Resilience by Design: what product leaders learned about their everyday patterns

On Tuesday 20 October, Technology Ireland Digital Skillnet and TU Dublin brought together Ireland’s product management community for Resilience by Design, a 90-minute interactive workshop with accredited executive coach Kate Leto.

Kate has more than 25 years in product leadership and works with senior product and technology leaders on the human side of the job: difficult conversations, clear communication, confident decisions, and knowing how you show up every day. This session was not about strategy, OKRs or roadmaps. It was about resilience in how we lead every day, not just in a crisis.

Pressure from three directions

Kate opened with two live polls on what gives leaders energy and where they feel the pressure most. The answers matched what she hears from clients. Everyday pressure comes from customers (what you deliver and what they expect), from your team (how work gets done, what is blocked, what counts as productive) and from above (the results, timelines and numbers you have promised). A lot of it is outside our control. How we respond is up to us.

What resilience is, and isn’t

Resilience is not being tough, pushing through, bouncing back, or something you either have or don’t. Kate framed it as the skill of staying clear and steady every day, not just recovering after things go wrong. The World Economic Forum ranks resilience, flexibility and agility among the most essential skills for the future of work, second only to analytical thinking.

The Leadership Strategy Scan

Resilience is hard to see, so Kate gave participants a way to look at it. Using her Leadership Strategy Scan, everyone scored themselves from 1 to 5 across five areas of everyday leadership:

• Attention: where does my attention go?
• Responsibility: what am I taking on, and what am I letting go of?
• Decisions: how do I decide when things are unclear?
• Relationships: who am I investing in?
• Communication: how do I communicate when I don’t have the answer?

Joining from their own desks, participants plotted their scores into a shape and spent 90 seconds just looking at it, without analysing or trying to fix it. Kate’s guidance: there is no perfect shape, a low score doesn’t mean bad, a high score is a strength that can be overused, and the aim is patterns, not perfection. She also walked through five common shapes (all high, jagged, one clear low, one clear high, all low) and the questions each one invites.

One small experiment

In small groups, participants talked through what surprised them and where pressure shapes how they lead, then designed one experiment to try: a Growth Experiment to strengthen something already working, or a Reset Experiment to shift a pattern that may no longer be serving them. The session closed with a simple check-out: what is one everyday moment this week where you will try something different?

Get the slides

Technical issues meant we were unable to record the session, so we have made the full slide deck available below. 

Keep learning

Join us at the Product Camp winter event on 19 November, 2026. A limited number of free tickets are available here. Use Code: TUDSKILLNET at checkout.

Resilience by Design was delivered by Technology Ireland Digital Skillnet in partnership with TU Dublin. Technology Ireland Digital Skillnet is co-funded by Skillnet Ireland and network companies. Skillnet Ireland is funded from the National Training Fund and the European Union through the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science.