TrainingIT sells IT training to Spanish companies and professionals — Java, Linux, data, AI, certifications. The gap was everything around the code: communication, leadership, team climate. I ran the end-to-end pipeline for a new course type that teaches soft skills to IT professionals by anchoring every lesson in the hard skills they already work with. Research, curriculum, teachers, and four courses out for soft launch.
TrainingIT's catalogue was technical and its buyers were HR and team leads at IT companies. Those buyers kept raising problems that no technical course solves: engineers who cannot give feedback, leads promoted out of code and into people, teams where the climate quietly decays.
Generic soft-skills training exists everywhere and IT professionals reject it — it arrives in the language of business, not of their work. The bet was that the same content lands if the frame is theirs: a sprint, a code review, a retro, an incident, a handover. Soft skills taught through the hard skills.
The research phase was built on interviews with three groups, because each one defines the product differently. IT professionals know where the day actually breaks down. HR professionals know which gaps show up in performance reviews and exits. Company heads know what they will pay for and when.
The goal was not a list of desirable skills — every such list is the same. It was to find which pain points were both crucial and urgent, and which of them could be taught inside a technical context rather than beside it.
Discovery & research: Designed and ran the interview programme across IT professionals, HR professionals and IT company heads, then synthesised the findings into a ranked map of soft-skill pain points by urgency and impact.
Product definition: Turned that map into a course type — the hard-skill-anchored format — and decided which pain points became courses and which were out of scope for a first launch.
Curriculum development: Built the curriculums and session structures for four courses, including the exercise formats that keep the practice inside the participants' own technical work.
Teacher sourcing & tuning: Found and selected the teachers, then worked with them to develop and tune their courses against the format rather than letting each drift into generic soft-skills delivery.
Launch: Took the four courses through to soft launch in the live catalogue, including positioning and how each course is described to its buyer.
The project ran as a straight pipeline with one decision gate between each phase. Research first, with no course concepts on the table — deciding what to build before knowing what hurt was the failure mode to avoid. Synthesis produced the ranked pain points and the format. Only then did curriculum work start, and teacher sourcing ran against finished curriculum outlines so candidates were judged on fit to the format.
The last phase was tuning: teachers developed their own material inside the structure, then it was revised together before the courses went into the catalogue for soft launch.