Transitioning from Project to Product

Help transform your organization's way of thinking from a "Project" mindset to a "Product" one, and unlock your Agile potential!

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Live Online

Oct 20th - 20th, 2025
8:00 AM - 4:00 PM CDT


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Overview

As more and more companies progress along their paths to digital transformation and embracing agility, there is a common pattern of obstacles that continue to present themselves. Many of these obstacles revolve around the legacy structure of a project and how the business is instrumented to plan, fund, and manage in a legacy project model.

In this one-day training, we seek to understand and eliminate these obstacles by helping organizations rearchitect their ways of working away from “project thinking” to “product thinking.” As part of this, we’ll take a deep dive into how “work” is defined, prioritized, and funded. In fact, we won’t call it “work” anymore as we shift our focus from what jobs we have to do to what outcomes and impacts we wish to deliver for our customers, our market, and our business.

This training provides an overview of Project to Product and then digs into three core areas of focus:

  • Product-Based Funding
  • Planning and Product Horizons
  • Measuring and Learning

Attendees leave with an understanding and a sketch of a path forward for guiding this change within their own companies.

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Full course details

Course outline

From Project to Product

  • Project to Product overview
    • Difference: Project vs. Product
  • Process and Approach
    • Waterfall
    • Iterative delivery with waterfall requirements
    • Blended discovery and delivery
    • Mean Time to Pivot (MTTP)
  • Common constraints to transitioning from project to product
    • Lack of persistent, dedicated teams
    • Redefining the role of the PMO
    • Absence of Product Management capabilities
    • Separation of Business and IT
    • Project-based funding
    • Project planning
  • Building persistent product teams
    • Project teams vs. product teams
    • The product management function

Product-Based Funding

  • Product-Based Funding
    • “What?” and “Why?”
    • Incremental investing
    • Funding by product portfolios, families, and teams
    • Funding cycles and adaptive investments
  • Designing your product-based funding model
  • Examples and case studies

Planning and Product Horizons

  • The Iron Triangle
    • From “fixed” time, budget, and scope
    • Certainty was always a myth
  • Product roadmaps
    • Outcomes over output
    • Measuring value
    • When will it be done?
  • Estimating in ranges
    • To fixed data and variable scope
    • Setting leadership expectations

Measuring and Learning

  • Measuring outcomes, not outputs
    • Measuring progress, capacity, and flow
    • Measuring resilience and technical agility
    • Measuring product / market impact
  • Validated learning

Course Wrap-Up

  • Road-mapping your change
Audience / prerequisites

Anyone interested in helping transition a company’s way of working from project to product. This may include but is not limited to people in the following roles: 

  • Finance
  • Transformation leaders
  • Product Leaders
  • Coaches
  • Change Managers
  • Executives
  • Business Leaders
In this class you will learn how to
  • Gain a foundational understanding of Project to Product and why this transition is critical to agility
  • Understand how planning horizons and methods shift in the product-space
  • Appreciate the concept of total product ownership and the necessity for product management people and skills
  • Differentiate between fixed-scope / variable date & cost planning versus fixed-date & cost / variable scope planning
  • Learn the basics of Product-Based funding
  • Learn techniques for measuring outcomes and value with product-based funding

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