Product Thinking in Practice
A two-day, instructor-led course for project, program, and portfolio leaders who have more work than capacity.
Product Thinking is an approach to deciding which work deserves your limited time, money, and attention, based on the outcomes it should create, and adjusting as evidence changes.
In this course, you’ll practice limiting work in progress, making trade-offs visible, and building roadmaps that show direction without fixed commitments.
Upcoming Sessions
This two-day, instructor-led course is practice-based, rather than lecture-heavy. It can be delivered onsite or live virtually. The learning journey moves from understanding the system to changing the decisions, with concrete practice tied to situations participants recognize from work.
Live Virtual | Price: $550 USD | 7 PDUs
Why Product Thinking Now?
For many organizations, success has traditionally been measured by whether planned work was completed: projects delivered, requirements met, milestones achieved. Those measures still matter, but they are no longer enough in an environment where customer expectations change, priorities shift, and new opportunities can emerge before existing commitments are finished.
AI is increasing that pressure by dramatically accelerating how quickly organizations can analyze, create, and deliver. Greater speed creates opportunity, but it also increases the cost of weak priorities, poor decisions, and work that is disconnected from meaningful outcomes. As organizations become capable of doing more, the ability to decide what is worth doing becomes increasingly important.
The challenge is therefore not simply doing more work faster. It is deciding where limited capacity should be invested, what outcomes matter most, what evidence should guide the work, and when changing conditions suggest a different direction. Product Thinking helps organizations make those decisions more deliberately.
A Different Way to Think About Work
Product Thinking changes the conversation around work in several important ways.
From outputs to outcomes
From certainty to learning
From commitments to investments
From delivery to adaptation
Changing direction is not automatically treated as a failure of planning. It becomes part of how an organization responds when new information, changing priorities, or emerging opportunities alter what makes sense.
These ideas can be applied across projects, products, portfolios, and broader organizational decisions. The goal is not to replace one way of working with another, but to improve the quality of the decisions surrounding the work.
Course Syllabus
Overview of the Program
Part 1: Getting Started
- Reflection, introductions, and orientation
- Connect the course to participant experience
- Establish how the practice-based learning will work
Part 2: Understand the System
- Recognize the patterns that create overload, slow completion, and delay learning
- Project Thinking and Product Thinking — Compare how each frames work and when continuing responsibility for results and learning is needed
- Outcomes and Outputs — Practice shifting from what will be delivered to the result the work should create
- Demand, Capacity, and Work in Progress (WIP) — Experience what happens when more work is active than available capacity can support
- What Overload Does to Work and Decisions —Connect excess active work to delays and decision problems
Part 3: Change the Decisions
- Practice making different choices about what work enters the system and how plans change over time
- Choose Where to Focus — Make choices about where limited capacity should be used and what will not be active now
- Adaptive Roadmaps — Build a plan that shows direction without treating every item as a fixed commitment
- Priorities and Trade-offs — Respond when new demand competes with current work and make the resulting trade-off visible
- Move Decisions Closer to the Work — Identify one recurring decision that can move closer to the people with the needed context, with appropriate guardrails
Part 4: Summary & Next Steps
- Bring the system and decision insights together into a practical explanation of what is slowing the work and what choices can change it
- Reflect on what changed in the participant’s thinking during the course
- Identify one decision or practice to apply differently in current work
Key Takeaways
What You’ll Leave With
This program helps participants recognize when the way work is being managed is creating overload or delay, then make better choices about what to pursue and when to change direction.
Distinguish project thinking from product thinking and recognize when each is useful
Reframe work around the result it is intended to create rather than only the activity or deliverable
Recognize when too much demand and too much active work are slowing progress, then make trade-offs when capacity cannot support everything being requested
Decide what should start now, what should wait, and what should not be pursued
Adjust plans when new information changes what makes sense
Move appropriate decisions closer to the people who have the information needed to make them
Who Product Thinking Is For
Delivery Practitioners
Product Practitioners
Project Managers
Program Managers
Portfolio Managers
PMO Directors
Construction Managers
Leaders and Managers
Prerequisites
No formal Product Management or Agile training is required. Participants should be able to relate the course discussions to work they do or influence.
Your Instructor
Roy Schilling
Enterprise Transformation Coach, PivotAgility
Roy Schilling is an Enterprise Transformation Coach, trainer, and founder of PivotAgility with more than 30 years of experience across technology, product development, delivery, leadership, and organizational change. He has worked across many industries, helping organizations improve adaptability, make better decisions, and connect work and investment to meaningful outcomes. His current work explores how AI is changing the speed and economics of work, exposing organizational assumptions built for a different environment and increasing the importance of context, judgment, and adaptability.
Follow Roy Schilling on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/royschilling/
Free Webinar
Product Thinking for What Comes Next: Moving Beyond Organizations Built for Yesterday
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
10:00 am – 11:00 am EDT
Frequently Asked Questions
How long is the course?
The Product Thinking in Practice Course is a total of 7 hours, with 3.5 hours each session.
How many course credits/PDUs is this program eligible for?
This program is eligible for 7 PDUs.
Ways of working: 2.5 PDUs
Power Skills: 1.5 PDUs
Business Acumen: 3 PDUs
Can we enroll a group from the same team?
Yes! Most cohorts include intact teams. Shared context tends to make the coaching call more useful, since participants can reference the same real situations.
What if I can't attend the course dates? What are my options?
Contact IIL about upcoming cohorts or a private session scheduled around your team's calendar. Email us at [email protected] to start the conversation.
Who can I contact if I need assistance?
Please contact [email protected] for any inquiries regarding the program. We'll be glad to assist.
Contact Us
Inquire About the Course
Contact us today to discover how our learning solutions can support you as an individual, team, or organization.
Call us: +1 (212) 758-0177
Email us: [email protected]
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