A Case for Curation

Product Management is a rapidly expanding and evolving space that hosts practitioners with myriad backgrounds. To remain competitive product teams need learning experiences that quickly shift behaviors and enable continual development in prioritized areas, all the while maintaining a cohesive experience that supports the same product values and expectations prioritized at home.

Approach

Instead of creating custom learning on product management skills (managing a backlog, compelling storytelling) and knowledge (business acumen, industry specific information, etc.), we took the following steps to enable a learning experience that supports rapid development and continuous deployment.

• Outline the team's business goals and the skills needed to reach them
• Identify the KPIs and data that measure each, respectively.
• Assess teams across the identified skills and knowledge 
• Identify data clusters with own unique strength and opportunity profiles.
• Develop learning architectures for clusters as well as an a la carte method for edge use-cases.
• Work with SMEs to identify trustworthy, insightful, and relevant resources.
• Curate material from these resources for examples relevant to prioritized learning needs.
• Organize curated material into a sequence informed by research and testing,
• Test in a beta group with a diverse set of roles, prior knowledge of content focus, and learning mindsets.
• Share on a platform equipped with the social, gamification, algorithmic feed, and other features that maximize engagement and provide stakeholders the data to form insights. 

Implementation

Degreed was a natural partner for this approach. Through Degreed, we levaraged open online resources, internal learning opportunities, social engagement, and rapid development capabilities to provide learning experiences that keep pace with Product. 

Results

Platform and anecdotal data suggest enjoyment and engagement with material. Ongoing weekly marketing continues to support engagement and advanced usage of the platform. Follow-up consultation with people leaders will determine if engagement has advanced to application and is positively influencing professional development in relation to the same metrics pre-launch. 

Working up to the weekend before to create learning pathways, the platform was launched 3/05 to 400 employees. High engagement on the launch day has leveled out to above-average engagement for population size.