Hello world
Who we are, what we did, what we learnt, and sign up for Cohort 2 please?!
What is OnThatJob?
We run cohort-based courses targeted at working professionals in tech looking to level up in their careers. Jobs in tech are new and constantly evolving. Only a few companies can invest in proper onboarding and training. Everyone else must rely on self-learning (in some form, everyone does!)
Training yourself by reading a 100 articles is great in theory, but learning by yourself sucks! Why?
- You have no idea where to start
- You have no sense of progress
- You have no idea when to stop
- You’re doing it all alone :( without peers or mentors
For the motivated amongst us, this becomes a chaotic process of reading and bookmarking a bajillion articles, then watching videos till you get some sense of what the hell you’re supposed to do. Many of us end up feeling lost, start doubting our abilities and experience imposter syndrome.
Our hope is to bring order to this chaos.
So what do we actually do?
We use the flipped classroom method — coupling lecture videos with assignments, 1:1 coaching, Q&As and critiques to create an experience that fosters learning with immediate application. Alongside, we facilitate peer learning with students exchanging their experiences and learning from each other.
Why we started
When we looked back on our careers — this is literally what we needed.
As baby PMs working at fast-moving startups, we went through the fun experience of wandering in the career desert, lost, and trying to find our way out. Strapped for time but charged with responsibilities — we read books, bookmarked articles, watched videos, and attended conferences to get better at our jobs. While a lot was useful, much was redundant too. We encountered lots of shallow generic advice that sounded good but was impractical or barely applicable. And even the best material couldn’t convey the complexities of the real world.
So being PMs, when we saw a gap, we formed a thesis and tested things out with an MVP. We decided to start out in our area of expertise — Product Management.
And that’s how OnThatJob — PM Cohort 1 was born.
Experience from our first cohort
We took a long time to begin — Almost 5 months of brainstorming & countless help from our friends. We launched cohort 1 with about 20 folks that were kind enough to trust us. So, here’s what happened.
We did live weekend classes & kept the weekdays busy with slack discussions, 1:1 calls & active learning via community. Students were given assignments and those were critiqued in live discussions (If you want to improve your thinking, try to coming up with a good critique. It’s hard). Over the weekend we got some amazing mentors to come & share their real world experiences. The talks were completely off the record — which meant the mentors could speak their minds and share stories without filtering to be diplomatic or politically correct.
As typical product managers, we wanted to know how we had done & what would make this experience better.
So, here’s what worked
- Concise content: We’re built for people with full time jobs and a paucity of time. We feared doing exactly what we wanted to run away from — becoming lengthy, annoying & filled with jargon. All lectures were capped at an hour long — used accessible language and were packed with intense knowledge, useful frameworks and tools for thinking. We provided links and books for further learning and exploration.
- Live Simulation : We structured the course so that everyone was a PM at a known company & that they had a problem to solve throughout the course. The problems tracked the entire product lifecycle — from defining the mission, choosing success metrics, writing PRDs and creating a go-to-market strategy. This helped everyone understand all nuances of building — what, when & why!
- Hands-on work with feedback: We brought “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory” to life. We gave people assignments where people loved racking their brains and thinking critically. And what did they love even more? Getting pointed feedback on those assignments that was immediately useful.
- Mentorship : Everyone has access to the both of us for 1:1 catch ups. Here we could discuss everything from career transitions to concepts. We ensured quick responses to all questions. We tried to ensure that the responses were thoughtful and reflected the nuances of reality. Every answer on our slack community could be a blog by itself. We took great care in going over topics again and repeating ourselves where needed. We also had some amazing industry mentors who helped share some unique perspectives. People really enjoyed the candour in our off-the-record mentor sessions.
We also used Cohort 1 to validate our thesis — That being a PM IS LONELY (Yeah, we heard that one too many times!) but the worst is when you have no one in your org supporting you with queries or guiding you through the problems you are facing. We also learnt that no matter how many frameworks you knew — unless you learnt how to implement them, knowledge had no value whatsoever.
BONUS
Our goal was to the plant the seeds for tomorrow’s products leaders, smoothening the road for those coming after us. We set out to upskill folks and instill confidence in them. Interview-prep wasn’t on our radar. An ironic validation for us was that 1/4th of the cohort changed jobs — with their basics now solid, they felt confident about pursuing new opportunities. That to us was one of the greatest highlights of this experience.
“Success ke peeche mat bhaago, excellence ka peecha karo, success jhak maarke tumhare peeche ayegi” — Rancho, 3 Idiots
Here’s what we’re improving
OK we’ll admit, we weren’t perfect! Our MVP validated the core need, and a lot of our methodology — why don’t we just start multiple cohorts already? Because we don’t just want to do this right. We want the impact to last long enough for everyone part of OTJ to look back & say — these folks and these perspectives changed my career trajectory! Aiming for such impact — it means we had to learn & course-correct.
Here’s what is changing
- Individual assessment: While we analyse everyone’s strengths and put them in teams that complement each other, we learnt that people want to test their individual skills too. PM maybe a team sport but our students wanted a personal scorecard.
- Longer courses: We looked around at other folks running programs & knew we run a shorter one (4 weeks) but we also thought we wouldn’t have more to teach. Turns out we were wrong. Everyone wanted more feedback, more time for assignments, more 1:1 sessions; which means our next cohort will be longer.
- Community engagement: We sent everyone books that we think they would enjoy, answered queries, had icebreaker sessions & more! But we are not seasoned community builders & so we didn’t deliver as well as people wanted.
- Tighter ops: We scheduled, interviewed, ran community, social media, collaborated on the website, copy & more! It was too much and there were slips here and there, we feel wiser and hope to do better.
- More diverse mentors: We need to get folks across teams, companies & countries (If this is you, please get in touch with us). We have to get better at it, hopefully we will :)
PS: If you’ve have community management skills and can help us with #3 and #4 or you’re someone with rich experiences in tech and can help us with #5 hit us up on hello@onthatjob.com or DM @onthatjob on twitter.
So what’s next?
*drumroll
A better improved and PM course is a go.
OnThatJob — PM Cohort 2 is now live!
Sign-up now
That’s it, no other steps.
One more thing
We’re looking for collaborators in other domains. We know that these problems of chaotic self-learning extend in many more areas that the early PM niche that we’ve begun with. We’ve spoken to our peers in other functions and found resonance with these problems. If you’re interested in considering running a course of your own, come talk to us. We’ve found it incredibly gratifying, and you might too.
✌
