strategic leadership | strategic planning | OKR goal setting | change management | leadership development | alignment
What You Will Learn:
- Build a strategy that survives contact with the organisation, not just the offsite
- Run a strategy session end to end: preparation, two days of work, and a written plan
- Translate a strategy into OKR and run the quarterly cycle that keeps it alive
- Communicate a strategy so that people can repeat it back to you correctly
- Lead change through Kotter’s eight steps and the rider-elephant-path model
- Diagnose where the organisation is now with gap and stakeholder analysis
- Develop the managers who will execute the strategy when you are not in the room
- Choose and set up OKR tooling, and connect goals to review and reward
- Learn alongside Mike’s 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author’s experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
The Reality of the “Last Mile” in Strategy
Let’s be honest: most corporate strategies are just expensive PowerPoint decks that go to die in a forgotten Google Drive folder. We’ve all been there—the leadership team spends three days at a fancy offsite, comes back with a “vision,” and by Tuesday, everyone is back to putting out fires and ignoring the new mandates. Mike’s course, Strategic Leadership: Set Direction and Execute Vision, is the antidote to that specific brand of organizational dysfunction. Having navigated the tech landscape for years, I’ve seen plenty of leadership development programs that are heavy on fluff and light on job-ready skills. This isn’t one of them.
What sets this apart is the focus on the “last mile.” It assumes that coming up with a clever idea is only 10% of the battle. The other 90% is survival—making sure your strategy survives contact with an overworked engineering team or a skeptical sales department. Drawing from Mike’s experience at heavy-hitters like Preply and Wargaming, the course feels less like a lecture and more like a hands-on lab for your career. It addresses the uncomfortable truth that leadership is often about managing the friction between “where we want to be” and “what we can actually do today.” If you’re looking for certification prep that actually translates to real-world projects, this hits the mark by focusing on operationalizing intent rather than just dreaming it up.
Prerequisites for Success
While the course is marketed as beginner to advanced, I’d argue that you’ll get the most value if you’ve actually felt the pain of a failed rollout. You don’t need an MBA, but you do need a baseline understanding of how teams function. Ideally, you should be in a position where you have at least some influence over a budget, a roadmap, or a headcount. If you’ve never had to deliver bad news to a stakeholder or pivot a product mid-quarter, some of the nuances might fly over your head. That said, if you’re an aspiring lead looking for career growth, this provides the vocabulary you need to sit at the “adult table” during strategic planning sessions.
The Toolkit: Skills & Industry-Standard Tools
The curriculum doesn’t just give you a “to-do” list; it provides a framework of industry-standard tools that top-tier tech firms actually use. We’re talking about a deep dive into:
- OKR Goal Setting: Moving beyond the theory of Objectives and Key Results into the actual “how-to” of choosing and setting up OKR tooling.
- Change Management: Merging Kotter’s eight steps with the Rider-Elephant-Path model to understand why people resist change even when it’s logical.
- Stakeholder Analysis: Moving from beginner to advanced levels of organizational navigation by diagnosing where the “blockers” are hiding.
- Strategic Communication: Learning the art of the “repeatable strategy”—if your intern can’t explain the vision to a peer, you’ve failed.
These are job-ready skills that directly impact your ability to lead through complexity without losing the room.
Career Benefits & Job Roles
This course is a goldmine for anyone eyeing Director, VP, or Head of Product roles. In the current market, companies aren’t just looking for people who can manage a backlog; they want leaders who can drive alignment across disparate departments. By completing the real-world projects embedded in the course—like running an end-to-end strategy session—you’re building a portfolio of leadership artifacts. This is the kind of stuff that wins interviews. It prepares you to handle the “how would you lead a departmental pivot?” question with more than just platitudes. For those seeking career growth, being the person who can translate a 5-year vision into a 3-month OKR cycle makes you indispensable.
The Pros: Why It Works
- Execution-First Mindset: It bypasses the academic “ivory tower” approach to strategy. Mike focuses on what happens when you’re not in the room, ensuring your managers have the tools to keep the vision alive.
- Global Perspective: Learning alongside 1.6 million students from 185 countries gives the community a massive breadth of perspective. You realize that “strategy friction” is a universal human problem, not just a “your company” problem.
- The “Wargaming” Pedigree: The insights aren’t theoretical. You can tell these tactics were forged in high-stakes environments like Alfa-Bank and Preply, where strategic planning isn’t a luxury—it’s a survival mechanism.
The Cons: An Honest Take
If I have one gripe, it’s that the course is dense. This isn’t something you can binge-watch on 2x speed over a weekend and expect to master. To truly get the job-ready skills promised, you have to do the work—the writing, the diagnosing, and the difficult self-reflection on your current leadership style. It requires a level of active participation that might be a turn-off for someone just looking for a “quick win” certification to slap on their LinkedIn profile without changing their actual behavior.