Groundwork for Individuals
Without a Coach
For Individual PMs looking to master their craft on their own time
Join the Groundwork Journey! Transform your approach to product management as you establish the best practices that will change your perspective and process in building experiences that customers love and drive growth.
Want to be more confident in your product decisions?
Want to be more certain that your product or service will resonate with customers?
Want to boost your PM skills?
Program Overview
Based on the proven Groundwork Method™
Through our decades in managing product teams, we’ve encountered similar problems, repeatedly. We learned that if a few foundations weren’t established early on in a project, the likelihood of success, delighted customers, and business growth, was low. We explored the root causes of those repeated problems to figure out how to address them in a scalable way.
And we wrote a book and developed a product management framework, called the Groundwork Method ™ that provides the blueprint to establish these foundations and addresses the major causes that lead to unhappy customers and poor product performance.
We’ve now coached hundreds of product managers on this framework and have evolved it based on their feedback.
Come join the program that is proven to change your approach and mindset around product management.
6 weeks of self-paced learning
The program is meant for you to complete at your own pace and is organized into 6 Modules (that you can complete whenever you want.) Within those 6 parts, we cover 3 Groundwork Pillars and 3 supporting Practices. Each week builds on the one before it so watching the videos and going through each week, in order of their listing, is important.
Total program time: Approximately 6 hours
* Does not include the exercises to apply each of the concepts. Exercises are estimated to add about 30-60 minutes per week.
Supported by AI Tools
In a world where we are increasingly relying on AI agents to generate research summaries, requirements, and user stories, it’s tempting to trust the outputs at face value. But speed without substance is dangerous.
The Groundwork AI Accelerator—our set of powerful prompts that help you create and analyze key product decision artifacts —was built to counter that risk. Every practice in the Groundwork framework is supported by a set of AI tools that accelerate real work without cutting corners. For each pillar, we’ve built proven sets of prompts—designed using prompt engineering best practices from leading AI experts—that help you apply concepts with rigor and speed.
These tools go beyond the program, giving teams reusable assets you can rely on to keep making strong, customer-centric decisions long after the training ends.
Each Module is Simple and Practical
1. A series of videos covering each Pillar and Practice of the Groundwork Method ™. Each video runs between 2-15 minutes. No week is more than 65 minutes. For those A-types, you could finish this program in about 6 hours!
2. Simple, downloadable templates to use in your business immediately.
3. Practical exercises to build muscle right away in your own business.
4. A set of optional supplementary articles and case studies from top product and innovation thinkers and companies. These articles round out the learning, providing real-life examples of the tools and concepts covered in the program.
Program Details
Define A Convergent Problem Statement
We jump right in! This module is all about defining one of the key rudders to your decision making. It will demonstrate the importance of having 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. In this week we provide a simple template and exercises as inputs into scoping and evolving the problem.
Module 1:
Pillar 1
Define A Convergent Problem Statement
Define an Actionable Persona
Now that you know what problem you want to solve, it’s time to truly understand who you want to solve it for. This module 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.
Module 2:
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.
Module 3:
Practice 1
Define Hypotheses
Conduct Scrappy Research
You’ve now formulated testable hypotheses around your problem and persona, now it’s time to test those quickly so you can 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 and ongoing basis so that a majority of our decisions are customer driven.
Module 4:
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.
Module 5:
Pillar 3
Discover Individualized Needs
Get Commitment
You’ve made it to the final module. 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 module is devoted to the best practices in doing just that. We even have a presentation outline you can use that has been proven to drive shared vision and commitment!
Module 6:
Practice 3
