You're listening to the Product Manager Podcast presented by the CPO Club.
Make sure to subscribe and check out cpoclub.com for more exclusive content.
Before we begin, you need to know that this is a really important episode for everyone in product to hear, not just because it will help you gain new skills, but because it addresses a crucially important factor that impacts the effectiveness of every aspect of your organization learning.
Because, when you think about it, everything from your leadership approach to your product's onboarding flow, to your GTM strategy connects to how good your organization is at understanding how people learn new habits and skills.
And let's be honest, in at least one of those areas, most companies are not nailing it.
But after recording the episode you're about to hear, I'm convinced that the best kept secret to success is to think like a teacher.
My guest today is Maxine Anderson, the co-founder and CPO of Arist, a text-based learning platform.
Before Maxine was a founder, she was a teacher, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I was blown away by the brilliant simplicity of Arist as a concept.
What I really want you to hear is Maxine's profound understanding of how people learn, and not only how deeply it connects to an organization's most important markers of success, but how costly it is to miss the mark.
You'll hear why more information doesn't equal more learning, the opportunities for improving stakeholder and customer outcomes that most companies miss, and the role of generative AI in changing how we learn, teach and get results.
Let's jump in.
Oh, by the way, we hold conversations like this every week.
So if this sounds interesting to you, why not subscribe?
Okay, now let's jump in.
Welcome back to the Product Manager Podcast.
Maxine, thank you for making time to talk to us today.
Yeah, sure.
I'm super excited.
So can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today?
So I actually started out teaching in rural Oregon, where I was building educational programs with almost zero resources.
And I was trying to figure out how you can create impact through educational experiences on students, like the impact that teachers make on students, which I felt was very personalized.
And so in that experience I saw how broken access to learning was and how traditional education mediums didn't really address personalization.
So fast forward to college.
I co-founded Aris with my two friends in college who were also working in the education nonprofit space to say, basically solve the same problem, but at scale, which was always what I was trying to do, which is, how do you get the right skills or information to people without the overhead of the classroom, a learning management system or a traditional educational program?
And so that's how I came to Star Aris.
We just found that a majority of someone's life is in the workforce.
And so enterprise learning is where we can make the most impact.
Yeah, that makes total sense.
And such a cool mission as well.
So I want to know a little bit more about, kind of how you guys put your minds together to think about the concept for AERIS.
Actually, maybe you can walk us through a little bit how it works, because I think it's just such an innovative product.
Yeah.
Put simply, how our product works is we deliver information and learning to people through messaging tools that they use every day.
So text Slack, Microsoft Teams in the workplace, Microsoft Teams and text and Slack are used a lot, you know.
For people out in the field or really anyone like text is super accessible.
And so delivering learning that way ends up being really effective.
And we have an end to end platform for creation, delivery and analytics, with AI built in throughout that entire experience to really help change how organizations do, learning for this way of working now, which is changing a lot.
Yeah, I think it's just such a cool and I'm such a fan of product that really kind of comes back to the existing competencies and functionalities that we are already familiar with and kind of expands on those in ways that are innovative.
So I do want to talk a little bit about barriers that people face in general with learning.
And you kind of mentioned a few with the kinds of examples of folks that you and your colleagues were working with.
But I think in general there's certain barriers to learning that all of us kind of encounter and especially in kind of like the work and enterprise learning space.
So what did you kind of discover that kind of led you to think about this alternative way of delivering information?
Yeah, great question.
I think I'll talk about like, you know, in product, we talk about like aha moments.
So, in terms of barriers, like I realized in my education experience, like as a teacher, especially in rural Oregon, that Learning isn't always about content.
It's really about context.
And what I mean by that is I was trying to educate some of these students on financial literacy training.
And honestly, they're just embarrassed to go to class or they don't have time to sit between work and school.
They're not going to sit through hours of video training.
But like we were for so long, the barrier isn't like knowledge.
