Groundwork Advanced Team Program
Our transformational Groundwork Team Program + design thinking workshops
Get all the value from the Groundwork Team Program and add best practices for innovation.
From transforming your current customer experiences to rapidly innovating and experimenting on new experiences, our Groundwork Advanced Team program ensures that your team innovates at every stage of the product development lifecycle, by leveraging both the Groundwork Method’s Pillars and Practices covered in our Groundwork Team Program, and the top 10 design thinking techniques for product managers, your team will learn how to apply these techniques directly to your business, and be personally supported by executive product management coaches.
Program Overview
9-Week Program grounded in our Team Program
The Advanced Team program follows our standard Team Program to ensure the foundations are set. We augment those 6 weeks of coaching with three, custom design thinking workshops.
Our Advanced Team Program is usually completed in 9 weeks.
Design thinking techniques for PM
As your team works through our 6-week Team Program, we integrate 3 bespoke workshops. These workshops leverage the learning from the Groundwork Team program and magnify the impact through learning and applying the top 10 Design Thinking methods specifically selected for product managers.
We center the series of workshops around a single business opportunity that you choose. We combine the Groundwork Method™ with design thinking techniques to take your team through early stages of problem identification and definition, ideation, prioritization of opportunities, rapid concept development, testing, and iteration. All focused on your selected business opportunity.
Real-Time Application
These workshops combine learning with real-time hands-on application and coaching from your facilitators; your dedicated PM executive coach paired with an additional experienced product management executive coach.
All Guided by Product Management Executives
Program Details
The Kickoff & Intro (3 hrs)
• Kickoff and program overview
• Design thinking overview
• Introduction to the first 5 of the top design thinking methods for product managers.
– Abstraction Laddering
– Scrappy research methods for rapid innovation
– Rose, Thorn, Bud
– Affinity Clustering
• Session Goals: Determine the right altitude and scope of the problem, leverage scrappy research for innovation, and make sense of what your customers say.
Week 1:
Workshop #1
Kickoff + Problem Identification Methods
Define A Convergent Problem Statement
We jump right in! A clear problem statement is at the core of building great products. We demonstrate the importance of having a shared vision with your team on a clear problem and how to define it in a way that enables effective, efficient, and durable product decisions. We provide a valuable template and exercises as inputs to scope, build and evolve the problem.
Week 2:
Pillar 1
Define A Convergent Problem Statement
Define an Actionable Persona
Now that the team knows what problem they want to solve, now it’s time to truly understand who is experiencing the problem. This week brings the value of personas (dusted off the shelves where they’ve been kept for years) and approaches understanding the customer in a new way. Our approach transforms the persona into a valuable artifact that can be used as an input into ALL product decisions.
Week 3:
Pillar 2
Define an Actionable Persona
Define Hypotheses
Before moving to our third Pillar in the Groundwork Method ™ we need to introduce our first practice. Both our problem and persona will include guesses, assumptions, or hunches. As product managers we need to get into the habit of establishing hypotheses to understand where we need to learn and why. We share why it’s important to document and test these hypotheses as part of our day to day to ensure we evolve our problem and persona and ensure that our third Groundwork Pillar, Individualized Needs, is formulated based on data. Before we do research, we utilize well-formed hypotheses to ensure the output of any research is actionable.
Week 4:
Practice 1
Define Hypotheses
Conduct Scrappy Research
The team has formulated testable hypotheses around the problem and persona, now it’s time to test those quickly to maintain forward momentum. This practice is about conducting research with a small sample in a way that holds high integrity and provides direction. Our Scrappy Research Practice is the set of practices and tools that support that integrity and allows us to gather insights on a rapid, ongoing basis so that a majority of our decisions are customer driven.
Week 5:
Practice 2
Conduct Scrappy Research
Discover Individualized Needs
Okay, research has evolved the problem and persona to a higher level of confidence. Now we dig into needs of each persona. Prioritization is always a challenge. Especially in more complex businesses and B2B. We often jump straight to solutions and features without understanding needs for each persona and how they prioritize those needs. Without that, then we glomb (yes, a technical term) all the needs together and pick and choose based on what we think we should be solving for first. Developing a set of prioritized needs by persona, even if there is overlap, allows us to make better informed tradeoffs and a clearer roadmap.
Week 6:
Pillar 3
Discover Individualized Needs
Translate Customer Needs and Inspire Creativity (3 hrs)
• Review customer learning and the needs that are uncovered
• Develop themes around major problem areas
• Introduction to 4 additional top design thinking methods for product managers.
– Silent Voting
– How Might We…Statements
– Creative Matrix
– Importance Difficulty
• Session Goals: make team tradeoffs to maintain momentum and commitment, inspire creativity, ideate for lots of ideas, drive shared vision in prioritization.
Week 7:
Workshop #2
Translating Needs + Inspiring Creativity
Get Commitment
As a product manager, most of the decisions we propose must get commitment by many cross-functional team members; most of which don’t report to us. This entire week is devoted to the best practices in doing just that. We share a step-by-step presentation outline that has been proven to drive shared vision and commitment!
Week 8:
Practice 3
Get Commitment
Concept Testing & Rapid Iteration (3 hrs)
• Review best practices of concept development and testing
• Introduction to 2 additional top design thinking methods for product managers.
– Concept poster
– Think aloud testing / Critique testing methods
• Session Goals: rapidly develop testable concepts, get actionable feedback quickly, iterate on ideas quickly
Week 9:
Workshop #3
