Is this course for me?

I built this course for:

• Sora Seniority-Seeker: Anyone who works on products or services who wants to learn new skills that help them interact with and manage stakeholders. These ‘executive alignment’ skills will help you grow your own career, because becoming more senior also means that you become more responsible for ‘managing up’ to help protect your projects and team from confusion and churn. Through this course, you’ll learn how to negotiate organizational politics without getting too political.

• Startup founders and innovation team leaders:

• Team builders

• Members of a stakeholder, leadership or executive team:

• Persona fans and foes:
  

What’s special about this course, and why should I care?

It’s unique. After co-authoring two books on data-driven personas and decades of consulting, I created, tested, and honed the perspective and processes I cover in the course. You’ll learn how to create alignment personas from the inventor of alignment personas.

It’s practical and detailed. This isn’t a thinly-disguised promotion for my services. When you finish the series, you should be able to say “I’m ready to plan and run my own executive alignment / alignment persona workshop. I know why I should try it, how to plan for it, what the ‘five conversations’ of the workshop are and how to facilitate them, and what to do after the workshop to put the alignment personas to use and keep my project on track.

What will I walk away with?

You will be ready to run your first executive alignment / alignment persona workshop in your own organization.

You will have a fresh perspective on why most projects get chaotic no matter how great your ideas and teams are.

You will understand why and how to ‘wrangle stakeholders’ in a way that’s helpful to them, to you, and to the other teams in your organization.

You will be unwilling to start any project without clearly defined, measurable goals.

You will know the difference between alignment personas and the other types of personas.

If it’s so great, why is this course free?

I believe executive alignment is a new frontier and critical skillset for people who work on products and services and I want to be at the center of that conversation.

I want lots of people to start talking about executive alignment (the ‘what’) and using alignment personas (the ‘how’). I believe these skills will help us all create better products, happier teams, and more expansive careers.

I also want to give back to the user experience and product communities, especially right now during these waves of layoffs.

I’ve identified my own personal and professional goals for sharing this course and the best way to achieve them is to give this content away.