It's like psychology and like context of like how to make it possible for someone to learn.
And a lot of traditional formats actually make those barriers worse.
While I found that Eris... Me and my co-founders all had different aha moments.
We basically couldn't get over the fact of how simple Eris was as a solution for such a complex set of problems like education.
Once you start digging into like the educational system and how people learn and like it's just really complex and i was overwhelmed by that, like out of high school, and i found it so motivating how simple eris like, where you just deliver information to people over text.
You have the opportunity to automate it and give it to people right when they need it.
I just found that how simple it was was like so contagious as an idea and And I think that my co founders experienced something simply like.
It was the first moment I heard Michael share with me because you know we live in entrepreneurship living community and share with me like Oh yeah, I'm sending information to students in Yemen over text about, like entrepreneurship.
That's the only way to reach them.
I'm like everyone uses text.
How is that not used as a learning medium?
I asked him like i literally asked him like oh, what technology are you using for that?
And he's like no, i'm just like texting people manually.
And i was like how does that not exist?
It's such a simple, overlooked solution to like uh education, which has like a lot of complex challenges.
Basically that don't put the learner first.
In my opinion, I tend to agree with you.
I'm curious when you say traditional learning mediums sort of amplify almost some of these challenges.
What do you mean by that?
I'm kind of curious about some examples where the traditional style is kind of not really meeting learners halfway.
Yeah.
I mean, in two places, right?
So like when I work more in traditional education, schools themselves are barriers.
Like, if you think about you know I experienced this in rural Oregon that sometimes students wouldn't show up to class, right.
Like having to go to school is a barrier.
The other barriers, like the school has mixed incentives.
You know, they have a lot of things like just organizationally that they're stressed about.
Like the business model of schools is difficult.
Teachers aren't paid enough.
They have state regulations they have to meet, federal regulations.
And so like the learner ends up becoming last actually, which is sad, but true, right?
So that's one example.
The example that we always say in like enterprise learning is that on average it takes like seven clicks to get into the learning you need to access.
You have to open a website, you have to log in, you have to click into a video, you have to start it, you have to approve some security approval thing.
By the time you get there you're like okay, got to run and pick up my kids or walk my dog or whatever.
And so that's just a simple example.
But there's a lot of barriers to just getting the information you need to do your job or to perform or learn better.
I do think that there is a lot to be said about taking these existing behaviors and just building on them, rather than asking of people to reinvent the wheel when you're trying to teach them something.
There's the thing you want them to learn, but then there's also the how to get there and carving out time for all of that.
I always say technology should reduce complexity, especially as product people want to build or engineers want to build the fanciest products.
And it's amazing and beautiful, but it's like okay, but is anyone going to even be able to engage with it or use it right?
So yeah, I think that's a really important principle.
Yeah, absolutely.
So we talked a little bit beforehand and you mentioned sort of this idea of having two or three things that most people really need to know about a specific topic.
How does that kind of principle inform how you deliver content on Aarist and just like your approach to learning in general?
Like I mentioned, we want to reduce the barrier or access to what people really need to know.
And we want people to get information that they actually need at the right time.
They drown in playbooks, in frameworks, and they're required to go through all the string.
It's amazing content.
But when they're about to walk into a meeting, what are the two things they need to know to say in that meeting to win the deal or move it forward right?
They don't need 200 pages before that meeting, right?
And so there is a place for more in-depth, more in-depth coaching, etc.
But there's a gap in solutions and learning out there that isn't solving for like what the most important things to know are.
And we've truly seen that training and organizations and just in general isn't broken because the content is bad by any means.
It's because it's not designed around people's, like the moment of need, right?
And actually one of our clients is redesigning, like moving away from skills and capabilities to like more of a product mindset, which is like what are the jobs to be done on an average weekly basis when they interact with tools?
And that's helping them integrate AI more, which is interesting.
Just to give another example, one of our clients is one of the oldest insurance companies in the world.
