This class is a part of the OTX – Extended Expertise educational offerings, powered by Org Topologies.

This course is taught in Norwegian and English.

OTX-APO: Shaping Product Organizations for the AI Age

An executive masterclass on adapting product organizations for the Agentic Age.  

This class builds on the models and approaches already in use, helping you decide what to keep, what to adapt, and what to let go. It will bring clarity to the messy dynamics of strategy, product development, operations, organization design, and human behavior. It will sharpen leadership decision-making that leads to increased profit or citizen value, reduced friction, and strengthened reliability. 

The goal: create the organizational performance you want.

About the event

This is an in-person executive masterclass for senior leaders accountable for the holistic performance of a product organization in volatile environments (who isn't, these days?). The product may be hardware, software, an embedded system, a service, or a combination of these. Agentic AI`s implications on individual, team, and organizational-wide efficiency will be integrated throughout the topics of the class.  During one and a half days, you explore three  multidimensional questions senior leaders keep asking:

1. How does my product organization work?

2. Why do familiar cost problems keep returning under each new framework or model? Problem like:

• Internal friction 

• Slow decisions & waiting due to dependencies on others

• Misalignment

• Disengagement from strategic priorities

3. How can you evaluate and, if needed, adapt the product organization models and approaches on offer* as well as the unnamed approaches at work?

*You probably already have some knowledge about, or heard people refer to, these sources and models:  the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency (Recommendation for product organizing in the public sector), Cagan (the SVPG Product Operating Model and the Product Trio), Skelton & Pais (Team Topologies), Leffingwell (SAFe), Larman & Vodde (LeSS), Schwaber & Sutherland (Scrum), PMI (traditional iron-triangle project management).

Models come and go. The underlying organizational dynamics do not. This course will allow you to evaluate new models on their merits instantly.  This has a direct impact on the decisions you authorize when new models and terminology are introduced. 

This is not yet another 'best practice for product organization' training. The class equips you with updated world-class experience-based knowledge, authority, and a leadership tool. It helps you stay on top of reflective conversations with your middle managers, internal experts, and external advisors.

Who Should Attend

General Managers in the public and private sectors. Other senior executives such as: VPs of Product, VPs of Engineering, HR Directors, Directors of Digitalization, R&D Managers, and similar. The class is well-suited for leaders in high-trust environments where quality and security are non-negotiable.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the training, participants will be better able to:

1. Tighten the link between strategic intent for long-term profit (or citizen-value) and the daily  structural dynamics that drive it.   

2. Bridge from output-factory to outcome-driven product development. Support continuous product discovery and PDLC learning loops, embedded in a broad learning culture across the organization and guided by holistic strategic objectives.

3. Adapt your organization for AI-augmented outcome gains, not just output hype. Enable an AI-harmonized organization.  Not just LLMs and agentic AI layered on top of an unchanged structure.

4. Expose structural friction and power dynamics — and sharpen your ability to reduce friction and unhealthy dynamics. See how the gap between business* and engineering, broader stakeholder demand, mandates, and subtle reward mechanisms drives local optimization over holistic performance. Why neither "culture campaigns" nor "transforming the IT department" alone can fix it. Unite commercial (or public) and technical outcome accountability. *Citizen-facing value in the public sector.

5. Improve communication and increase clarity through a shared, precise language grounded in the Org Topologies™ body of knowledge.

6. Understand the product organization models and sources of influence you are asked to support. Examples: the Norwegian Digitalization Agency (Digdir) recommendation, the SVPG Product Trio, Team Topologies, SAFe, Scrum, LeSS, and the unnamed intentional and unintentional designs already at work.

7. Evaluate and, where needed, adapt the product organization model in your context. Decide what fits, what you adapt, and what you set aside. - Rather than install a model wholesale and hope it solves recurring structural problems.

8. Build informed consent across senior leadership. Define a fit-for-purpose, system-optimizing goal that holds consistently across your product organization. You own this! Not the consensus of a committee. Learn how deliberate mandate adaptations grow ownership to let the rest follow.

   
   

Workshops anchor the class. You leave with explicit next steps. -  Not a day and a half of lost work, but an opportunity for deep focus on your organizational performance at its core. 

Why This Matters

Organizational design is a leadership responsibility. 

The performance of your product organization is too important to delegate completely to middle management or outsource to external advisors. Over the past few years, many organizational influencers have repeated the message, 'Managers must step back. The result, in many organizations, is that senior leaders have quietly disengaged from the very structures they are ultimately accountable for. Instead, middle managers and these external voices have taken de facto control of the organizational design elements that shape culture and performance.

The need is a functioning, reliable, and relevant product organization. 

It's about embedding continuous change in the org versus the stop/go motion of costly transformations.

A Strategic Lens on Your Product Organization as a whole — Not a Framework

Most management education focuses on a narrower question — what's good for middle management (often named product leaders, product managers, or product owners), for UI design, for software development, for architecture, for operations, for a sales role. OTX-APO is not a framework and not a prescriptive method for doing product development. It is a shared thinking and communication tool grounded in one question: what is in the interest of the organization as a whole?

Certification

Participants who successfully complete this course earn the OTX-APO (Adaptive Product Organizations) accreditation.

The OTX-APO badge recognizes that the holder can apply systems thinking in organizational contexts: build and read system models, distinguish local fixes from systemic improvements, facilitate cross-role modeling sessions, and use these skills to drive sustainable change in teams and organizations.

The badge is awarded upon completion of the training and is valid as a standalone credential. It also counts toward the broader OTX certification pathway for those pursuing deeper expertise in organizational design and transformation.

Trainer

This class is taught by Steinar Haldorsen.

Steinar has 13 years of first-hand experience in business and product leadership roles across different product organizations. He has been a Product Manager and worked extensively with product discovery and service design.

Over the last 7 years, he has worked as an organizational consultant, change agent, and supporter for both senior executives and employees. He is entering his 5th year as a guest lecturer at Kristiania University College and has delivered multiple courses through Glasspaper.

He has been a certified Org Topologies Educator since 2023 with practical experiences from both workshops and educational contexts. His practice is grounded in high-trust, highly regulated contexts like health, finance, auditing, public sector, and offshore/energy, where reliability and trust are non-negotiable.

 Steinar's approach holds the connection between individuals, organizational design, and long-term profit as the senior leader's actual job, not as separate concerns to be balanced 

How We Work

The class mixes concise input, systemic zooming exercises on the Org Topologies™ body of knowledge, structured dialogue, assessment techniques, and case-based reflection on participants’ own organizations. Participants bring a real organizational challenge into the room; the org design map, learned principles, and the multi-model comparison are used together to surface patterns, identify leverage points, and design experiments on organizational design and mandates.

Class Experience & References

Language

Norwegian by default. Switches to English only if all registered participants agree, decided by poll before the start date. Norwegian wins ties. English speakers are welcome to register: a full refund if the class runs in Norwegian.

Includes a copy of  the Amazon bestselling book “10X Org”, lunch both days, drinks & snacks throughout the class