Overview
Charles River Laboratories aimed to enhance its product management practices and foster better team alignment. To meet these objectives, Productside delivered a tailored Optimal Product Management course featuring custom exercises designed to tackle the company’s unique challenges. This engagement resulted in high satisfaction among participants and measurable improvements in their skills.
Background
Charles River Laboratories is a global leader in providing essential products and services in drug discovery, development, and manufacturing. Since its founding in 1947, the company has supported life sciences clients with a broad product portfolio, including research models, preclinical testing, and various clinical laboratory services. Over the years, Charles River has expanded through strategic acquisitions, positioning itself as a comprehensive early-stage contract research organization (CRO).
The Challenge
The organization faced multiple challenges, including difficulty in prioritizing projects aligned to business objectives, role clarity, and communicating a product vision. The team was staffed by great people who were domain experts that transitioned into product management, but without formal training. There was also no established product process and this had downstream effects such as inefficient stakeholder management and delays in the product development processes that hindered progress.
A Partner for Change
Charles River chose Productside for their expertise in product management and custom training programs. The goal was to create a training program that encouraged transparency, improved stakeholder communication, aligned product teams, and ultimately drove better business outcomes. Productside’s ability to customize training exercises to the needs of their company was crucial in addressing the specific challenges faced by the Charles River team.
In working with the team leader, the Productside consultant identified additional issues such as poor interdepartmental communication and reliance on outdated practices that conflicted with the company’s digital transformation goals. Inefficient stakeholder management further prevented the team from identifying issues early, hampering the achievement of business objectives and creating more rework. These insights contributed to the customization of the training program.
The Solution
Productside ran a skills assessment to find where additional skill gaps were on the team. The consultant developed a customized Optimal Product Management course tailored to Charles River Laboratories, focusing on key gaps such as pricing, forecasting, and prioritization. Custom exercises kept participants engaged, while additional takeaway resources, including worksheets for pricing prioritization and the DACI framework for stakeholder collaboration, facilitated the practical application of lessons learned.
A Success
The results were overwhelmingly positive, with 100% of participants agreeing or strongly agreeing that they gained new skills to apply in their roles, earning an overall satisfaction score of 4.75/5. The exercises and takeaways provided actionable steps that participants could implement immediately. Productside also ran skills assessments after the training . On average skill areas improved 19.2% over the baseline assessment. For the biggest skill gaps, Pricing improved 38%, Forecasting by 37.5%, and Product Process increased 31.25%. While there were still improvements to be made in skill areas such as Communication, the team had taken a big step forward on their Product Management Maturity!
What Could This Look Like for Your Team?
Charles River Laboratories walked away from their engagement with Productside not just with stronger skills, but with real momentum toward a more mature and effective product organization. If your team is grappling with role clarity, prioritization, or stakeholder alignment—don’t wait for misalignment to slow you down.
Book a consultation to learn how a customized training program can elevate your product teams and drive measurable business impact.
Let’s do product better, together.