And they were struggling with training service reps to increase CSAT scores, basically.
They adopted Eris to try to solve the problem.
And a lot of their learning designers were like, no way. we cannot reduce information by this much.
We can't make it 1200 characters, which is like the forcing function we put into our product.
And they honestly fought against it a lot.
We said, okay, just try our AI tool, like try to write it short.
And they actually came back saying like that was a really good exercise because I realized how much of the training we were giving call center reps like they're just not going to read, especially in like their day to day.
And it's actually not like super critical.
And so they push it out and they increase like CSAT scores by I think it was like 20 or something from like a three lesson course, because they just were able to like actually narrow down and parse information.
And like still like six months later, I met again with them.
They said, I still like any tool I use, I put way less information because of Eris.
So yeah, I think the forcing function of like, what do people actually need to know?
And it applies in marketing and learning, like in a lot of, it's just like human psychology.
Like people can only consume so much.
What comes to mind for me is user onboarding.
Like, how many times have you had an onboarding experience where it's just like, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm reading a tome just to get to the first feature and You know like, So I feel like you know, if you're, if you work in user onboarding and you're listening to this podcast, please take to heart.
Users can only take so many pieces of information at once.
So yeah, I think this is a really good principle to embody.
And this is something I think that is useful in all forms of communication as well, because I think we have a tendency to think, not just in product but in general, that by over explaining or providing all the information up front that we are giving everybody what they need.
Often I think that tends to backfire.
So I think this is such a like it is a cool exercise to just review any form of communication or learning and pare it down to like the absolute minimum.
Okay, let's talk a little bit about just the idea of now that we've talked about consuming content, getting people to actually put it into practice.
Like, now that you've delivered the information, how do you kind of ensure that the actual skill that you're trying to deliver is in place?
A couple things we look at.
So we've done our own research on what drives.
So, like most learning tools, track things that I call are like leading metrics of potential behavior change, which are like okay, you completed a course, or like, you got a certification for a skill right.
It's like, okay, they're more likely to perform better, right?
We look at a couple things.
One, we look at confidence lift.
So our AI evaluates if someone's confidence and ability to talk about the subject has changed throughout the course.
And then we basically show confidence lift.
And we pull data from other systems that basically measure if a change has happened.
So an example for a sales rep could be a gong.
Basically, their confidence in like following this messaging framework increased.
And in Gong we pull like they have like insights and they have like pillars of like what reps are like saying in meetings.
And so we can like pull that and basically provide it back to admin and say okay, you like, after this course, within 10 days these pillars on success rate shifted basically.
So we're always trying to change behavior, just in organizations, of how admins and I should say enablement leaders and leadership delivers training internally, that they think first of what is the actual business problem or business outcome that we're trying to solve, versus taking in an incoming training requests and then like saying someone has a skill.
And so like, with our tool also, we're trying to change the behavior of how like needs are fulfilled in our organization, so that leaders have a pulse on all the data in their organization and can rapidly close gaps that exist, versus having a long lead-up time on these analysis, taking in a bunch of requests, prioritizing them and then missing.
You know like 75 of closing those gaps.
And you know, something we've also learned is like and any of our clients will tell you this is like most other teams that go to central, like learning and development teams or hr, to like solve the problem.
They basically are like a lot of times the problem is not training, like they actually don't need more enablement.
It's that like the messaging framework doesn't make sense, or like people need more time with their manager right, like sometimes the problem and solution is not learning, actually sometimes even though organizations default to it.
So it's like your sales team struggling.
It's like everyone's like, oh gosh, like now we're going to go through, like you know, a four-hour meeting on like how to pitch this better and it's like well, it's not actually like probably going to solve the problem.
So That's what we see in organizations.
It's like just back to original question is that the way that we track performance is like we do work really closely with leaders and we're trying to like make that more automated and with like agentic AI and pulling information from different systems to like really prove that enablement and like targeted applications.
