Hi [Manager's name],
I'd like [your company]'s support to sponsor my seat in AI-Native PM Cohort 2 — a five-week, project-based fellowship for senior product, design, and engineering leaders building AI-native products. May 19 – June 19, 2026, Tue/Thu 4–5:30pm EST. The sponsorship is $3,495. Course details: https://ai-native-pm.com.
Why now.
The product, design, and engineering roles are being restructured in real time. LinkedIn killed the Associate PM program and replaced it with Associate Product Builder. Tomer Cohen (CPO, LinkedIn) named the five skills that survive the shift — vision, empathy, communication, creativity, judgment — the skills he's "working really hard to automate" and keeps failing. This cohort is built around all five.
What this is.
Not a Coursera class. Not a webinar. A fellowship modeled on Building Imaginary Worlds — the Walt Disney Imagineering–inspired Carnegie Mellon course where computer scientists and artists ship things together. I'll be paired with a new cross-functional team every week (PM + designer + engineer) and ship a real project each sprint.
The four sprints, mapped to problems we'll hit at [your company] this year:
- Sprint 1 — Vibecoding. Vibecoding for someone else, and "yes-and-ing" your teammate's work and changes.
- Sprint 2 — Custom LLM + fine-tuning. Build a custom LLM with a Ralph loop. Claude and OpenAI are generalized — how do you create one specific to our product?
- Sprint 3 — Evals. Website search-ability by agents. The web is inherently hostile to bots — how do we make our product agent-friendly?
- Sprint 4 — RAG. Website authority with LLMs. How do we become the source ChatGPT and Claude recommend as authority + links?
- Demo Day, June 19. A shipped portfolio of all four — open to friends and family.
Specifically for [your company], this directly supports [the project this helps with].
Who's teaching.
Elizabeth Ferrao — 10+ years building products at Time Inc, American Express, and C Spire. Taught product at General Assembly with 80+ PMs placed at an 80% rate. Co-founded Women Who Code NYC (now 18,000 members).
What Cohort 1 said:
"The cohort pushed me from thinking about ideas to actually building. Being surrounded by a high-caliber group shipping real projects created a level of accountability and inspiration that's hard to replicate alone." — Hari Chidambaram, Data and AI Executive
What I'll come back with.
- A portfolio of 4 shipped AI-native projects + a Demo Day deliverable
- Hands-on fluency with Ralph loops, evals, agent-readable websites, and LLM authority — the building blocks of every AI product we'll ship next year
- A network of senior PMs, designers, and engineers from other companies, so I can see what's working in production and bring those patterns back to [your company]
Logistics.
- Cost: $3,495, one-time professional development sponsorship
- Dates: May 19 – June 19, 2026 (Demo Day Friday June 19, 3pm EST)
- Time commitment: ~4–5 hours/week (Tue/Thu 4–5:30pm EST + team work between)
- Paperwork: standard invoice and W-9 sent directly to AP
- Knowledge transfer: I'll share what I learn via [a Lunch & Learn after each sprint] so the team benefits
Happy to walk through any of this. Thanks for considering it.
[Your name]