The Learning Library
How to create a recommendations database for professional growth in R&D
I’m excited to share our experience of creating a learning library for Kry’s R&D organization.
What is it good for?
We created this library to complement our development plans: they contain, for each topic that the employee wants to improve, a few columns, and one of them is resources they will use to grow in that area.
I’ve found myself recommending the same resources again and again, and of course, there are resources I’m not aware of. This led me to start this initiative with my colleagues Hannes Johansson and Paul McKenna.
How do people use it?
Our R&D members can go on our organisation’s Notion and into one of three rooms: Engineering, Product, or Design. In each room there are shelves, like the Software shelf from the screenshot above, and on the shelves there is one page per resource.
A resource can be a book, article, podcast or podcast episode. The page contains a screenshot of the resource, its name, the name of the author and a public URL that can help with identifying the resource (for example amazon.com).
The reader can then see who uploaded this resource, and hopefully their detailed recommendation. They can also see a rating from 1 to 5 on this resource that is aggregating all of the reviewers.
We encourage all of our R&D members to upload recommendations and resources to the library.
Roll out
To roll this project out we created the rooms with initial recommendations, then invited a group of beta testers to test it out, learned from their behavior and feedback, adjusted the documentation and then presented the library in a show & tell meeting, and published the recording in several Slack channels. We added a channel for the community, and we monitor the additions to make sure people stick to the format and learn from the behavior of the whole R&D when using it.
Technical Details
In Notion we created two databases inside the library page, one for the books/resources, and one for the recommendation. On each shelf there’s a ‘linked view of database’, filtered according to the shelf’s name, and with a Gallery view. For each room there’s a table of contents.
Worth the Investment
We’re very happy that we have this initiative and receive good feedback on it, and we feel that it was worth the investment. We recommend you to have such a library in your org as well!
