A Fortune 15 telecom · Product & venture-building training
A Fortune 15 telecom's product team needed to build like founders again.
An immersive three-day training, culminating in a live pitch day
The situation
A Fortune 15 telecom with a deep product organization, facing the reset every legacy enterprise is facing: AI is rewriting how products get built, faster than most can absorb.
The challenge
Despite real and sustained effort, this was an organization that had struggled for years to keep its product and innovation muscle current. Just as it made gains, AI moved the frontier again, and faster. The deeper issue wasn't talent or intent. It was distance. The team was operating a world away from where the best product work is actually being done today, and the gap was widening every quarter. They didn't live in the world of what's frontier and best-in-class. They needed to see it.
The question
How do we close the distance between a legacy product organization and the frontier of how ventures are actually built today, fast enough to matter?
The approach
An immersive three-day training, designed and led end to end and delivered in partnership with the Pioneer Square Labs team, on one principle: don't lecture, immerse. We brought the team inside a real startup environment to show them, not tell them, what's possible at the frontier.
What the three days covered
- 01
Product foundations
what good product management is, and why it matters more in an AI world
- 02
AI-forward workflows
building requirements and prototypes with AI tools, hands-on, in real time
- 03
Storytelling & the pitch
the discipline of telling a venture's story and earning the room
- 04
Rapid venture validation
drawn from live studio venture-building
- 05
Candid founder conversations
the unvarnished reality from people building at the frontier
The culmination
Pitch day
Teams take an idea from blank page to a funded-style pitch in front of investors. The goal: blow past what they thought was possible, and send them home changed.
The lesson underneath
Even the best product managers in the world won't ship breakthrough ventures if the organization and its executives aren't aligned to let them. Capability is necessary. Executive air cover is what actually unblocks it.
The impact
The team left having seen and built at the frontier: a shared AI-forward way of working, real reps with AI tools, and concrete commitments for the new year.
Just as important, leadership left with a sharper picture of what world-class venture-building looks like, and what it would take from the top to enable it.
Role
I designed and led the engagement end to end: the pitch that won it, the commercial structure, the logistics, and the facilitation on the ground. It was delivered through Tribe Ventures in partnership with Pioneer Square Labs, where I lead the corporate innovation studio. My lens throughout was the corporate venture builder's: not just how to build, but which innovations are worth backing, why they stall inside big companies, and what executives have to do to unblock them.
Re-tooling a team for the AI era?