Actions or like that are, you know, sent as nudges to people through Aris, are actually like driving a change in how they behave or how they perform in their job.
So we're always trying to work towards that holy grail of measuring success, because most learning tools just like candidly, they just like can't get there.
And so like what's used as a default instead is like certifications or other things that like point to like potential change of behavior.
Another thing that I think is really interesting about the delivery method of Aris is this element of personalization and being able to kind of emulate to some extent the experience of being taught directly by a teacher.
And I think that the social aspect and the relationship aspect of learning is something that I think also is kind of missed by a lot of the traditional corporate training methodology.
You know the online courses and that kind of thing that are very content focused but are kind of void of having that more of like a relational aspect.
So was that kind of a part of how you guys conceived of it?
Or have you kind of noticed anything that's kind of interesting or a byproduct of having this approach that does kind of emulate more of a personal connection?
Yeah, I don't know if I can speak to the personal connection as much.
There was like a phase of tools, like three years ago.
That was like social learning and like every like.
It seems like you're learning from your manager.
And I think that like it's valid, but we actually try to abstract away like that component and gamification for like the same reason, which is that if we believe that you give someone like only what they need and then they like trust that you're giving them what they need to perform well, that you don't need to like layer in those other things.
What I will say, though and it's what like goes with what you're saying is that People share a lot more over text like open-ended, and the learning experience can be personalized, and more when it's a one-to-one relationship.
And I think what we mastered with Aris is that it's an at-scale learning solution, but you're creating one-to-one experiences.
Most learning tools are like made in it for enterprise or like at-scale solutions, but it's like everyone's is very much the same.
And it is through like a platform, which in itself makes it feel less personable.
It's different than like.
We're not like personifying, like another person or company necessarily, but I do see what you're saying.
And like, it makes a big difference.
And that's what I meant by like the context, like also psychological safety and like just sharing anything.
Like, people go through courses and it's like okay if like, an exec is asking you as a new manager what you're struggling with, like you probably have a lot of reasons you don't want to share.
But, like over a text, if the course is going to help you and it's like made for you, that's going to change the way you respond and like probably help you more because you're more vulnerable.
Yeah, absolutely.
And there's that conversation element that I think just kind of facilitates more just open-ended learning.
And I haven't personally used the platform.
So you know, maybe I don't want to step too far in a turn, but I just think it's a really amazing delivery method.
Okay, so tell me a little bit about how AI has sort of figured in.
You know, where are you guys seeing AI in terms of like, the story of your product right now?
And kind of, where do you see that sort of fitting in in general at this kind of I would maybe even call this kind of a next generation method of education.
So I'll say like what we're not solving, but I think it's valid.
Like there are a lot of like AI role playing and coaching and adaptive learning tools out there.
I think we've realized that basically, a lot of the reason that learning ends up not being like learner focused, or I should say employee focused, or like the employees are at the center, is because of honestly, how messy the administrative overload and burden is across teams and organization to coordinate to get effective enablement out there.
And so what we've decided to tackle is essentially changing the way that an organization approaches doing learning from like a top-down approach, right.
So the first thing I'll say there is that, like one of our early observations was like okay, most people do want to learn in an organization, but they don't pull learning right.
Why is that?
Because it's not built for the way they need and whatever, right?
But there's also not many tools out there that are built other than compliance learning, that are built for pushing learning based on organizational intelligence.
So the first layer is like you assume humans have that.
The second layer is like okay, if AI and automation were really well embedded into all the tools in your organization effectively, you should be able to push learning to people when they need it.
So we are like an AI enablement tool.
And what we say is like, we're like the solution to like instant enablement in your organization.
I don't mean just like sales enablement.
I mean we use enablement broadly for, like learning, anything that helps people perform better basically.
So our AI does everything from understanding these organizations to creating it and then analyzing if there's performance gaps.
