Schulich Masterclass Certificate in Venture Product and Growth

Decide what to build next when every option involves incomplete information. Most teams do not fail because they lack ideas; they fail because they cannot determine what is worth learning now, what should be exploited, and what should be stopped. This module gives participants a practical way to make product bets without pretending the evidence is clearer than it is. 

• Define what the company is optimizing for right now 

• Determine whether a product move is exploration, exploitation, or a distraction 

• Use opportunity cost, expected value, time horizon, and one-way versus two-way doors to sequence bets 

• Set evidence thresholds before the team becomes attached to the work 

• Define kill criteria and follow-on decisions 

You do not need every founder to become a CTO. However, leaders do need to understand the product system well enough to make informed trade-offs, write useful specifications, identify risks, and use AI without confusing speed with progress. This module helps participants determine what can be validated, prototyped, automated, or shipped with minimal engineering headcount—and what must be treated as production infrastructure because of scale, security, reliability, or the cost of failure. It also helps them identify the first high-leverage workflow for their AI Product Harness.

• Map the product system: users, workflows, data, interfaces, integrations, dependencies, and failure modes 

• Distinguish among prototypes, pilots, internal tools, and production systems, including when engineering ownership becomes non-negotiable 

• Write product specifications that clarify trade-offs rather than create more meetings 

• Determine where AI and a lean team can improve cost, speed, quality, or risk in the way the company builds 

• Identify the first high-leverage workflow for the AI Product Harness 

Strategy can leak through daily execution. Without aligned roadmaps, metrics, and communication, organizational drift is inevitable. As a company scales, the founder’s role must shift from making every product decision to unblocking teams and clarifying direction so they can execute without constant approval. This module helps participants create organizational coherence through a product operating rhythm that connects vision, priorities, decisions, and feedback.

• Translate company vision into product priorities, decision rules, and an operating cadence 

• Define decision rights across founders, product, engineering, design, GTM, and customer-facing teams 

• Improve decision velocity by identifying founder bottlenecks, unresolved trade-offs, and unclear ownership 

• Determine which rituals create leverage and which create noise 

• Decide whether to hire product managers, what they should own, and what should remain with founders 

• Design a feedback and action-item loop that prevents decisions from disappearing after meetings 

Capital is fundamentally connected to product strategy: what you build, who adopts it, and how efficiently you reach proof all directly shape investor conviction and potential exit paths. Building with AI and a lean engineering team can extend runway and accelerate learning, but investors and strategic buyers will still assess whether early speed is supported by a product and engineering foundation that can scale securely and reliably. This module helps participants connect immediate product and growth choices to financing readiness, valuation, and strategic optionality.

• Translate roadmap choices into the product proof points investors and strategic buyers’ value 

• Connect lean engineering choices to burn rate, milestone velocity, technical risk, and the capital narrative 

• Map adoption, retention, expansion, workflow depth, and customer concentration into a credible capital story 

• Understand how strategic buyers assess product gaps, customer overlap, integration risk, and build-versus-buy decisions 

• Define near-term product and growth actions that strengthen strategic optionality before a financing or acquisition process begins 

Growth is not simply about generating more activity; it is about driving customer behaviours that compound over time. By examining how a product creates, captures, and multiplies demand, this module helps participants select the right growth motion, shape their core offer, and assess whether their activation, retention, expansion, and referral loops are improving.

• Choose among founder-led sales, sales-led GTM, product-led growth, community-led growth, and hybrid motions 

• Design pricing, packaging, promotion, and activation experiments 

• Use product data, activation metrics, retention patterns, expansion signals, referral loops, and viral-coefficient thinking to strengthen the growth system 

• Assess whether network effects exist, identify their type, and determine what must happen for them to strengthen 

• Create a measurement plan with clear decision rules—not just a dashboard 

As AI makes product features increasingly easy to copy, long-term defensibility requires founders to look beyond code to identify where true competitive advantage lies. This module helps participants navigate an era of low-cost, automated development by distinguishing temporary product features from compounding company advantages—such as proprietary data loops, workflows, and ecosystem positioning—that are more difficult to replicate.

• Map the company’s current advantages across workflow ownership, data loops, distribution, trust, switching costs, brand, ecosystem position, speed, and organizational learning 

• Identify where AI lowers barriers to entry and where it increases the value of proprietary context 

• Distinguish between features that can be copied and loops that can compound 

• Determine what must be true for the company to become more difficult to replace 

• Define concrete next steps to build and strengthen competitive moats 

The capstone is not an AI demo. It is a working system that helps participants’ companies listen, learn, decide, communicate, and follow through. It can take the form of a workflow, automation, internal tool, prompt system, agent process, or prototype. The credential baseline is one coherent harness focused on a single high-leverage workflow that improves a real product or growth-related operational problem. Participants may extend it into additional areas as useful for their companies.

Harness Components (choose one primary area): 

• User feedback and bugs: Ingest, tag, summarize, prioritize, and route customer feedback, bug reports, and feature requests to inform product decisions.  

• Research and analysis: Support market, competitor, customer, usage, and internal analysis.  

• Go-to-market (GTM) and launch motions: Generate first drafts of launch emails, blog posts, beta targeting lists, onboarding messages, pricing tests, and lifecycle communications.  

• User and internal communications: Improve communication loops among customers, product teams, GTM teams, leadership, and other internal teams.  

• Action items: Turn insights and decisions into assigned owners, next steps, deadlines, and review cadences.  

Baseline Deliverables (required for credential completion): 

• One working prototype, workflow, automation, prompt chain, agent workflow, or implemented internal process for the selected high-leverage workflow.  

• A one-page system map showing inputs, outputs, users, data sources, tools, risks, and the maintenance owner.  

• A short operating note explaining where the harness resides, who uses it, what decision it improves, and how it will be maintained.  

• Optional extension: A short presentation or demo explaining the business problem, the workflow, what changed, and what the participant will do next; or an additional harness component.