Most product managers working in Belgium today did not get there through a formal path. They came from business analysis, project management, engineering, or consulting, and at some point someone handed them a product scope and called them a PM or a product owner. The theory came later, and with it came a sharper awareness of the distance between what good product management looks like in books and what actually happens in the room.
This training is designed for product owners, product managers and product leaders at Belgian and European tech companies who want to close the distance between what they know and what they can actually do consistently, in the real conditions of their work. Two days of practice-first learning, delivered by practitioners who have worked with product teams across the Belgian and European market for over a decade.
We do not layer more theory onto an already substantial reading list, but we give practitioners at every stage of their career a shared language, frameworks grounded in real product work, and two days to apply them alongside peers who are dealing with the same pressures.
"A no brainer for every product manager." — Jago Winnen, Product Manager at Vanden Broele
What the two days cover
The programme is structured across two distinct days, each with a clear focus. Understanding this split before you register helps you assess which parts will be most immediately useful for where you are right now.
Day 1: Strategy, context and discovery
The first day opens with product foundations: what makes a great product, how the product lifecycle works, and how the different roles in a product team relate to each other. In organisations where the boundary between PM, PO, business analyst, and project manager is genuinely blurry (which describes most European tech companies) this is often where the sharpest conversations of the day happen, because people arrive with different assumptions about what their role actually is.
From there, the day moves into the strategy to execution cascade: how company mission connects through to product strategy, objectives, and initiatives, and how to build alignment using opportunity solution trees. The section is honest about the fact that most participants are working in organisations where parts of this cascade are missing or poorly defined. You will not just learn what the full picture looks like. You will work through what to do when it is incomplete, which is the more useful skill to leave with.
The afternoon covers problem framing and research. This means writing problem statements precise enough to actually guide decisions, planning and conducting customer interviews, and analysing what you learn through both qualitative and quantitative methods. The day closes with discovery in action: generating and mapping ideas through collaborative methods including story mapping.
"The training helped align our team and provided practical tools we can use immediately." — Olivier de Lamotte, Head of Product at Qualifio
Day 2: Delivery, go to market and leadership
The second day covers the parts of the product lifecycle that get less airtime in most PM training. It opens with solution delivery: how to prioritise, estimate, and use delivery frameworks that improve predictability without turning planning into a process for its own sake.
The mid-section addresses market introduction, which is a topic most programmes skip entirely. You will work through the STICK framework for refining your product messaging, and explore how the PM and product marketing roles need to work together to get a product to market effectively. Given how often this collaboration breaks down in practice, this tends to be one of the more useful sections for participants who already have shipping experience.
The day closes with two areas that matter more the longer you are in the role: measurement and stakeholder management. You will work through how to choose the right KPIs, how to track product health and iterate with real purpose, and how to communicate with enough influence to build the kind of trust with stakeholders that makes alignment less exhausting over time.
"A great quality training, taught by real product experts, in a professional atmosphere, surrounded with challenging fellow-trainees." — Eve André, Head of Product at Keytrade
What else is included
The two days of content come with materials, templates, and frameworks you take away and use straight away. You will also receive expert feedback on your work during the sessions, and a digital certificate upon completion. Breakfast, lunch and a post-training social drink are included.
Satisfaction across past cohorts has averaged 9.3 out of 10.
"Super nice people, really well explained. Good atmosphere." — Tom Caporossi, Digital Product Owner at Pluxee
Who runs the sessions
Your trainers are Timoté Geimer and Mathieu Thys. Timoté is CEO of dualoop with 14 years of experience scaling product teams across startups, scaleups and enterprise companies across Europe. Mathieu is a Manager at dualoop with over five years in product roles, focused on turning complex technical contexts into products that genuinely work for users. Both have worked directly with Belgian and broader European product organisations, so the content reflects that context rather than being an international curriculum adapted for local consumption.
Who gets the most from this programme
The training is designed for product owners, product managers and product leaders at all levels of experience. The people who get the most from it tend to share one thing: they have real product work in front of them and want a more principled way to approach it.
If you are entirely new to the product field and still finding your footing, the first day gives you the operating logic that most introductory PM resources skip. The product foundations and strategy sections build the kind of grounded mental model that takes most practitioners years to construct on their own through trial and error.