And what we've found is that that entire process is shifting.
So historically, in organizations like large enterprise, you know you have business unit functions like a CRO, Chief Revenue Officer, and they have to go to like they have all these new sales reps, the new sales onboarding program.
They either have like an enablement team on their team, which a lot of sales teams do.
But let's say you're like an ops team.
You have to go to like central learning and development.
It goes into their queue and then they basically do like an expanded needs analysis on it.
So then they interview like hundreds of ops people or I don't know, ops leaders, get insights.
And then they say, okay, great.
Now we have all these insights.
Now, as humans, which we know takes a while to process, we're going to process this information, decide what to do.
Now we're going to create training.
Now it has to go through all the approval processes, which is a lot of back and forth.
And now after it's gone through all the approval processes, we're going to come back.
Now we have to like translate it and version it for different groups in the organization.
And then we're going to launch it.
And then we're going to like try to get people to adopt it, right?
So that whole process takes like 40 weeks, like minimum, right?
What's changed completely and like where Eris fits in is that Businesses are changing faster than ever before because it's so much especially tech companies, but other companies as well because it's so fast to build product now that, like the rest of the company, literally can't keep up.
And so basically, these companies have like all this revenue potential and there's like bleeding money.
Like one of a really well-known like tech companies, one of our clients.
They just IPO'd and they like keep shipping products features.
Like AI features, keep shipping features.
They literally just can't keep up.
And so like their support reps aren't enabled, their sales reps are saying the wrong things, they aren't driving like success of those AI tools and so like it's a huge gap.
And so what we're realizing and fitting in is that, like eris, like end-to-end solution is basically like an orchestration engine on understanding, like okay, this is what we're working towards right, and like what we're helping our clients is like this release is coming up.
It's like in, you know, ready to launch.
Now we're going to pull notes from all the relevant tools.
Like you know the commit, the get, you know from github, or like linear notes or whatever it is jira, you know anything from there.
And then basically like spin up content and like basically create versions based on the different teams, get quick approval and send it out.
So AI also needs to know when to get human approval.
But you can imagine that then that makes people in that organization, in a tech company or whatever.
Rather than being maybe a learning designer specialist, they're basically being the human approver or pointing it in the right direction based on business challenges.
So they become more of an orchestrator rather than maybe a specialist in their job is kind of the way that we're seeing it change.
And so workflows just have to change completely.
And that's very painful in a large enterprise.
And so there's just tons of problems right now with that.
But you can tap on a million AI features to other learning tools that exist that are traditional corporate learning tools, but it just doesn't change the way that people work enough to actually meet the needs of organizations today.
And so that's why we took a ground-up approach to building a tool that is optimized around business outcomes versus how humans do the work today.
Yeah, and I really resonate also with this idea of people becoming more orchestrators.
I think that we've discussed that before on the show.
We've kind of thrown around this idea of AI kind of actually kind of, in a way, building people's management skill set, because you're sort of acting more in the mindset of a people manager when you're directing agents, for example, or when you're kind of reviewing and kind of guiding information, rather than just sort of building from scratch and kind of, you know, throwing spaghetti at the wall.
So I think that's kind of interesting, how like we're seeing this kind of multiple different verticals, how this kind of effect of yeah, orchestration and guiding things and kind of refining, rather than having to kind of build interpret, do all these things manually.
I think that might be... the biggest thing in all AI advancements lately.
So, now that we're kind of at this point in the company, what would you say has been the most significant lesson?
Like this is, it sounds like quite a journey for you.
You know this all started from your experiences in Oregon and now you know you're working with enterprise clients and this has been like a relatively short period of time, if I'm not mistaken.
In the last several years that you've been working in your capacity, what have you learned that you think is like the most impactful, that you would want other people, other founders, other people in the education space to know?
Yeah, I think, whether it's called education learning enablement, whatever it is, like I always view it, the goal is that you're helping someone realize their potential to accomplish what they want in life.
