How the “Learning Menu” Concept Can Help Develop Your Product Team
Petra Wille
Product Leadership Coach, Author of STRONG product people & STRONG product communities, Curator at Product at Heart
As a product leader, an important part of your job is to help your team grow and develop. This is the key to keeping people motivated and engaged in their work—people want to have a sense of progress and mastery. But it also makes sense for your business. The more you develop your product team, the better they’ll get at key product skills like user research, prioritization, and communication with stakeholders. And ultimately, more skilled product people will build better products that have a bigger impact on your company’s bottom line.
But when it comes to offering development opportunities, some companies struggle with doing this in a strategic way. They essentially throw money at the problem, opting to pay a premium for coaching and training.?So what’s wrong with this approach? As a coach, shouldn’t I be happy to take money from any potential client who would like to pay me?
To answer these questions, let’s take a look at the “Learning Menu,” illustrated below.
Thinking about development opportunities as a “Learning Menu” means you can include a wider range of learning resources that are more scalable and adaptable to individual needs.
The Learning Menu presents a range of learning resources and formats. The options at the bottom of the menu are free or low cost. As you move up the pyramid, the items become more expensive.?
You can see that coaching appears at the very top of the menu as the most expensive offering. This is because it involves working one-on-one (or in a small group) in a real-time setting. As you move down the menu, options become more self-service and less time-bound. Reading a book or taking a self-paced online course is still a bit more time-intensive than simply reading a blog post or listening to a podcast, for example.
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Why is this important?
Not all people have the same learning needs. Different options from the menu make sense for different people at different stages.
It often makes sense to start at the bottom of the menu. You can encourage your team members to explore all of the amazing free and self-service content that’s out there as a first step. This approach has a number of benefits. First, it’s a more cost-effective, sustainable approach to employee development. But, perhaps more importantly, it puts the responsibility on the employees themselves. They can discover which resources and formats they most enjoy and while gaining the essential skill of self-directed learning. Rather than waiting for someone to tell them what and how to learn, they can take the initiative to design their own learning journey.
Make it a Team Exercise to fill out the Learning Menu Pyramid.
This doesn’t mean that you have to throw your employees in at the deep end. You can work together to create a list of trusted resources such as your favorite blogs, videos, or Meetup groups. In fact, it could be a fun team exercise to fill out the Learning Menu pyramid with some of your recommended resources at each level. Encourage your team members to add to the pyramid as they find more resources, or revisit it as a group from time to time.
Once they’ve developed some foundational knowledge, you might encourage them (or give them discretionary budget) to pay for a book or self-paced online course. Then, after they’ve explored the free and low-cost menu items, that’s when it makes sense to invest in higher-ticket items like training or coaching.
When leaders push their team members to activities at the top of the pyramid too quickly, they risk making a limited impact. Training, for example, is often a one-off event that’s disconnected from day-to-day work. And coaching is generally best reserved for people who have already spent time learning and practicing on their own. And, as I mentioned earlier, if you jump to the top of the pyramid too quickly, you’re also depriving your team of taking responsibility for their development and deciding the areas where they’d most like to focus.?
So how diversified is the Learning Menu on your team? How will you expand your current offerings and encourage your team members to sample what’s available?
Originally published at https://www.petra-wille.com on October 19, 2021.
Operational Excellence & Product Mastery for B2B SaaS – Executive Advisor | Fractional CPO/VP Product | Keynote Speaker | Community Builder
3 年I'd like to add two lenses: 1) Social learning. You focused your pyramid on solo learners[^1] –?at the same time peer coaching, communities of practice and the like are amongst the most powerful AND cheapest methods for growing people. Besides it strengthens social ties within an organisation. Pair social learning with any competent senior advisor/coach like us :) and you get the best of both ends of the pyramid. Plus scaleability. One of the reasons why I prefer to coach teams over individuals. 2) Effort vs. impact. Besides budget we also need to consider efficiency and effectivity. Autonomous learning with books and other sources e.g. misses the critical feedback loops that help to transfer knowledge into practice, sharpen and retain it. At least it takes _much_ longer than with a coach/mentor. Speaking from experience:?I had to acquire a large share of my skills all by myself. And I still had the rare privilege of being able to take a lot of time off for learning and research between projects and longer engagements. Yes, it works – but it is slow and you're prone to commit way more mistakes. Frankly, I could have done without at least half of them. ?? Books and other media are much more useful when you already have basic literacy and practice in a field. Besides you need to have some competency in order to evaluate the competency of a knowledge source (social recommendations are only semi-reliable and there's lots of nonsense out there –?just google ‘roadmapping’ to be showered with frightening exhibits ;)). Therefore the challenge for learners already starts with selecting what to learn from and how. Excuse the detour O:-) In any case, besides deliberate practice the most effective learning requires a) contextualisation (even most trainings & workshops fail there miserably) and b) continuous feedback loops within that context to enable reflection in action (trainings & workshops fail there as well). None of the cheaper menu offerings can deliver any of that. Except for the social ones. :) TL;DR: Given the massive shortage of senior people available for helping grow product talent companies urgently ought to reframe learning and development from individuals [^2] to groups. The future of L&D is clearly social. --- [1]: Except the Slack communities –?alas, even most Meetups just deliver a classroom-style frontal knowledge download. [2]: The common focus on individual skills also penalises growing great teams: in the end only a group's joint capabilities matter. But roll out any common kind of career ladders and you end up with a preference for ‘well-rounded’ people with similar profiles rather than the spikey ones you would actually require for best group and org performance.