Software is the key enabling factor for many industrial giants in product development and the ability to deliver reliable software intensive systems in a cost-efficient manner is becoming the differentiating factor for their future competitiveness. This underlines the importance of an industrially relevant software engineering program and realization of the above fact has lead us to conceptualize a novel graduate program in this domain. The program originated from a set of mutually beneficial motivating factors, which were realized during close collaborations between industry and academia in a global setting. In this paper we present the stakeholder perspectives as well as our experiences during the development and running of such a program.