Yue Wu

VP Product (ex-Lyft, Dropbox, Yelp, Google)

Managing Up for Product Leaders

Learn how senior PMs create clarity, surface risks early, and reduce leadership anxiety under ambiguity.

How strong PMs reduce executive uncertainty

Understand how execs evaluate decision-making, prioritization, and independent leadership capability.

How product leaders build judgment trust

Learn how strong PMs align stakeholders, manage tradeoffs, and influence across teams effectively.

How to increase organizational alignment

Identify communication habits that strengthen executive confidence and improve leadership perception.

Communication patterns that build leadership trust

Build the confidence, clarity, and emotional intelligence to lead up, across, and down with lasting impact.

Founder, Author & PCC Leadership Coach

Nejat Abdurahman

Founder of N-BAC, PCC Leadership & EIQ Coach, Author of The Art of Managing Up

Cohort 19

Cohort 20

You’ve mastered the technical side of your role, but leading people requires an entirely different set of skills. Between meeting expectations from your boss, aligning with peers, and supporting your team, it’s easy to feel stretched thin and unseen. This program helps you change that.Lead with Influence equips you with the mindsets, tools, and self-awareness to lead up, across, and down effectively. Through the DISC, EIQ, and Managing Up assessments, you’ll uncover your leadership patterns and learn how to communicate with confidence, build trust across levels, and navigate organizational dynamics with emotional intelligence.You’ll discover how to influence decisions without formal authority, coach your team for performance, and become the strategic partner senior leaders rely on. Through live coaching, practical frameworks, and peer learning, you’ll create a personalized 90-day leadership action plan to sustain growth long after the program ends.If you’re ready to move from managing tasks to shaping outcomes, this is where your next level of leadership begins.

Lead up, across, and down with emotional intelligence, clarity, and confidence.

Manage up with confidence 

Collaborate across functions

Lead down with impact 

Apply emotional intelligence in real time

Strengthen your leadership presence

Create your leadership plan

This course is ideal for professionals with some workplace or team experience who are ready to grow their leadership impact.

No formal prerequisites.

Emerging managers who are new to leadership and ready to build confidence, clarity, and trust while managing up, across, and down.

Mid-level leaders seeking to strengthen their influence, visibility, and emotional intelligence to lead strategically and with impact.

Aspiring leaders preparing to step into management by learning to lead and influence effectively without formal authority.

You will learn how to make and recommend strategic decisions grounded in business reality -  not feature logic.

ex-Product Exec @Spryker, Commerce, eBay

Spryker Systems

BigCommerce

eBay Inc.

PayPal

Elena Leonova

Founder & CPO, OneRank.io,  ex-CPO @ Spryker, VP of Product @ BigCommerce

Cohort 2

Cohort 3

At senior levels, product leadership stops being about having the best answers. It becomes about being trusted with decisions. You’re expected to connect product bets to revenue, cost, and risk — and defend those decisions under pressure.But most product leaders were never taught how those decisions are actually made.So decisions move forward without you. Not because you lack context. But because others are framing the business problem more clearly. They connect strategy to financial reality, risk, and trade-offs. And their judgment lands.This course exists to change that. This is a 6-week, high-touch cohort where your judgment is tested the way it's tested in leadership rooms.You will practice making strategic decisions through real scenarios:• diagnosing business pressure • translating KPIs into strategic bets • navigating financial tradeoffs • defending strategic decisionsYou won’t just learn frameworks. You will apply them live and receive direct feedback on whether your reasoning holds up.It’s judgment that holds when the stakes are real — and the room is deciding whether to trust you. If you want to move from executing strategy to shaping it, this is where that shift happens

Think like a VP before you become one. Ground Product Strategy in business.

Understand the business before building the strategy

Use financial metrics to guide strategic decisions

Build a credible, business-backed product strategy

Present strategy to executives and boards

Partner effectively with Sales, Marketing & Customer Success

Lead with strategic judgment & influence without authority

You already operate as a Senior or Principal PM or Product Lead. You don’t need help shipping, running discovery, or managing teams

Strong Product Execution Fundamentals

You’re used to making calls with partial information, competing metrics, and real tradeoffs. You understand the importance of judgment

Comfort Making Decisions with Imperfect Data

Your judgment is - or soon will be - evaluated by executives, boards, or clients. You’re responsible for explaining why a decision is right

Accountability for Strategic Decisions

Senior &amp; Principal PMs who already deliver at a high level and want to be trusted with larger, riskier decisions - not just execution

Group PMs, Directors, and above who own strategy, make real tradeoffs, and defend decisions under executive scrutiny

Product consultants, coaches, and advisors who want to bring executive-level judgment to their client work and recommendations

Build great relationships with bosses and key stakeholders

Former Amazon VP; 70+ patents; led 800+

Walmart

Capital One

OpenAI

J.P. Morgan

Ethan Evans

Former Amazon VP (15+ years); 70+ patents; led global teams of 800+

Cohort 1

Most high performers don’t stall from lack of skill — they stall because managing up and across is messy: a boss with a different style, shifting priorities, unclear expectations, and peers who don’t align. The result is great work that is misunderstood, under-credited, or derailed by surprises and politics.This workshop gives you specific, ethical, repeatable steps to build high-trust relationships with your manager, skip-level, and key peers — so you execute faster, reduce friction, and increase your influence.You’ll learn how to understand your boss (preferences, pet peeves, strengths/weaknesses) and communicate upward with clarity, brevity, and the right timing. You’ll run better 1:1s, ask sharper questions, separate fact vs. opinion, and give upward feedback without triggering defensiveness.When things get tense, you’ll handle conflict, emotion, and tough decisions without breaking trust: avoid surprises, manage expectations, set boundaries, and “quit and commit” when needed.You’ll also leave with tools to drive your growth, navigate remote work and frequent boss changes, and spot when managing up crosses into manipulation — so you stay effective and principled.

