In-House Training for Swisscom

In-house Training for Swisscom

In this interview, Pradeep Fernando (VP of Products Data & AI at Swisscom) shares his experience of working with Product Academy. We developed a set of tailored in-house trainings for his team.

• What has been the goal of your internal upskilling program and who was been involved?

Our data lake unit has been transforming in to empowered agile product teams as part of Swisscom’s overall agile transformation. In this context, we realized many of the newly appointed product owners were lacking certain product management “hard skills” and wanted to upskill the whole team in order that all the data lake product owners have at least a certain level in all the important product management “hard skills” and also the same understanding of basic product management concepts including the vocabulary.

• Why did you choose Product Academy?

Having been a highly satisfied participant in a few of Product Academy’s open workshops, I chose Product Academy specifically for the in-house training due to their product management expertise, the experienced product leaders they bring in as trainers, their professionalism, their ability to understand the trainees’ questions and needs, and give pertinent and highly actionable/practical answers and recommendations. Moreover, Tanja’s flexibility to run a pre-study and tailor the courses to the needs of our product owners convinced us that Product Academy was the right choice for achieving our goals.

• How did you perceive the collaboration and have your expectations been met?

The collaboration with Product Academy was very good – Tanja and Isa were very well organized, proactive and communicated very well. They were also very flexible and always involved both the product owners and the Swisscom leadership team to ensure that the training content and methodology were well suited to achieve the desired goals. I was especially impressed by the engagement from the POs in every workshop.

• Looking back at the training in 2021/2022, what has changed since then in your team? Have you been able to apply any of the learnings in real-life?

Every PO at Data Lake has benefitted from the workshops especially value estimation and business case creation. Our business planning exercise for 2023 was hailed as one of the best in the last 5 years by our executive business sponsor and management team. The POs have also reached a maturity where they are now regularly applying some of the frameworks such as opportunity-solution trees for developing their products, especially new ideas. They have also become quite confident in building business cases for their products.

• Who would you recommend an inhouse training with Product Academy to?

Any product unit that needs tailored, expert, practical and actionable training for their product owners & managers from product leaders with many years of experience.