaders held some joint sessions between our team on topics where our work overlaps. The shared training allowed some facilitated conservations to happen between our teams for the first time. Third, I wanted training that was useful enough for our experienced people and accessible enough for our newer members– that they could all take together. The training and application or coaching sessions struck the right balance for all levels.

Our team appreciated that the training was customized and responsive to the needs of the team based on an initial assessment of our gap areas. We particularly liked the tools and application or coaching sessions where we could explore whether our current approaches (e.g., to prioritization) were working and then continued the conversations after the training.

The instructors Steve Johnson and Grant Hunter were friendly and accessible, even holding 1:1 meetings with our team members to discuss specific challenges.

We would wholeheartedly recommend Product Growth Leaders training for any product teams who are looking to align their team terminologies and approaches and to refresh their team training for new ideas and approaches in order to increase their impact.

I wanted to thank you again for getting acquainted and extending me an opportunity to participate in your PGL product management training. I've done some other PM training courses, and yours is wildly superior. Yours makes me feel like, "Yeah, I AM capable of doing this!"

I've made Saturdays my "Product Growth Leader" days—I'm looking forward to spending this upcoming Saturday with the video version of you.

Thank you so much, Steve. You and your course have done wonders for my confidence, providing context and talking points for these difficult conversations and the path ahead. I cannot believe my good fortune.

The structure of the Fundamentals course is outstanding. Each week, we learned new material on Tuesday and did a peer review of homework on Thursday. I found I actually wanted to do the homework to get the most value out of the course.

I will use the templates provided during the course in my upcoming new product manager role and will continue to recommend Product Growth Leaders to colleagues.