Unleashing Potential: How Continuous Learning Drives Product Team Success - Part II
This is Part II in a series. Part I is Unleashing Potential: How Continuous Learning Drives Product Team Success. There I outline the reasons why creating a continuous learning culture for your product managers is so important and how it can level up your product team. In this post, we cover how to implement this type of culture with practical suggestions.
Creating a continuous learning culture
Creating the systems and programs that facilitate and allow your teams to grow their knowledge and expertise can be quite challenging. It can seem pretty daunting to take on this task with everything else that a product leader has going on.
However, it's quite feasible if you know the tactics to utilize. Continuous learning is just that, continuous. This means it's part of the daily tasks and habits of the product team. You don’t need to plan a large learning transformation to create continuous learning in your product team. That’s likely not going to work. We’ve all been to that one-off seminar on teamwork, innovation, or communication. We find that learning to be useful, but think about how quickly we forget those learnings and fail to implement them. Sound familiar? What we need is to create a continuous learning culture and process in our product team that develops the habits needed for a growth mindset. Once these habits are established, they become routine daily tasks. As a product lead, I’m hesitant to introduce big operational changes to my teams. Implementing those types of changes can be disruptive to product velocity and achieving your goals. My suggestion is to delay until it is necessary. That being said, there are good and bad times to implement a continuous culture of learning.
When is the right time to implement this culture in your product team?
I’ve found that certain inflection points or pivots are a natural break to insert new processes and systems in your team. Here are a few examples of those natural breaks:
Initial product market-fit - Your first product has been launched and things are looking good! The rapid experimentation phase is over and you are seeing sustained growth.
Product-qualified leads - You begin to rely on product qualified leads as opposed to sales or marketing-led leads. The product can self-sustain its growth. The skills and abilities of the product team need to evolve to continue to grow in this new paradigm.
Moving from one product to multi-product - After achieving product-market fit and sustained growth, a significant challenge for SaaS companies is to replicate their success with a second product. Growing a new product line at an established SaaS org requires new skill sets.
Reorg - Reorgs are common, particularly in larger organizations. If you’ve brought on a lot of new team members or responsibilities have significantly shifted, that sounds like a good time to establish new learning habits.
The common thread between these events is that there’s a reset in the operating cadence of your team and new systems or processes will be more readily accepted. Consider your own situation when deciding when it makes sense to implement a continuous learning culture.
What are practical ways to implement a culture of continuous learning?
How should you go about creating that culture in your product managers and product team? Although there’s no one single method, upon reflecting on my career journey, I’ve had success by using the below methods and tactics to create a culture of continuous learning and motivate my product team to buy in. These tactics are not in any particular order:
Lead by Example - Product leaders should actively engage in learning new skills, staying abreast of industry trends, and sharing their findings with the team. Demonstrating a personal commitment to learning encourages the team to follow suit. Team meetings are a great forum to share what you are learning, and I’ve even had a slide at the start of my team meetings titled “What I’ve been reading this week:” to facilitate the discussion.
Encourage Experimentation and Accept Failure as Part of the Learning Process - Experience is the greatest teacher. Create an environment where team members feel safe to experiment and take calculated risks. Emphasize that failure is not only acceptable but is expected as part of the innovation process. Share failures and lessons learned constructivelyin a constructive manner, focusing on the insights gained rather than the outcome. Encourage PMs to chair post-mortems when initiatives fail or hit unexpected roadblocks.
Implement Regular Learning Opportunities - Schedule regular sessions for team learning, such as workshops, seminars, and guest speaker events. Encourage team members to attend conferences or online courses relevant to their roles. Allocate time and resources for these activities to emphasize their importance. A good rule of thumb is to ask your team to set aside 10-15% of their work time for learning.
Promote Knowledge Sharing - Encourage team members to share knowledge, insights, and skills. with each other. This can be facilitated through internal presentations, lunch-and-learn sessions, or creating a shared digital repository of resources and learnings. Peer-to-peer learning can be incredibly effective and fosters a collaborative environment. I’ve scheduled regular learning sessions for my team at the start of every quarter, before the org gets too preoccupied with OKRs and other quarterly goals.
Set Specific Learning Objectives - Work with team members to set individual and team learning objectives aligned with both personal growth and product goals. Regularly review these objectives and their impact on the team to reinforce the value of continuous learning.
Provide Access to Learning Resources - Offer subscriptions to online learning platforms, provide access to industry reports, and purchase books or courses that benefit the team. Making learning resources readily available removes barriers to self-improvement. In my previous roles, I’ve purchased team access to LinkedIn Learning to support this self-improvement.
Recognize and Reward Learning and Improvement Efforts - Acknowledge and celebrate achievements related to personal development and process improvement. Recognition can be in the form of shout-outs in team meetings, performance reviews, or even tangible rewards for significant contributions to team knowledge and product success.
Incorporate learning into performance reviews - The other side of setting learning objectives is to incorporate their formal measurement and assessment into the performance review process. This essentially makes continuous learning and upskilling an expectation of the role.
By integrating these elements into the team’s culture, product leaders can create an environment where continuous learning and improvement are not just encouraged but are integral to the team's approach to product management. This not only enhances the team's skills and knowledge, but as discussed in my previous article, this also drives better product outcomes and business success.
Conclusion
We’ve explored when and how to create a continuous learning culture and some of the specific actions you can take to make your efforts successful. Given there are trade-offs on time, priorities, and goals when building this culture, don’t be surprised about receiving initial resistance from the organization or product managers themselves. Change is inevitably difficult to accept and instilling a continuous growth mindset leads to some amount of discomfort. If you have any experiences with a continuous learning culture in your product team, I’d love to hear about it! Don’t hesitate to drop a comment or an email on my post and let me know your thoughts.