Product Team Leadership: Lead Cross-Functional Teams

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Leading a product team is one of the strangest jobs in modern business. You are accountable for outcomes you cannot dictate, working with talented engineers and designers who do not report to you, surrounded by stakeholders with their own agendas, and judged on a result that emerges from a hundred decisions you only partially controlled. The leaders who thrive in this environment are not the ones with the loudest opinions or the cleanest roadmaps — they are the ones who have learned a specific craft of influence, alignment, and collaborative decision-making that almost nobody is taught explicitly.

This course teaches that craft from the ground up. You will master the product trio model and learn how product managers, design leads, and engineering leads share ownership of outcomes while preserving individual accountability. You will learn to onboard onto a new team without crashing, draft working agreements that actually shape behaviour, and apply decision-rights frameworks like RACI, DACI, and RAPID to remove the ambiguity that fuels most product team conflict. You will design product rituals that earn their time — sprint planning, retrospectives, product reviews, cross-functional one-to-ones — and learn to ruthlessly kill the ones that do not. Whole sections are devoted to the alignment-autonomy tradeoff, cascading mission, vision, and strategy into team-level OKRs, and the discipline of giving teams problems to solve rather than solutions to implement.

The course is built for product managers leading squads they do not formally manage, product leaders coaching other PMs, engineering managers partnering with product, and design leads operating inside product trios. You should come with some exposure to product work — running a feature, attending sprints, owning a roadmap — but no prior leadership experience is required. By the end you will know how to handle engineering pushback, design disagreements, stakeholder overrides, and escalation in ways that strengthen trust rather than damaging it, and how to scale all of this from a single squad to many.

What sets this course apart is its honesty about how product leadership actually works inside real organisations, including the political dynamics most courses politely ignore. Every framework is paired with the failure mode it tends to produce and the leadership move that corrects it. If you are ready to stop being a project manager with a product title and start leading product teams that ship work you are proud of, enrol now and begin.