At receeve we are always exploring engaging ways to share our internal knowledge, which is why we started “receeve Academy” in the first place.
One of the problems we identified early on when we had new employees was that not everyone comes from a collections/financial background, so the learning curve in the first few months can be steep. Our team decided to tackle this problem heads on by facilitating knowledge sharing sessions led by individual team members.
The purpose was to empower teams across all departments to better understand our product, customer and the collections market itself! The feedback that we have gotten so far about receeve Academy has been great and we hope it becomes a key organizational initiative.
Everybody is receeve Academy
At receeve, we have a strong culture of encouraging participation. We believe that every team is responsible for receeve Academy. It was never designed to be the brainchild or the sole responsibility of a single department. Having said there needs to be a facilitator to move things forward and make sure it works like a well-oiled machine.
That facilitator happens to be the Product Marketing (PMM) team. Why? Because the PMM team interacts with multiple customer-facing departments across the company to ascertain the latest market trends and understand the internal team’s pain points. This just gives them a unique perspective to prioritise topics that would help all stakeholders in the short and long term.
How we are doing it
Now you might wonder how the team actually executes this and comes up with topics for the session? Answering this question was one of the critical components of our strategizing process. There are various approaches we follow to get inspired for topics to be featured in receeve Academy, including:
- Regular sessions between sales, product, marketing and operations teams to discuss a variety of topics including any pain points and knowledge gaps that the parties might be having.
- Slack channels are a useful goldmine to identify topics as long as you can dig around a bit.
- Market trend shifts and updates in the product are key drivers for shaping newer sessions and negating knowledge silos.
Cross-departmental knowledge sharing is key
Another important aspect of the Academy is that the people who delivered the workshops come from different teams within receeve. Most of them had no prior experience as teachers and their mission was not to "train" or "instruct" but rather to help people discover their individual strengths and use those strengths in a way that would deliver better results on a day-to-day basis.
This is the same approach we take when building our own products – we always start by understanding our customers' needs and pain points, then work backwards from there. The goal behind the program is to help teams become more effective in their roles through cross-pollination of insights. It is a chance to build rapport and provide a platform for asking the right questions to address the need of the market.
From a Product Team perspective, this is a wonderful initiative for aligning the whole company and making everyone feel like they are important contributors to the growth of the organization.
To sum it up in a nutshell: receeve academy lets the whole company understand the customer, master the product and identify key areas to improve as a company!
