The course — Collaborative Project & Stakeholder Management, part of the PM27 Stockholm programme — ran for five weeks and covered stakeholder management, facilitation, collaboration, product discovery, assumption testing, project tracking, and communication. My role spanned designing and facilitating workshops, coaching student teams, giving feedback and assessment, bringing in industry guest speakers, and connecting every framework back to real-world product management practice.
Stakeholder management is easy to teach as theory and hard to make feel necessary in practice. A cohort can learn a matrix, a meeting cadence, a template, and still never feel the pressure those tools exist to relieve. The brief was to close that gap: build a course where students experience the same ambiguity and stakeholder friction real product teams face, so the frameworks land because they've already been needed, not because they were assigned.
Rather than teaching frameworks as content to memorise, I built the course around situations the cohort had to work through. Each session paired a method — stakeholder mapping, DACI, assumption testing — with a live exercise where the method was the only way forward, not a worksheet to fill in afterwards. By the final week, every team ran a real workshop with stakeholders from an actual client brief, so the tools they'd practiced for five weeks had to hold up in front of someone who wasn't grading them. I stayed in the room as a coach, not a safety net: my job was to design the conditions for teams to find their own way through, and to give direct, specific feedback on what worked and what didn't.
Alongside the core curriculum, I curated a guest speaker programme bringing practicing product people directly into the room: Jasmine Jaja, Sigrid Hellberg, Moa Bogren, Francesca Cortesi, and Molood Ceccarelli each shared how the frameworks the cohort was learning actually show up in their day-to-day work. Students consistently named these sessions among the most valuable part of the course — proof that the gap between practice and method closes fastest when practitioners speak for themselves.
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What students highlighted
“Stefania is the best IL we have had so far. Her dedication is inspiring. She really listened to us and catered to our real needs as students.”
— PM27 Stockholm student
“Stefania is a great industry leader, all frameworks that she taught us are very valuable.”
— PM27 Stockholm student
“Stefania was always clear, communicative, super organised, very knowledgeable and really passionate about her work and the course.”
— PM27 Stockholm student
“Thank you Stefania for all the sessions, guest speakers and sharing your knowledge and experience.”
— PM27 Stockholm student
“Great job! I learned a lot and the speakers were very good and insightful.”
— PM27 Stockholm student
Coaching a cohort through real stakeholder pressure reinforced something I see in product teams too: people don't internalise a framework by being told about it, they internalise it by needing it. The students who got the most out of the course weren't the ones who memorised the matrix fastest — they were the ones who hit a wall in front of a real stakeholder and reached for a tool because they remembered exactly why it existed. That's the same instinct I look for when I bring frameworks into product teams: less about the slide, more about the moment it's actually needed.
Working on something similar?
I'm returning to Hyper Island after summer as Industry Leader for a second course. If you're building a team's product practice — through coaching, workshops, or hands-on facilitation — I'd love to talk.
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