Organizing regular knowledge-sharing sessions

Overview

As your team grows, it's crucial to prevent knowledge silos while avoiding information overload. Regular knowledge-sharing sessions provide a balanced approach, offering opportunities for team members to share their work. These sessions can also promote continuous learning, innovation, and collaboration, keeping teams informed about best practices, new tools, and industry trends while fostering a culture of growth and mutual support.

Result

Our Product Ops Assistant will organize regular knowledge-sharing sessions tailored to your team’s needs, ensuring that they are engaging, purposeful, and anticipated events—far more than just another task on the checklist.

Share playbook

Process

Establish timing and format

Product Ops Assistant & Product Leader

Meet to plan the implementation of regular knowledge-sharing sessions. Set clear goals for the sessions, consider suitable formats and an ideal frequency. Consider how these sessions can also serve as opportunities to reinforce team spirit and celebrate successes.

Product Ops Assistant

Draft an email template for the Product Leader to introduce the regular knowledge-sharing sessions to the team, clearly outlining the goals and benefits. Include your ideas for a proposed format and frequency, but let the team know that there will be a follow-up survey to solicit their input.

Product Leader

Review and personalize the email template provided by the Product Ops Assistant, then send it to the team, emphasizing the importance of knowledge sharing. It’s important that you are the one to introduce these sessions to demonstrate your commitment to fostering a learning culture within the team.

Product Ops Assistant

Send out an anonymous follow-up survey to gather feedback on the proposed format and frequency of the sessions. Additionally, ask for input on topics of interest, providing a few examples that you think the team might find engaging. Solicit suggestions for encouraging active participation - such as whether shorter sessions or group presentations would increase involvement. Ensure there's ample space for the team to share their own ideas on how knowledge-sharing sessions could be structured and any concerns they may have. When the team has a voice in shaping the sessions, they are more likely to be engaged and supportive.

Product Ops Assistant & Product Leader

Meet to review the team’s ideas and incorporate their feedback into your plan. Plan to address any concerns that have arisen.

There are many suitable formats for knowledge-sharing sessions. Consider: Lunch & Learns for informal presentations over a meal; Lightning talks for short, focused presentations (5-10 minutes), encouraging multiple team members to present in one session; Show & Tell sessions, where team members showcase their current work.

Create a collaborative space for topic collection

Product Ops Assistant

Develop a collaborative space where team members can suggest topics for future sessions. To maintain focus on the purpose of the sessions, include a brief reminder of the "why" behind these meetings in this space. Use this area to manage the schedule of upcoming sessions and, eventually, to store session summaries and a knowledge repository.

Consider using Notion’s upvoting system for idea collection and prioritization (see this example template). Adapt this template by adding columns for presenter names and dates to organize the schedule. Once sessions are completed, link the summaries to this space and build a comprehensive knowledge repository.

Schedule meetings and set agenda

Product Ops Assistant

Send out a recurring meeting invite for the knowledge-sharing sessions, including a proposed format and agenda. Begin populating the session schedule, encouraging team members to volunteer as presenters.

To kickstart participation, the Product Ops Assistant or Product Leader might consider leading the first session to set the tone and break the ice. ClickUp offers valuable tips setting an agenda for knowledge-sharing sessions, along with a helpful template.

Participate in the sessions

Product Ops Assistant

Help facilitate the meetings as needed, starting with an introduction to the topic and a reminder of the session's goals. Conclude by announcing the next session’s topic and the presenter(s).

Distribute summaries and collect feedback

Product Ops Assistant

After each session, prepare a summary highlighting the key points, takeaways, and action items. Share this summary with the entire team, acknowledging and appreciating those who contributed to the session. Remember to store this in your knowledge repository.

Alongside the summary, request feedback on the session’s content, format, and overall impact. Use this feedback to refine future sessions.