Stop having the same argument every quarter.
Six hours that turn a recurring argument between your product people and your engineers into a decision they make together — worked on their own backlog, not a case study.
Both sides leave using the same words for the same things. Most of the friction was never disagreement; it was translation loss.
Twenty recurring decisions, and who decides, is consulted, is informed, can veto. One page. Signed by both sides in the room.
The estimate, the refactor, the “can we just”, the no, the escalation, and the architecture decision nobody outside the room understood. A seventh, newer one — who owns an AI-generated artefact — is covered where the room wants it.
Who it is for
- A product and engineering team that keeps relitigating the same trade-offs.
- A group of PMs and tech leads across several teams, where the friction is a pattern rather than a personality.
- A new leadership pairing — a CPO and a CTO, or a PM and an EM — who need an operating contract quickly.
- Eight to twenty in a cohort. Fewer than eight and the labs lose their range; more than twenty and the room stops arguing honestly. In-house there is no floor — a leadership team of five or six is a normal shape, and the labs are built around them.
The shape of it
- Format
- One day, on site or remote
- Shape
- Half taught, half worked
- Group
- 8–20 in a cohort; no floor in-house
- Drawn from
- AI-Native Core · The Bridge · Technology
I hold a CTO seat day to day. That is the point: you are not being taught by someone describing a job they left, and the material is drawn from a job I am still doing.
What actually happens
Half taught, half worked — and the worked half runs on your own material, because a case study lets everyone stay polite.
- What changed, and what did not
The morning opens on the honest version of the AI question: which parts of both jobs got cheaper, which got harder, and why the fundamentals underneath them got more valuable rather than less.
- The six conversations
The core of the day. Each conversation is framed, taken apart, and then run live — including the one where everybody now assumes AI made it faster.
- Enough architecture to argue properly
Not to make PMs into engineers. To make the cost of a technical decision legible to the person asking for it, and the cost of a product decision legible to the person building it.
- The decision-rights lab
The room writes its own map, argues about the contested rows, and leaves with something both sides have actually agreed to.
What you leave with
- A one-page decision-rights map for their own team, written and signed in the room.
- Scripts for the six conversations, in language they chose themselves.
- A shared read on which technical constraints are real, which are habits, and how to tell.
- A follow-up pack: the exercise templates and a short reading list.
What it costs
A cohort seat is €500–600 per person, excluding VAT, for a room of eight or more drawn from different companies. In-house for one organisation starts at €6,000, and is about €8,000 for a room of twelve — quoted after scoping, with no minimum and the labs running on your own backlog.
How you know it worked
Corporate training gets renewed on evidence, not enthusiasm. Two numbers are agreed at scoping, and only one of them is promised.
The Health Check the promise
Twelve statements, scored one to five, answered separately by each function, a week before and eight weeks after. The headline number is not the average — it is the spread between the functions. That spread closing is the product.
One metric you already track context, not promise
Chosen with you at scoping from what your tooling already produces: escalations per month, percentage of sprint scope changed mid-sprint, estimate-to-actual variance, lead time for changes. Reported as supporting context. I do not promise a number I do not control.
Is this the right thing for your team?
Thirty minutes. You describe what is going wrong; I tell you which of these actually fits, including when the answer is none of them.