Stay up to date in a product team

Today I'd like to talk about knowledge management in a product team because for me that is one of the very important subjects on which we must invest.

And when I say that you have to invest, I am speaking as much to individual contributors, whoever you are, as to companies.

When I speak of knowledge management, I think of different subjects:

• training of individuals
• the development of personal curiosity
• dissemination of knowledge

I'd like to present the different elements put in place in the Malt team in 2021 if it can give you any ideas. And then maybe, why are we doing this if you ever wonder.

Why train people?

Maybe we'll start there because otherwise the rest of the post doesn't make too much sense.

For me the answer is rather obvious, but apparently it is not the case for everyone.

I could give a famous quote first (although I can't find the author)

"Q: What if we train them and they leave? R: What if we don't and they stay? "

This sentence is undoubtedly valid for all jobs. Do you need a great team or do you need to add expertise to the existing team? One of the solutions is to recruit them, but the other one is to train them.

Do not ignore the training of your teams.

Worse, concerning the tech and the product, these jobs are constantly evolving. The approach to the PM profession today has nothing to do with the profession of 10 years ago. The frameworks and technological solutions evolve every year (can I troll on JS frameworks?).

If you work in product or tech, I am speaking to you in particular.

Technology watch is not a plus, you must do it, at the risk of no longer being relevant in your business within a few years. Curiosity must be one of your qualities.

And, I'm going to be transparent, I think it's your responsibility to take this into your own hands, because it's your future that depends on it.

Of course, the ideal thing is for your company to give you the means to do it. But if it does not come, do not sleep, in the end it is you who will suffer the consequences. So be an actor in your training.

Now that I've done this short intro, let's take a look at everything we've already done or are continuing to do.

BBL (brown bag lunch)

We have used this format several times to bring in external speakers. The principle is simple, they come on their lunch break, we provide them with a meal (the famous brown bag lunch) and in exchange they present us with a subject.

For example, we brought in Philippe Charrière to talk about Clever Cloud, Sébastien Deleuze for Kotlin and Spring, Vladislav Pernin around performance measurement.

Unfortunately the dynamic in 2019 was good but quickly interrupted by COVID in 2020. We will resume this format soon.

Malt tech days

A Malt Tech Day corresponds to a whole day of conferences. The objective is to share fairly varied subjects over a day of talks to emulate everyone's curiosity, disseminate knowledge, share our day to day between backend, front, mobile, data, security, ops.

The first edition took place in 2019 in Lyon. We had a lot of proposals, so we had to do a mini CFP. 15 subjects were provided, we selected the maximum (11) to fit on the day. This was possible with two rooms in parallel.

We then tried to make it a biannual event. With COVID, we had to transform the event into a videoconference, which necessarily reduced interactions, and therefore emulation, but hey, we had to adapt.

For each edition we invited an external speaker who came to talk to us about a subject totally external to Malt. The latest one was core commiter in the Apache foundation and he told us about the governance of projects in an open source foundation.

This format is incredibly rich, it's a great time to bond in the team (when there is no COVID), to share little-known topics in other teams, to discuss practices, to discover other professions.

Among the topics that have already passed, I could list:

hexagonal architecture, API Design, biases in data analysis, a capture the flag challenge, riskstorming, TLA +, Shenandoah, Kafka etc ...

Some presentations were subsequently replayed in conferences, meetups or in Malt Academy. But I'll talk about all of this right after ...

And for the little anecdote, we are thinking of opening the format more externally, so stay tuned.

Conferences

Exactly, let's talk about conferences. How often do I see people struggling to have their company pay for a conference between 100 and 500 euros. Conferences are a great way to learn. It is of course very different from training with a facilitator, practical work etc ..., although we now find labs in a lot of confs, but it is also more diversified, and more conducive to opening the mind, bring out ideas.

The policy at Malt is very open on this point. Everyone in the team can register and attend a conference of their choice during the year.

Malt pays for the conference and the costs. No leave is necessary, it sounds silly but it is not the case everywhere.

Ditto, we encourage those who wish to apply as speakers. Several have already participated as speakers in conferences: Mixit, Devoxx, meetups in France, Spain, Germany but also in other European countries.

You might ask me what is the policy on expenses, or content? We don't have. The instructions are simple, choose in the common interest of Malt and yourself, your progress being also in the interest of Malt.

And there is no abuse.

Malt tech training sessions (MTTS for close friends)

In the continuity of the Malt Tech Days, we initiated this new format in 2020 to fill the periods between each edition of the Malt Tech day.

It's a slightly different format since there is only one conference, every month, over 1 to 2 hours.

It's very "practical" oriented. An MTTS should allow everyone to learn about a subject with us. This is not just a general introduction but a "how Malt uses..."

The sessions are recorded so that they can be given back later to newcomers.

We have not yet fully concluded on the subject because the next step will be to cut the videos to make learning modules that will be part of the onboarding path in 360 learning (an e-learning tool from business).

Some examples of the latest topics:

the design system, internationalization, hateoas in our vue.js apps, security, kube/argoCD/Kustomize

The Malt Academy

It is a more "external" format and which in reality covers 2 different formats.

A Malt Academy generally lasts 1 hour, and corresponds to a kind of internal BBL. Its objective is to popularize a subject to the rest of the company.

But we also do external Malt Academy, in the form of webinars which are announced to the freelance Malt community on a regular basis.

There are Malters who participate but also great external speakers.

These videos are then posted on Youtube so if you do not know, I invite you to take a look!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPA9grRuUqVLyrazhIqd8BQ

E-learning

E-learning is one of the tools we use at Malt. I think everyone knows so I won't dwell on it too much. Each person in the team can use a personal budget to go to PluralSight, Oreilly, Coursera etc ...

There are very good quality training courses.

Not much more to say, but I mention it.

Exchange days

More exotic, we made exchange days with other companies. So I'm not going to hide it, the organization is more complex so it's still rare. It has happened twice in recent years. When I say it's rare, it's rare

But I mention it for those who would be ready to give it a try. We always got great feedback from these exchanges.

The organization was done each time in a similar way: one company invites the other, for an evening or a half-day.

It is an "open forum" format: we organize a small introduction where everyone has the opportunity to write a subject on a post it note then everyone votes, and we take the subjects that have been voted on to create round tables on slots of 20 / 40min max. People are distributed over these round tables and we run 2/3 round tables in parallel over a few hours. We can talk about all our practices, our issues, see how we have solved this or that concern. Each time it has been quite rich.

I'm not naming the companies we did this with because I'm not sure how well I can do it. But it was a great exchange and I thank all the participants.

Teaching

This point I mention it last because it remains very minor. But in the organization of Malt, the choice to go to 4/5th does not pose any problem. Several people went to 4/5, for sides projects, family organizations, or teaching.

And so we have a few people in the team who have given or still give courses externally.

For the anecdote, coincidentally, one of the people on the team gives attendances at the same place where myself I gave in 2011, I described in this old blog post

Besides, I explained in this post how giving vacations also makes us progress.

I think I have taken a look at the different formats that we have used over the years at Malt.

I did not mention "traditional" training but we also practice it. Here I especially wanted to show less usual formats to share ideas that could be good for others.

I strongly believe that technical curiosity should be encouraged. Curiosity is an individual gymnastics that must be practiced for it to be natural. All we discover this way is a new string to his bow available to solve problems later and it avoids falling into the wrong "when you have only one hammer, all problems look like nails ".

Even if, be careful, I'm not saying in the extreme that you have to give in to each new trend and make hype driven development, we could write a post only on this theme.

That's all folks.