PLANARA LEADERS · EXECUTIVE EDUCATION
Cohort-based executive programs for product and innovation leaders at complex enterprises. Designed by MIT faculty. Tailored to your team. Taught by people who have actually shipped.
Every major enterprise has launched AI pilots. Most have deployed tools. What almost none have built is the human capability to lead through it — to decide what to build, understand what people actually need, and guide teams where AI is a participant, not just a feature.
The gap isn’t technology. It’s judgment. And judgment is still entirely human.
Planara Leaders runs cohort-based executive education programs for product, innovation, and transformation leaders at large enterprises. Every program is built around a single conviction: that great products — and great organizations — begin with a deep understanding of what people genuinely need, and the discipline to build toward it.
The curriculum is designed by faculty from MIT’s Integrated Design & Management program. The delivery is by practitioners who have shipped at scale in Fortune 500 environments. The format is cohort-based, hybrid, and applied directly to the real work your team is already doing.
We don’t scale by hiring instructors to deliver someone else’s curriculum. The people who design the programs are the people who teach them.
Matt Kressy founded MIT’s Integrated Design & Management program and ran it for nearly three decades. Through his firm Designturn, he has shipped more than 100 products for organizations from startups to the Fortune 500. He teaches innovation the way practitioners wish they’d been taught — grounded in what people actually need, and in what actually ships.
James Haliburton is a serial entrepreneur and transformation leader who works at both ends of the stack — setting strategy in the boardroom and shipping systems on the keyboard. He has co-founded and exited multiple companies and delivered innovations to more than twenty Fortune 100 organizations.
We don’t send a generic curriculum and ask you to imagine it fitting your team. Before we finalize anything, we speak to a handful of your people directly — twenty to thirty minutes each — to understand what they’re actually working on and where they feel stuck. Then we shape the program around that.
30 minutes
We ask about your team, what you’re trying to build, and what success looks like.
within one week
We speak with 3–5 members of your team, 20–30 minutes each, to understand their world directly.
We send a curriculum outline and a clear pricing proposal — no obligation.
If it’s right, we move forward. If not, you have a free outside perspective on your team’s capability gaps.
Our programs are designed for organizations where the stakes are high, the systems are complex, and the people leading the work have to balance multiple disciplines at once.
CURRENT PROGRAM
Product leaders at OEMs, industrial manufacturers, and marine, automotive, and heavy equipment companies.
Our current program focuses on industrial and manufacturing leaders. Additional verticals are in development.
FORMAT
A 30-minute call. No prepared deck. No sales pitch. Just a conversation about your team and what you’re trying to build.
