The VP R&D Scale-up program
Are you a VP R&D at a fast-growing start-up?
We’ve been there and we’ll help you make the LEAP.
WELCOME TO LEAP - THE VP R&D SCALE-UP PROGRAM
You’re a VP R&D in a fast growing start-up, with great responsibility and multiple growth challenges. You have significant management experience, but you find out that things appear to be quite different close to the top. You need to connect your team to the business, increase velocity, drive long-term technology changes, and become a meaningful partner in the company’s management team. It’s not that simple.
Being a VP R&D in a rapidly growing start-up is one of the most challenging roles in the hi-tech industry. In order to lead the engineering team to the next funding round and beyond, there’s a lot you need to know and learn, both on the professional and the leadership level.
After many years of being senior engineering executives, Miri Curiel and Adi Shacham-Shavit share their toolboxes and insights to make you a qualified R&D leader.
The Program
LEAP, the VP R&D Scale-up Program is the first of its kind.
Each lecture discusses different elements and skills you should possess as VP R&D. Each group session focuses on applying advanced tools and practices to real-life situations. In each session, you will meet and learn from engineering leaders who share similar problems.
By the end of the program, you will have a strategic growth plan for your R&D organization, suited for your specific challenges.
When we were senior R&D executives, we learned all those lessons the hard way. We plan to save you that experience and replace it with a much better one.
Start your managerial LEAP today!
Testimonials
Who can participate?
The program is intended for active VP R&D or CTOs in startup companies, who lead the company’s engineering teams. We ensure that participants have similar-sized organizations and similar challenges, to provide a useful knowledge-sharing environment. We do encourage a bit of variation, which results in a more diverse group and exchange of ideas and insights.
With about 12 participants, it is an intimate group of engineering executives where open, transparent discussions are possible.
Participation in the program requires an interview.
Join us for the next LEAP batch!
What will you learn in the LEAP program?
At the end of the program you will know:
- What the actual role of the VP R&D is
- How to be a real partner in the company’s management team
- How to scale up your engineering organization
- How to work effectively with product team and other peers
- How to increase product development velocity and frequently release value to your customers
- How to drive technological goals to enable a long-term growth
Get the program’s syllabus
How it Works
Program’s Duration
The program runs for 10 weeks.
The Sessions
- An all-day opening workshop
- 8 weeks, each including:
- A 2-hour session, including a lecture on one of the program’s topics, where you can consult about your own challenges around that topic. The lectures are recorded and available for future watching.
- A 1-hour group free consultation, in which you can raise specific dilemmas and learn new approaches from the mentors and from the experience of the other participants.
- An exercise that allows you to apply the learned material to your own challenges. The exercises are part of an ongoing project that will produce a concrete change-oriented work plan tailored to your organization. The mentors will provide you with personal feedback and guidance concerning your exercises.
- An all-day final workshop
Sessions’ Time and Location
The opening and final sessions take place on Tuesdays 9-16 in a lovely venue that meets COVID19 guidelines.
Lectures will be held mostly in Zoom, on Tuesdays 9-11. It will allow you enough time for work and private time further on during the day. 2 of these meetings will take place face to face, to allow some more networking.
The consulting sessions will be held in Zoom, on Sundays 17-18.
The Zoom sessions are recorded and made available to participants only, so you can go back and listen to them whenever you need them.
Slack Group
Each program batch has its own Slack group that can be used for discussions, consultations, and additional material. This group remains after the program is over, in order to give members the opportunity to communicate with one another on an ongoing basis.
Privacy and Non-Compete
The participants will commit to full privacy and to not publish other participants’ business or personal information so that the program can be open and transparent. It offers a safe place for members to share their challenges.
We will not accept participants from competing companies.
What will you achieve by the end of the program?
- The power of fluent business communication
- Seeing your challenges from a different angle, and gaining a broader perspective on how to tackle them
- The ability to become a productive senior manager who leads the company to results, while gaining an intimate network of peers to work with
- A scaling program for your team to implement within your organization.
Moreover...
- Participants are entitled to a 1-hour mentoring session with Miri or Adi
- 15% off mentoring sessions with mentors, within 6 months after the program has ended
- Participants become part of the LEAP Academy community, which includes dozens of VP R&Ds to consult with. They also have exclusive access to the LEAP Academy monthly meetups.
FAQ
The next batch opens on November 15, 2022.
One of the most important aspects of the program is the group’s quality. Having people with a similar level of expertise and facing the same scale-up challenges is essential while assembling the group. During the interview, we pay close attention to these aspects.
When you have to double your engineering team in the coming year, when this is your first serious VP R&D role, when this is your first scale-up R&D management role and when your company is gaining huge traction and the founders need more output from you, which you are not sure how to deliver.
In order to ensure the participants are able to share their dilemmas confidentiality, we are obligated to have no participants from competing companies in the program. This is one of the goals of the screening interview.
The homework is part of the program. Writing is a small part of the homework, but it involves a lot of thinking, so allow some time for this. The goal is to implement the learning material into your own use case, with a rare opportunity to get feedback from us. The end goal is for you to come up with a scale-up plan for your team, and the homework is the path to achieve it.
