Effective Strategies for Sharing Product Learnings

In the dynamic world of product development, effectively sharing learnings is crucial for team alignment, continuous improvement, and overall success. This article explores the best ways to disseminate product knowledge within and between teams, drawing on practical experiences and proven methodologies.

The Importance of Product Trios

The product trio, typically composed of a designer, product manager (PM), and developer, acts as the core leadership unit within a product team. The diverse personalities and expertise within the product trio can lead to a divergence in focus, interpretation of insights, and capture of learnings. Ensuring the alignment of the product trio is paramount to prevent everyone from pulling in different directions. In some teams, four or five people might participate in this collaboration. Sometimes, a team is small and product-oriented enough that everyone is part of the trio. In a startup, for instance, a PM might also be a designer; the product trio will have two people. When collaborating in a trio, it becomes very important to share product learnings effectively.

Internal Knowledge Sharing: Building a Foundation

Before delving into specific strategies, it's essential to understand the importance of internal knowledge sharing. Sharing your knowledge with team members and colleagues in other departments is vital for your organization. It can lower training costs, improve productivity, and boost the quality of your work. Knowledge sharing is essential for getting the entire organization aligned so you can achieve more, faster. When folks are empowered to find relevant information, everyone can make a greater impact and serve customers better. Knowledge sharing goes beyond creating documentation, though. You are also responsible for capturing meeting agendas and notes, sharing insights from stakeholder check-ins, and presenting product roadmaps.

Benefits of Consistent Knowledge Sharing

Efficiency: Teammates can self-serve, and everyone saves time when resources are accessible.
Clarity: The team knows what you are working toward and how you will do it.
Collaboration: A free flow of information and learnings means everyone can work together effectively. Likewise, any silos will break down.
Trust: Folks feel confident in what you are working to deliver, and information is transparent across the organization.

Sharing Product Learnings: Proven Methods

Here are several effective methods for sharing product learnings, suitable for various team sizes and organizational structures:

1. Daily Discovery Stand-ups

Discovering daily is a lot like a daily meeting of the development team. The structure, too, differs little from your usual standup. Here, you start with a quick update on what discovery-related activities you did the previous day and what your plan is for the next day. Although essential in product development, discovery activities are often the first ones we deprioritize when things hit the fan, but the vision of upcoming daily activities motivates me to get at least some discovery work done. The daily cadence encourages consistent knowledge sharing and keeps everyone aligned on the latest insights. Depending on your speed of product discovery and team composition, a daily discovery meeting might be a bit too much. So, you can consider having it every other day or just twice a week.

2. Deep-Dive Discussions

Everyone from the product trio should bring their most important learnings and insights and explain to the group why they believe these are important. These recurring deep-dive discussions are essential. A developer interprets insights differently and sees different opportunities than a product or a design person. These discussions provide a platform for diverse perspectives to be shared and debated, leading to a more comprehensive understanding. Remember to capture conclusions and share them somehow, whether it’s a PPT, Miro board, or even an AI-generated summary.

3. Dedicated Communication Channels

There is no hard science here. Just create a shared channel in the communication tool you use and post there whenever you learn something new. Ensure the channel is open for all and the rest of the organization is aware of it. A dedicated channel fosters a culture of continuous learning and makes it easy for team members to stay informed.

4. Centralized Knowledge Repository

You can align twenty times a day, but your memory is limited. So, you must store what you learn somewhere. Having a single source of truth where you can store all of this data is essential. This is what your knowledge base is. For example, you can store notes from product team meetings and stakeholder check-ins in dedicated folders in your knowledge base. Or keep whiteboards from recent brainstorming sessions and customer journey maps for the team to refer to. The possibilities - like your responsibilities! - are (nearly) endless.

I recommend revising these together at every review meeting. This repository can take the form of a wiki, shared document folder, or a dedicated knowledge management system. Software such as Aha! Knowledge allows you to centralize notes, files, images, whiteboards, and more into a single hub. Look for a tool that allows you to create knowledge bases, standardize your product documents with repeatable templates, collaborate with teammates, and integrate with your roadmapping tool. You will also need to manage permissions - this involves assigning owners and deciding who can view the info and who can edit it. For most documents, you will want anyone in the organization or team to be able to view documents, but only select team members to edit them.