Basically, like that's the purpose of it, right?
If it's in a job, it's performance.
If it's in like high school, you want them to be able to, like go out into the world and get what they want out of their life right.
So I think that is the goal.
And I think what I've learned is that that is not accomplished through the best content in the world.
It's accomplished through providing the right context to the learning.
And by basically like... bumping into problems.
Right.
And that sounds weird, but like even technology should get people to do that.
Like don't sit and like consume three hours of video training, right?
Like people need to and this is done, but like anyone building technology or implement it, whatever it is like, should really focus on like how do you get people to like bump into problems?
A little bit more like practice.
And that's when it like really sticks in their head.
And how do you create that experience in context when it's like needed the most.
Right.
I always talk about like podcasts are the perfect example for me.
I love listening to podcasts.
I listen to all the time and like 10% of them like drive me to like change anything.
And it's because I like happened to listen to it, like the day before I faced that problem, or like that night I like listened to the podcast and I faced a problem earlier in the day.
And so like I think context is like super important and creating that context for people is is really important.
I also.
I think it's interesting and, like curious people and, like you, can learn knowledge.
But, like you know, our goal, with our technology at least, is not like for people to just learn.
It's for people to like actually change their behavior, perform better, like feel the impact of that learning.
So I think it's like you know, great content is totally necessary, but I think it's just like what we've learned is just not what drives people to like actually gain a new skill or something is like, it's just not.
It's just not through content.
I know people who like consume the most content ever on like product management and like still struggle with like the day to day of like how to get something like actually out there.
Right.
So I think it's just like human behavior needs practice and you need to provide that context so that people can actually understand and utilize the content.
I completely, completely agree.
We actually, we were for a long time hosting panel events and kind of like live events.
And over time, we were kind of figuring out like, how do we make these better?
How do we make these more useful?
And one of the things that we kind of thought we would experiment with was doing something that was a lot more hands-on.
So we ran a vibe coding workshop and it was a similar format where we would have a facilitator still leading it.
We would still have hosts and that kind of thing.
But what we did was we told people to come prepared with a few different supplies, have some accounts built, kind of already have a platform in mind or a concept that they wanted to try to prototype.
And just by making the format more following along rather than just listening and taking in all this information that, without context, can be very abstract, we got way better results, participation levels.
We got way better people.
As far as the percentage of people that stayed throughout the entire thing, people who gave us great feedback about how many skills that they actually retained.
It was just night and day.
So I, yeah, like firsthand, I can say that that context piece is super, super, super critical.
Yeah.
And one response is like, there's just nothing more frustrating.
Have you ever heard someone say something so intelligent?
You're like, okay, stick it in my mind.
I'm going to use that in my next meeting.
And you just forget it.
You're like, oh, I was going to come to this meeting so smart.
I heard the best tidbit from someone.
There's value to that.
But there's an opportunity with AI just being able to generate content on the fly to give people information.
If you add good automation, integrated data, when they need it, and that's so powerful.
That can be a serious engine for an organization.
So yeah, I'm excited to see how it changes learning.
Same here.
And I'm a little bit disheartened to hear that this actually means that homework is actually valuable.
Oh, no.
Anyway, thank you so much for joining us today, Maxine.
This was a really fun chat.
Where can listeners follow your work online and find out more about Eris as well?
Yeah, so we're at www.eris.co.
I post a lot on LinkedIn about what learning and reinventing learning organizations for the future of work looks like.
So I'm at Maxine Anderson on LinkedIn.
Cool.
Well, thank you so much for being here.
Yeah, thank you. next on the Product Manager Podcast.
Now that you know how people learn, our next episode is all about how people buy.
We'll be digging into buyer psychology and the small tweaks you can make to your customer touch points that boost conversion, drive adoption and fill the cracks in your growth strategy.
You don't want to miss this one.
So subscribe now to jump in with us next time.
