Growing Product Talent with Product Teacher

Convergence.Tech upleveled its product practice by drawing on professional development workshops with Product Teacher.

Convergence.Tech is a digital transformation and technology development firm that is a leading innovator in Digital Identity, Web3.0, and data platform technologies. They’ve served customers including governments in places like Canada, Singapore, and Australia, the University of Toronto, and the United Nations Development Programme.

To continue to hone its edge, the firm regularly invests in its people talent. In 2022, Convergence.Tech kicked off training workshops for its product management and platform engineering teams, selecting Product Teacher as its provider of choice.

"This training helped the team reframe project thinking into product thinking by going through group discussions to use examples from our current work in progress. This will help our team better evaluate new feature requests for product scalability," said Erik Zvaigzne, Vice President of Product, Convergence.Tech.

The power of delegation

The leadership team at Convergence.Tech identified that delegating product management training would unlock significant return on investment. The ability to acquire key new product skills, without needing to sink in dozens of hours from leaders to personally facilitate training sessions, was strategic for Convergence.Tech to continue its growth trajectory. 

When it came to evaluating a partner to uplevel Convergence.Tech’s product management function, Product Teacher stood out as a frontrunner. With deep experience in training both early-stage startups and large multinational companies, Product Teacher offered a breadth of curriculum covering both the hard skills and the soft skills of product management.

Due to Product Teacher’s track record of cross-training talent across a spectrum of backgrounds and experiences — ranging from newly-minted product managers to experienced product directors — Chami Akmeemana, CEO of Convergence.Tech, decided to bring in Product Teacher to lead a series of product management training workshops.

Empowerment through first principles

While Convergence.Tech was already experienced with agile practices, its leadership team recognized that the key to their next phase of growth was to explore productization of tech they’ve developed to support its consulting engagements. Empowering the team by building the skills and competencies required to do this ensures they’ll bring this mindset to each new client engagement, while also refining what innovations have potential as standalone products to unlock new revenue streams.

To do so would require a successful shift away from delivery-oriented practices towards product-oriented practices. To achieve this outcome, Product Teacher facilitated a “Transitioning to Product Teams” workshop for a group of 17 attendees to create the foundation for a shift to product management thinking.

In this two-hour session, participants gained deeper insight into the first principles behind product management. Equipped with mental models and playbooks, team members of all seniority levels and backgrounds were empowered to make product decisions.

By acting as entrepreneurs and investors rather than as delivery managers, participants learned how to quickly identify low-hanging fruit to convert past deliverables into scalable product offerings.

Innovation through cross-pollination

The group followed up on this first session by kicking off a follow-up session focused on product development best practices, specifically diving into the interplay between product, design, and engineering for ideating divergent possibilities and then converging on the highest-ROI option.

In this second session, participants were invited to leverage group exercises to dive into the material, providing each individual with the opportunity to share their current and past initiatives with their teammates. By breaking down silos to gain a more holistic view across all workstreams, participants identified insights and ways of working that they could use to pursue higher-leverage outcomes.

Analyzing commonalities and differences between various client engagements, participants co-created innovative proposals for crafting product functionality and client collateral that could be seamlessly repurposed and swiftly customized for specific contexts.

Delighting customers at scale

This two-part training series with Product Teacher enabled the team at Convergence.Tech to add a crucial new skill to their repertoire: the ability to reframe customer initiatives as problem statements rather than immediate deliverables.

Viewing client engagements as incubators for scalable products enabled the team to elevate their decision-making processes towards a more strategic perspective.

Furthermore, participants were energized by the opportunity to collaboratively share in-flight work with one another to identify ways to craft repeatable, scalable product offerings.

By thinking about problems at scale, the team has a new lens on leveraging abstraction and innovation to create unique customer value. 

The future of product management consulting

With Product Teacher enabling product managers, strategists, and engineers to delight customers at scale, Convergence.Tech is eager to raise the bar and ship valuable offerings in Digital Identity and Web3.0, including how to leverage their existing C.TI verifiable credentials platform and digital wallets to apply to broader cross-sector opportunities.

With the team operating at a higher gear, they are crafting novel solutions that address not just the immediate ask from their clients, but the deeper root cause - leading to better adoption and stronger customer satisfaction.

The Convergence.Tech team looks forward to working with Product Teacher again for additional training engagements, ranging from data analytics to product strategy to internationalization.

See how you can uplevel your product management talent to truly delight your customers