5. Key Terms Dictionary

Something that seems like a common sense truth for a designer might be challenged heavily by a developer looking from a completely different perspective. It doesn’t matter how often you talk to each other and how many learnings you share if you speak in different languages. One of our key buyer personas was “parent.” The problem is we never fully clarified who a parent is. To avoid those, we started building a “key terms dictionary” - a file with all key and potentially confusing terms and a clear definition. Whenever we noticed that there might be some misalignment, we did a quick level-set to ensure we were thinking about the same thing.

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6. Knowledge Sharing Platforms

Another best way to share knowledge across every department in an organization is to introduce take advantage of a knowledge sharing platform. Knowledge sharing platforms let you share product information in virtually any format i.e. video, audio, GIFs, still images, etc. The best thing is that a knowledge sharing platform acts as a productive tool for the organization. The users of the platform can share their feedback in the form of videos, images or text-only documents and add valuable content to the knowledge base.

7. Product Matters Sessions

Product Matters is a knowledge-sharing and learning session that I’ve been running at NHS Digital. It’s for product managers to come together to discuss aspects of their craft, from problem statements and product visions to roadmaps and stakeholder engagement. They are designed to promote discussion. As the facilitator, I give everyone opportunities to contribute. I pose the questions and I move everyone through the activities but I try to leave the actual discussion to others. The sessions work best with 6-12 people. They last 55 minutes so they don’t require a large time commitment from attendees. I send some links to blog posts on the topic a few days before each session, along with a summary of the activities we’ll be doing. I like to give people the chance to think about the topic before they attend. I run the sessions on a video call using Mural but they could also be done in-person.

Knowledge Sharing Tips for Product Teams

Ready to establish or refine your knowledge sharing process? Start by clarifying what you are sharing, why, and with whom. For example, some information is relevant to the entire organization. This includes things such as company goals, product positioning, strategic roadmaps, organizational charts, and IT policies. Certain documents are meant for specific functional groups (think personas and customer feedback for marketing, sales, and support teams). And other information is really only applicable to specific teams, including meeting notes or team-dependent onboarding resources.

There is also the question of when to share that information. Some knowledge is static or evergreen - you document or share it once, and it continues to stay relevant for months or years. But most documents require that you monitor and maintain them on an ongoing basis. For example, you draft a product positioning document once, but then let the team know when it is changing and why.

What matters most is that you have a system in place for regularly reviewing and updating documents. Sharing those updates with relevant stakeholders is critical, too. Here are some quick tips for more effective knowledge sharing:

Pick a format: Should you communicate the information in a meeting, a message, a memo, or all of the above? To help you choose, consider the urgency and importance of what you are sharing.
Decide on frequency: How often does knowledge sharing need to happen? Decide on a regular cadence and share more often when necessary.
Define your audience: Who needs access to the information? Think about what is important for each team to know. This might mean that you create separate knowledge bases (or separate sections of a single knowledge base): one for the support team and one for the sales team, for instance.
Choose a tool: Software such as Aha! Knowledge allows you to centralize notes, files, images, whiteboards, and more into a single hub. Look for a tool that allows you to create knowledge bases, standardize your product documents with repeatable templates, collaborate with teammates, and integrate with your roadmapping tool. You will also need to manage permissions - this involves assigning owners and deciding who can view the info and who can edit it. For most documents, you will want anyone in the organization or team to be able to view documents, but only select team members to edit them.
Organize data: Consolidate resources and organize documents. Remember that too much information can be just as unhelpful as too little information. Make your folders and documents consistent. Set naming conventions for documents, and use templates to ensure standardization. Encourage people to follow those standards when they create new documents or update existing ones.
Get visual: If you use knowledge base software that comes with whiteboarding capabilities, try visual diagrams to quickly communicate complex or technical topics. Then, organize flowcharts, diagrams, and wireframes into folders in the knowledge base. This way, teammates across product, engineering, support, and marketing can find these visuals when needed.