Specific actionable steps to create effective and ethical relationships with your manager, skip level, and peers.

How to work better with your boss and build a high-trust relationship

How to handle tricky (tough) situations without damaging trust

How to drive your professional development and create upward momentum

How to manage up to your skip level and peers to increase your span of influence

How to navigate office politics ethically

High-performing IC: Delivers strong work but struggles with alignment, visibility, and no-surprise updates across boss + partners.

New or stretched people leader: Needs a clean system to manage up, set expectations, give feedback, and navigate conflict without politics.

Cross-functional driver: PM/ops/finance/sales/eng partner who must influence peers + skip-levels and get decisions without burning trust.

Become the PM executives trust — earn approval for AI products that deliver business outcomes via the Product Explorer™ Methodology.

Creator of Product Explorer™ methodology

The Home Depot

U.S. Army

Cadence

Unilever

Stanford University

Rocky - ProductLedCEO

Led the $1.3B Product P&L at Home Depot | Created Product Explorer™ | CEO & CPO


March 2026

June 2026

AI is not replacing Product Managers. It is replacing the ones who cannot think.AI Product Builder — build a product using AI tools &amp; ship fast — is no longer a differentiator.So what separates the PMs companies fight to keep from those quietly replaced?Before you become a Product Builder, you need to be a Product Explorer™ — the ability to connect every decision to a business outcome that your executive is accountable for.A Product Explorer™ is given problems to solve, not features to build. That distinction changes how execs see you.That discipline is called Product Strategy &amp; Discovery — &amp; most PMs skip it entirely, accelerating the feature factory. Garbage in, garbage out, faster.The PM who survives develops 3 skills:<ul><li>Executive skills to set product strategy and earn approval</li><li>Inventor skills to run Product Discovery &amp; find solutions worth building</li><li>Operator skills to scope, frame ROI, &amp; deliver the business outcomes</li></ul>Over four Saturdays — 15 hours direct with Rocky (~$100/hr vs. $400–600/hr for comparable exec coaching) — you develop all three through the Product Explorer™ Methodology, build your own AI opportunity, &amp; a business case judged by Rocky.Not someday. Now.

Master the Executive, Inventor & Operator skills that make C-suite fight for PMs

Executive skill: connect every product decision to a business outcome.

Executive skill: set AI Product Strategy tied to mission and outcomes.

Inventor skill: run Product Discovery to learn what is worth shipping

Operator skill: build a Business Case that earns executive approval.

All 3 skills: pitch and earn Executive Approval under real pressure.

All 3 skills: measure success by Outcomes — not features shipped.

You've shipped at least one product or feature — this course builds on that foundation, not from scratch.

Basic product management experience

You've used ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini at work or personally — so we can skip the basics and go deeper.

Familiarity with at least one AI tool

Week 2 discovery prototyping sessions run on Claude (claude.ai — Pro plan, USD 20/month). You will need the paid plan to build and test it

Access to Claude's paid plan (USD 20/month)

PMs tired of shipping features stakeholders ask for — ready to deliver business outcomes executives actually fund

Mid to senior PMs who do solid product work but struggle to connect it to what leadership actually cares about.

Product managers feeling pressure to deliver AI results but unsure how to make it count at a business level

Agentic AI

Coding with AI

AI Workflows

Claude Code

OpenClaw

Vibe Coding

AI Evals

AI Transformation

RAG & Search

AI for PMs

AI for Engineers

AI for Designers

AI for Marketers

AI for Founders

Product Sense

Product Discovery

User Research

Prototyping

Growth

Analytics

Tech Foundations

Strategy

Influence

Leadership

Career Growth

Machine Learning

LLM Ops

Context Eng

Security

System Design

Figma

Design Systems

Visual Design

Design Strategy

Automation

Content Marketing

Demand Gen

Go-to-Market

Product Marketing

Positioning

Social Media

Brand

B2B Marketing

SEO & AEO

AI for Leaders

AI Governance

Communication

Management

People Operations

Exec Presence

Storytelling

Goal-setting

Personal Brand

Fundraising

Everyone

Operators

Data Scientists

Business Analysts

User Researchers

Customer Success

Project Managers

HR Professionals

Sales People

Lawyers

Finance

Investors

Real Estate

Educators

Creators

Product managers who drive strategy, development, and launch of products.

Executives and senior leaders who set strategy, lead teams, and drive organizational outcomes.

Getting promoted, navigating job transitions, and advancing to the next level in your career.

Executive communication — presenting to boards, writing memos, running all-hands, and high-stakes messaging.

Day-to-day people management — 1:1s, feedback, performance management, hiring, and team operations.

Persuading stakeholders, presenting ideas, and getting buy-in across an organization without formal authority.

Projecting confidence, gravitas, and credibility in high-stakes leadership situations.

Managing Up for Product Leaders

What you'll learn

Why this topic matters

You'll learn from

Yue Wu