If you have been in product for two to six years and feel the frustration of knowing what good looks like but struggling to practise it in your current environment, the strategy, discovery and problem framing sections of Day 1 are likely where you will get the most challenge. The stakeholder management and go to market sections of Day 2 tend to land hardest for practitioners who are past the execution fundamentals and now running into the organisational and commercial walls.
The most common hesitation at this stage is some version of "I already know most of this." It is usually true, and it is not really the point. Mathieu hears it before almost every cohort. What shifts for most people in the room is not what they know but how consistently they can act on it.
"The practices aren't specifically new, but now we do it more systematically and way more consciously." - past participant
People who have transitioned into product from business analysis, engineering or consulting consistently find the strategy cascade section valuable, because it gives them a way to frame what they have been doing instinctively and make the case for it more clearly to leadership.
If you are a Head of Product, CPO, or leading a product team of five or more people, the most useful conversation is probably not about sending someone to the open cohort. It might be about running the training for your whole team at once, or even adapt it to your specific context. Or it might be about a broader question around how your product operating model is set up. Reach out to info@dualoop.com with a short description of your situation and the team will point you in the right direction.
Getting your employer to say yes
Most participants attend through their company's learning and development budget, and the approval usually sits with a direct manager rather than a leadership committee. The framing matters more than the price.
The case worth making is:
- Your team will spend less time in priority conversations that should not need to happen, because you will be better at framing what you are trying to solve before asking for resources.
- Your discovery process will become more structured, which means fewer cycles spent building things that fail to land.
- You will come back with a shared vocabulary that makes alignment with engineering and design faster and less fragile.
- If you bring a colleague along, the impact doubles: two people using the same frameworks and language can shift how a team operates in a way that one person rarely can alone.
A short email to your manager covering what the training addresses and what will change in your work afterwards is usually enough to get a decision. dualoop can also provide supporting documentation to help make the case if that would be useful.
We've prepared a short mail you can adapt and send:
Hi [name],
I would like to attend the dualoop Product Management Training on 18 and 19 May in Brussels and would love your support to fund it through our learning budget.
The two days cover the areas I think would make the most concrete difference to my work: how to frame problems before we commit to building, how to structure discovery so it actually informs decisions, and how to connect what we are building to the company strategy more clearly. The training is run by practitioners who have worked with Belgian and European product teams, so the context is directly relevant rather than generic. Past cohorts have rated it 9.3 out of 10.
Depending on our setup, part of the cost may be covered through subsidies. I can look into that if helpful.
Happy to share more details or the full programme.
Thanks,
[Your name]
Funding and subsidies
There are several ways to fund the training, and dualoop actively supports this rather than leaving you to work it out alone. We will help you prepare documentation, answer funding questions, and provide tailored quotes for teams of three or more.
Not sure which option applies to you? Contact us directly and we will walk you through what is available.
What tends to be different after the two days
The most common thing participants report is not "I learned a lot." It is closer to: "I finally have a way to name what is wrong, and I know what to do about it."
A lot of practitioners arrive with a solid instinct for what is broken in their organisation: stakeholders bypassing discovery, roadmaps driven by the loudest voice, no clear line from company goals to what the team is actually building. What they are often missing is not the diagnosis but the standing to act on it. The training gives you that, partly through the frameworks themselves and partly through having worked through them with peers from other companies who confirm that yes, this is a solvable problem and here is how others have approached it.
Concretely: people come back knowing how to challenge a poorly framed brief without it turning into a political conversation, because they can point to what a well-framed problem statement looks like. They come back able to build an OKR structure that their manager will actually engage with, rather than one that gets nodded at and shelved. They come back with a way to explain to an engineering lead why discovery is not a delay to delivery but the thing that makes delivery worth doing.
The cohort dimension also turns out to matter more than most people expect before they attend. You will spend two days working through real product problems with practitioners from other Belgian companies, people facing the same organisational walls, the same title confusion, the same gap between what they know and what they can get done. That shared context makes the conversations unusually direct. dualoop also runs regular events in Brussels after the training, including the Product Apéro series, which means the relationships that form in the room have somewhere to go. In a product community the size of Belgium's, that is worth something.
Questions about whether this training fits your situation? Reach out directly, we are happy to have an honest conversation before you register.