Knowledge Sharing Between Trios and Larger Organizations

In a larger organization with more than one product team, you’ll have more than one product trio. It’s also important to ensure smooth knowledge exchanges between these different trios.

Strategies for Inter-Trio Communication:

Dedicated Slack Channels: I recommend separating the inter-trio channel from your internal trio Slack channel if you have more than three product teams.
Newsletters: All product trios should collaborate to publish a summary of learnings and discoveries every month.
Rotating Members: You can rotate a few members for every review, challenge session, or daily to boost knowledge exchange and collaboration.

Overcoming Barriers to Knowledge Sharing

Effective knowledge sharing isn’t one-size-fits-all. Some people don’t know what to share. Others don’t feel safe doing it. And some just don’t have the time. You can fix this.

Build a safe space: Create an environment in which you and your colleagues feel comfortable and safe to share knowledge.
Make sharing easy: Easygenerator lets anyone create and share training without needing design skills. That means more people can contribute. Knowledge flows faster.
Reward it: A great way to start sharing knowledge at work and get each other in the right mindset is by rewarding participation and celebrating achievements. You can do this by nominating colleagues, listing their names in an internal newsletter, giving them more responsibilities, and so on. Working in this way will make you all feel valued.

Additional Best Practices:

Capture Lessons Learned: Lessons Learned should be recorded and shared. First of all, Lesson Learnt shall not only mean "Learning from failures'. This shall also be an opportunity to celebrate your successes on the project and share these best practices with others. Whilst all the lessons have to be recorded in a data base that is searchable, the major problem is that there is generally hundreds of Lesson Learnt and you sometimes feel like finding needle in a haystack. It is always good to have a moderator for Lesson Learnt data base so that duplicate lessons are eliminated and there is always a root cause identfied. There may be number of lessons around single root cause. Some best practices for lessons learned: 1) get an unbiased person to conduct the lessons learned and to collect the feedback to share, 2) capture what went well and what didn't go so well, 3) get people to agree on 1-3 things that they want to continue to do right or that they want to be sure to correct in future phases of the project, 4) follow thru so these things are not done again!
Hands-on Training: There is nothing that makes learning more effective than hands-on training. Paper-based manuals and instructional documents are the common tools to train employees on a product. Things appear much more difficult to understand in theory than they do when you can touch them physically.
Visual Aids: Humans are able to retain visuals much better than they are able to retain any other format of information. That’s why companies are keen to create images, GIFs and videos to explain products to their teams these days. If you cannot give them hands-on training of a product, the next best alternative to that is video. It is noteworthy here that incorporating your presentations with visuals gets more attention from the listeners and viewers. The fact that the human brains can process visuals 60,000 times quicker than they process text should be enough to convince you to convert your product information into visuals e.g.
Online Communities and Support Forums: These online support forums are a great way for companies to create expansive repositories of knowledge pertaining to their products. These online forums can be a lot of help not only for the internal employees but customers as well.
Workshops: Workshops can be a great way to educate employees as well as customers on a product or service. The best thing about workshops is that you have an opportunity to interact on a personal level with everyone. You can always decide for how long you want to conduct a workshop. If you have a lot of employees and a complex product to explain, you can make your workshop week-long. The best way to make a workshop effective is by handing a packet to the attendees that contains information about the product. Once again, you should not stick to the conventional paper-based text-only handbooks only.
Keep it Simple: Start with what matters. Ask your team what they need. Use a quick poll or a short chat. Then create content they can use right away. Keep it simple. Use tools that don’t require training. Share updates often. Celebrate people who contribute. And switch up the format. Videos. Checklists. Cheat sheets.
Think Small, Practical Wins: Less guessing. More doing. When people share what works, others don’t need to figure it out from scratch. Teams move faster. Quality goes up. Confidence grows. Think small, practical wins. A cheat sheet for a tricky system. A how-to video from someone on the floor. A podcast with quick tips. Even a checklist can save the day. It doesn’t have to be fancy.

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