Before
You ask for 3 heads with a velocity chart. The CFO hears “cost center” and you get 0.
After
You ask with a revenue-risk case and a payback date. The conversation moves to “which quarter”, not “whether”.
Masterclass · 1 day
Speak Money, Tech People Talk Business
You walk out with a board-ready business case for your next headcount or platform ask, built and stress-tested against a live “no.”
This is a rehearsal room, not an accounting class.
12,900 CZK per seat · from 150,000 CZK in-house
Trusted by
Not for
- Individual contributors with no budget exposure.
- CFOs and founders who already sign their own checks.
- Leaders looking for a finance theory course.
Who it is for
- Engineering Managers, Senior EMs, Heads of Engineering, Directors, and VPs who own a budget line or want one.
- Anyone who has to justify heads, tooling, or tech-debt time to a CFO, CEO, or board.
The program
4 modules, culminating in a live “no.”
The headcount meeting where you asked for 3 and got 0
Your next ask names the cost of “no”. Finance argues with your numbers instead of ignoring your charts.
The tech-debt argument you lost to a feature
Platform work stops being a faith-based ask; it competes on the same money terms as features, and sometimes wins.
The AI tooling line nobody can justify
You leave with a defensible frame for your actual AI spend, and a review cadence that keeps the line safe next quarter.
The board one-pager and the live “no”
The first time you hear a hard “no” from a real finance executive is in this room, not in the meeting that sets your budget for the year.
From where you are, to where you walk out.
Before
Tech-debt work loses to a feature request every single planning cycle.
After
Your debt argument arrives priced in delayed launches and churn risk, and it wins a slot on the roadmap.
Before
Your AI tooling spend sits on the CFO’s cut list because nobody can say what it returns.
After
You bring a cost-per-engineer-per-month case with a measurable output delta, and the line survives.
Before
“Our velocity dropped 20%” gets a polite nod and no action.
After
“This delay puts the Q4 launch and two enterprise renewals at risk” gets a decision in the same meeting.
Before
You find out product and sales pitched against your ask, after the meeting.
After
You align the narrative with them before the meeting, and the CFO hears the same case from three sides.
What you walk out able to do.
- Build a headcount business case with cost, payback period, and the revenue or risk line it protects, on one page.
- Translate one of your real velocity or incident metrics into a revenue-risk sentence a board acts on.
- Price a concrete piece of your tech debt in delayed-launch and attrition terms.
- Defend an AI tooling line item with a per-engineer cost-benefit the CFO can compare against anything on the cut list.
- Answer the three standard CFO objections to an engineering ask without retreating to jargon.
- Run a pre-meeting alignment play with product and sales so your ask lands as a company case.
- Read your company’s P&L well enough to know which line your ask helps and which it hurts.
Format
Format and price.
- Masterclass, half day to 1 day. Czech-first delivery.
- After the room: post your board one-pager in the ELC Slack for peer review by leaders who have defended the same line item.
- The CFO objection deck: 21 objections collected from 3,400+ mentoring sessions, with counter-moves that survived a real room.
- Two-sided record: you and your manager both receive the before and after of your case.
- The finance chair is real, named before a single seat sells, someone who killed engineering asks for a living.
Open-enrollment seat12,900 CZK per seat
In-house cohortfrom 150,000 CZK in-house
Company yearly leadership programMasterclass access from the Team subscription
Prices in CZK, excl. VAT. Published, not on request.
Faculty
Our Lecturing Masterminds
Our team is unique. We are not consultants selling academic theories or empty certificates. They have built multiple unicorn companies and helped organizations scale from startups to scale-ups to established corporates.
In-house cohorts
Tailored Leadership Training for Your Ambitions
No two organizations are the same. That is why our learning designers have crafted a selection of sessions focused on the key challenges faced by today's leaders. We work together to customize these sessions specifically to your needs. Our experts do the heavy lifting throughout the process and craft the program that is just right for your organization.
What nobody else offers
The parts a competitor cannot copy in a quarter.
01
The budget meeting itself, simulated.
Nobody rehearses the actual scene, ask for 3 heads, CFO says 0, respond in 30 seconds, against a named finance chair. Wharton teaches finance in 5 days for $13,250.
02
The reverse translation.
Every comparable program teaches engineers to read financial statements; none teaches turning “velocity dropped 20%” into “the Q4 launch is at risk.”
03
Post-2023 spend categories.
Wharton, Stanford, and Berkeley CTO programs have no module on justifying AI tooling spend. We build the case frameworks from zero.
04
Czech-first, one day, local math.
None of Wharton, Stanford, Berkeley, Abilitie, Coursera, or VŠE runs a budget-defense rehearsal in Czech, on Prague salary math, in one day.
05
Promotion instead of a certificate.
Every exercise runs on your real ask, backlog, and tooling line. Coursera gives you quizzes; you get an argument you use next week.
“You ask for 3 heads with a velocity chart. The CFO hears “cost center” and you get 0.”
Proof, honestly labeled
What we can stand behind today.
- Companies that trained their managers with us: Rohlík, Košík, Mews, Kiwi.com, Česká spořitelna, Trezor, and Apify.
- Trusted across the Engineering Leaders community: partners include Microsoft, Barclays, Productboard, and Ataccama.
- ELA masterclasses to date rate 9.3/10 across 21 reviews.
- One deliberately unnamed case: an EM at a Czech scale-up asked for 3 heads and got 0, rebuilt the ask as this one-pager, and got 2 approved the next cycle. He stays unnamed because his CFO reads the same internet; the numbers are walked through in the room.
The 9.3/10 is for ELA masterclasses to date; this program is new, and its own first-cohort reviews will replace that line, unedited. Named, permissioned case studies land here after cohort one, or this section stays this short.
Speak Money, Tech People Talk Business
Seats are limited to keep every room interactive. Register, or book a private cohort for your team.
Ready for the full operating rebuild? The AI-Native Engineering Manager →