Product Tonic Lab Cohort 2 — Retreat Day #4

PTL Retreat Day #4 wrapped up to help us build engaging products by tapping human’s intrinsic motivation toward mastery and purposes. In this session, we explored the concept of job story and techniques for building a learning journey toward mastery.

Check — In: Temperature Reading Exercise

Appreciations:

• For guardians and scribes
• Those who helped create a good ambiance in the chat and who made the session chill!
• Core learning loop + journey to mastery exercises

New Information:

• Meetup #1 has been changed to 14 July
• Participants will now run the session
• How to have party virtual background in Zoom
• one participant has jogged for the first time in 10 months!
• Treehouses where the facilitator stays are built by children
• Good effects of practicing tiny bits of mindfulness spread to all parts of their life

Puzzles:

• Learning loops feels not coming up so intuitive — looking more deeper info
• Not understanding the aim of the activity at the very start

Worry with Recommendations:

• Doing a scribe role — fear of missing out a lot of words — Participants are most welcome to write their own notes on the Miro board
• We don’t actually know what each person is doing in the cohort — Everyone has the permission to use Go Wild Card and have more fun getting to know each other
• Guardian requested support — another guardian steps in!

Hopes and wishes:

• Have clarity / better idea about the rest of program looks like
• Suggestion for people in bungalow help members who are missing out to catch up (i.e. through teaching back)
• Hoping that new knowledge/tools can be used in the day-to-day of work

Breakout Group discussion on core learning loop and prepare MVP “roadmap” to Mastery

Each bungalow are invited to discuss about core learning loop and prepare MVP “roadmap” about what we want to achieve for mastery

• What are the learning loops we want to learn?
• What is the M V P?

What’s in our (learning) backlog?

As cohort, we identified:

• Topics you are still growing in (highlighted in orange)
• Topics you are confident to lead (highlighted in green)
• Discuss what’s currently in own backlog

Here we refer back to 26 product management skills defined in APP Product Proficiency Framework. From the voting, Cohort 2 appeared strong in operational tactics and some market strategy with desire for more guidance in adaptive skills and operational strategy.

Bungalow Group Discussion for our learning backlog:

The Kanban board is a tool for workflow visualization — it depicts work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. Within our small (bungalow) group, we discussed topics that we currently and aim to learn.

World Cafe!

Back to MVP “roadmap” to Mastery — we use World Café methodology for hosting group dialogue.

The process begins with conversation for small groups of four people seated around a “table”. At the end of first round conversations, each member of the group moves to a different new table with one person stay behind as the “table host” (or in PTL terms as cactus owner) for the next round, who welcomes the next group and briefly fills them in on what happened in the previous round.

Each round is prefaced with a question specially crafted for the specific context and desired purpose of the World Café:

• Round 1: Why is your MVP Important?
• Round 2: How would you attempt to approach the statement?
• Round 3: At the table — share:
• What motivates you at work
• Your main skills that you can sell to the team
• Secondary skills that you have
• Skills that you want to buy from others

After the small groups discussion, individuals are invited to share insights or other results from their conversations with the rest of the large group. Here are the topics that emerge:

• Group #1: How might we create empathy across people in different organizational levels? Alignment, Trust, Unhappy Decision during implementation, issue of responsibility, accountability
• Group #2:How might we create an environment to share in order to overcome challenges at work/life. Value driven, Because we face challenges, so that we know how to react to challenges
• Group #3: How might we achieve mastery to be able to teach
• How might we be a master of the tools and concepts
• How might we learn more to share more
• How might we integrate what we learn into our lives?
• How might we get people to be participative in our meetups

http://theworldcafe.com/key-concepts-resources/world-cafe-method/

Team Knowledge Model (TKM) Assessment

Having identified the topics, we map back how comfortable the selected topics are for the cohort. Here we can observed mixture of familiarity as well as anxiety about the topics:

By looking at the chart above, the working group can adjust and prepare their topics at a slightly uncomfortable level outside the Competency Zone where more learning could take place.

Reference:

• The Learning Edge | June 2006 | Communications of the ACM
• https://less.works/case-studies/bmw-group-usp/team-knowledge-model.pdf

Preferred Learning Style

The Felder-Silverman Model was originally formulated by Dr. Richard Felder and Dr. Linda K. Silverman, an educational psychologist, initially for the use by college instructors and students in engineering and the sciences. It was designed to overcome problems such as boredom, inattention, poor performance due to mismatches between learning styles of most students in a class and the teaching style of the professor. This model denotes four dimensions of learning styles which combine and make up the individual’s learning preferences.

Having awareness of participants’ learning preferences, the facilitator is better equipped and opt for more balanced approach instead of forcing with their own preferred style.

Reference: Richard M. Felder’s Learning and Teaching Styles in Engineering Education Article

Check Out

Participants were invited to post their closing reflections with following questions

• How Do I Feel?
• What Happened?
• What Did I Learn?
• How Does this Relate to the Real World?
• What If — What are the possibilities to enable more play for yourself?
• What Next?

Attributions

This is a summary notes for Product Tonic Labs 2022 that is taking place from June — October 2022

Product Tonic Lab is open source

This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). This work is derivative of Prime/OS, Theory U concepts, #ProductBeer, #ProductTonic and The Collab Folks (TCF) “The Learning Circle v1-v3” and “TCF v1-v5.5”.

Materials in Product Tonic Meetups

This work is based on “The Collab Folks”, Cactus team and many sources.