AI and product capability building at a global media and entertainment company
The brief
Our client is one of Europe’s most recognisable media and entertainment brands, with product teams spanning TV, broadband and mobile propositions that serve millions of households.
Having dominated the market with years of growth, its product organisation in turn quickly expanded across a mix of portfolios and locations. They had many people stepping into product roles for the first time from elsewhere in the business, bringing deep customer, commercial and operational expertise - but with varying levels of experience in the nuts and bolts of product practice and little sense of where AI could fit into their roles.
With teams scattered across the country and delivery work increasingly sitting with external partners, product managers found it harder to learn together and develop a consistent approach to their work. Product leadership needed a partner who could build a lasting community, strengthen core product skills and, most importantly, grow confidence in AI-native practices.
Project summary
A Loomery team of product coaches worked alongside a group of product directors and representatives from each commercial portfolio, covering a total of 88 product people of varying seniority. Following a brief discovery period, we delivered bespoke hands-on workshops, small-group coaching, and Community of Practice sessions across three UK office locations. The 8 month programme culminated in building an AI coaching assistant that lets the community query everything we taught after we had left.
Project in numbers
88
Product people coached
98%
people more confident after coaching
9/10
Loved or satisfied
“I really enjoyed the interactivity and examples around similar use cases to what we experience today… a great way to think about how to use AI.”
— Product Manager coaching participant
Shaping the curriculum with the client team
We started by assessing product approaches and capability across the organisation. We listened carefully, ensuring the PM voice was at the heart of our approach. Interviews and a PM-wide survey revealed where teams felt confident, where habits differed, and where people needed more support.
We distilled that into a clear picture for product directors and the executive team, giving everyone a shared view of the opportunity. From there, the Loomery coaching programme was built around real gaps in capability, not an off-the-shelf syllabus.
Those insights shaped the whole design - what we taught, how we taught it and how the coaching was rolled out across locations, so each hub received the same thoughtful, high-quality experience.
The programme worked on two levels:
A Community of Practice is a regular space for people who share the same craft to learn from one another, work through real challenges and raise the standard of their work together. We believe this matters because capability rarely sticks through training alone. It grows when people keep applying what they have learned, comparing approaches and helping one another make sense of the work in front of them. These monthly community of practice sessions brought Product Managers together across the different UK hubs, creating a shared space to learn, compare notes and build connections across the organisation.
The coaching workshops then created room to go deeper on the areas that mattered most, from stakeholder influence and consumer insight to product discovery, experimentation, vision-setting, roadmapping and AI product approaches. Each session was led by Loomery coaches with real-world product experience, bringing practical examples, hard-won lessons and a clear sense of what actually works and what doesn’t.
The emphasis was on doing and making - sessions were built around live case studies and hands-on tasks, so people learned by working through the actual craft rather than watching slides. Product managers brought live challenges from their own portfolios and we used the sessions to shape real opportunities, pressure-test ideas and design experiments they could take straight back to their teams the next day. We also ran ‘peer pods’ and small-group coaching between sessions to help the learning stick and turn new methods into everyday habits.
All sessions included a section on how to adopt AI into core product practices. AI was woven into the programme as a practical product capability, and we explored how teams were already using it, what was holding adoption back, and where it could make existing product practices faster or stronger. That included introducing new approaches such as synthetic personas, helping teams explore early hypotheses before committing time and budget to deeper customer research. We also established an ‘AI Forum’ to keep the learning and adoption going.
Practical coaching, grounded in experience
Turning the coaching into everyday practice
The programme was designed to change how teams work, not simply what they know. So, alongside the coaching, we created a set of practical resources that Product Managers could take away and use in their day-to-day work.
These ranged from tools and templates for shaping product strategy and navigating stakeholders to experiment cards and an ‘Experiment 8 Ball’ that helped teams find new ways to test their assumptions. The tools quickly travelled beyond the original cohort - people who had not taken part in the programme began hearing about them through colleagues and requesting access for their own teams, as well as coming along to some of the open workshops - a strong indication that the work was solving a wider need across the organisation.
Making the capability stick with AI
It was important to our client that the value didn’t disappear when we left. To solve this, we used Microsoft 365 Copilot to turn six months of coaching into a living, searchable resource. The methods, tools, exercises and practical guidance from across the programme were organised into a knowledge base that Product Managers could interrogate through conversation.
Instead of digging through old slide decks or trying to remember what came up in a workshop, teams can now ask for support at the point they need it - whether they are shaping a strategy, managing a tricky stakeholder or deciding how to test an idea.We also helped internal leaders prepare the Community of Practice for its next chapter. A group of product reps took ownership of the forum, with a repeatable rhythm, a backlog of content ideas, and the confidence to keep people connected, share what works and continue building capability from within.
Conclusion
The Product Community now has the foundations to keep building its own capability. They have a shared language, practical tools they can reach for in the flow of work, and an AI assistant that brings the coaching closer to the moments when it matters.
Overall, 9 out of 10 participants loved the coaching and were satisfied by what they learned. The impact has already reached beyond the original brief: confidence in core product practice has grown, teams are using the tools in their day-to-day work, and experimentation has become more focused and effective. We helped move AI from something people were curious about into something that amplified their impact throughout every single day. The programme also created stronger connections across the wider organisation and supported several team members as they progressed into more senior roles. Following the programme’s success, another department has now brought us in to develop their own bespoke coaching programme.
