What’s the difference between Product Leadership and Product Strategy? How do I know which one is right for me?

Product Leadership and Product Strategy are excellent courses for newly promoted product leaders or senior product managers looking to make the jump to product leadership. Let’s dive into the focus of each course and how they differ.

Product Leadership

Product Leadership focuses on a systems-thinking approach to the managerial, organizational, and people aspects of being a product leader. It covers how to evaluate and coach product managers on your team, design your organization for maximum effectiveness, plan and execute job shifts that accelerate career progress, and manage changes as you move into product leadership.

• Skills You'll Learn:
• Building high-performance product teams.
• Developing your unique leadership style.
• Ideal For:
  • Product leaders with direct reports, including Directors, Heads, and VPs of Product (8+ years of experience recommended).
  • Product builders who are on a leadership track.
• Course Outcomes:
  • Evaluate PMs on your team and deliver the feedback they need to perform their best.
  • Build a high-performing team that consistently sets and achieves ambitious goals.
  • Level up your ability to influence people at all levels of the product organization, set better OKRs, and make critical product decisions effectively.
  • Earn the confidence and support of executives within your organization.
  • Manage your time to focus on the highest leverage activities and avoid firefighting.
  • Deliberately plan your career progression.

Product Strategy

Product Strategy focuses on managing a portfolio of product work and building and communicating a cohesive product strategy across multiple pillars of product work. It takes a portfolio approach to help you build a product strategy and make strategic decisions about features, growth, product-market-fit expansion, and scaling.

• Skills You'll Learn:
• Managing a portfolio of product work.
• Developing product strategies for scaling, growth, and innovation.
• Ideal For:
  • Senior PMs, Group PMs, Directors, and Heads of Product managing a portfolio of product work (6+ years of experience recommended).
  • Product builders who are transitioning from execution-focused roles to a more strategy-oriented role.
• Course Outcomes:
  • Build, communicate, and execute a detailed product strategy spanning feature, growth, innovation, and scaling product work.
  • Evaluate new and existing features based on feature adoption, retention, and satisfaction, then map that to various improvement strategies.
  • Understand, evaluate, and prioritize PMF expansion opportunities.
  • Learn how to scale products with strategic investments in critical infrastructure.
  • Articulate and get buy-in on your product strategy.