Hyper Island: Industry Leader

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.

Since that first course the role has grown. On the Product Management programme I teach product thinking, stakeholder alignment, experimentation, growth and cross-functional ways of working. On the Data Analytics programme I lead a course on data-informed decision-making: turning analysis into a recommendation a business can act on, managing stakeholders through a real engagement, and holding a position under pressure. In both, students work on live client briefs end to end.

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.

• Designed and facilitated five weeks of workshops covering stakeholder management, discovery, assumption testing, project tracking, and communication
• Coached student teams through live exercises, stepping in only when needed and letting teams work through friction themselves
• Gave individual and team feedback, and led the assessment process for the cohort
• Curated and hosted a guest speaker programme bringing outside product practitioners into the room
• Connected every framework back to a real product management decision, not just the theory behind it

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.