Maven: LLMs for Leaders & Senior Product Managers

This Maven program is built for senior product managers, C-level executives, and founders who need a working understanding of large language models — not to become engineers, but to lead teams that build AI products and evaluate where to invest.

The instructors are Hamza Farooq and Mustafa Kapadia, both formerly from Google. Farooq has 15-plus years of experience leading ML teams and teaches at Stanford and UCLA. Kapadia brings 20-plus years in product innovation and is currently building an LLM startup. The combination of academic-side and founder-side perspectives gives the course a practical bent that distinguishes it from purely conceptual AI literacy programs.

What the course covers

The program addresses four areas: identifying where to integrate AI technologies within an existing product or business, validating concepts through user research before building, developing minimum viable products that incorporate AI components, and building the internal case for GenAI investment with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

The target audience is narrow by design. The course is aimed at people who already know how to run a product and need to develop AI fluency on top of that foundation. It explicitly targets three groups: C-level executives developing organizational AI strategy, senior PMs integrating LLMs into future products, and founders launching AI-native startups. New or early-career product managers are not the intended audience.

Format

The next cohort runs for five Saturday sessions across four weeks, with a time commitment of four to six hours per week. Sessions are live. The price is $800.

What the course does not cover

This is not a technical program. Participants will not learn to fine-tune models, write prompts at a system level, or build LLM pipelines from scratch. The emphasis is on product thinking applied to AI: how to scope, validate, and pitch AI features rather than how to implement them. Teams looking for hands-on engineering exposure will need a different course.

Worth considering if

You lead a product function and are under pressure to define an AI roadmap but do not have the vocabulary to evaluate competing technical approaches internally. The course provides enough conceptual grounding to ask better questions of engineering teams and make more confident prioritization decisions.