[CTQ Smartcast] The Role of MOOCs in Staying Future Relevant, with Kapeesh Saraf
Kapeesh Saraf, most recently was the Head of Growth at Coursera, overseeing consumer growth and monetisation for consumer business. Prior to that, he was Director of Product at Zynga. He has received his Master’s degree in Management Science from Stanford University after completing his engineering at the University of Pune.
In this Smartcast conversation with CTQ co-founder BV Harish Kumar, we talk to him about his observations on how learners use online channels like Coursera, and how you can use such MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) to stay future relevant.
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SOME OF THE THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
Role of MOOCs in staying future relevant
How to approach learning from MOOCs
The kind of learners that can best benefit from MOOCs
Value of certifications
Current trends in online learning
Cohort-based courses
The next disruption in online learning
The future relevance of universities
PLUS
Advice for aspiring product managers
Kapeesh’s picks for great product management books
AND
Using a sabbatical as a way to reorganize your career and goals
LINKS TO BOOKS, PEOPLE, ARTICLES AND WEBSITES MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST
‘Ask Gib’ newsletter by Gibson Biddle of Netflix
PEOPLE
OTHERS
If you enjoyed this Smartcast, you will also like Lessons In Culture And Decision-Making From The Indian Army.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
00:00:00
BV Harish Kumar: In this episode I speak to Kapeesh Saraf. Most recently, Kapeesh was Head of Growth at Coursera overseeing consumer growth and monetisation for consumer business. Before Coursera, Kapeesh was Director of Product at Zynga. Kapeesh received his Master’s degree in Management Science from Stanford University and earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Pune in India. I spoke to Kapeesh about the role of MOOCs in staying future relevant. About Coursera, about current trends in how learners use Coursera. We also spoke about how he trained himself to become a product manager. He’s given some excellent recommendations of books and newsletters on product management that you can follow. And finally we spoke about his sabbatical and how one should think about taking one. If you are a leader or you work in the L&D function or if you think about future relevance of yourself and your team, you’ll find this chat interesting and well-informed.
00:01:16
Harish: Hi Kapeesh, welcome to the CTQ Smartcast.
00:01:19
Kapeesh: Hi Harish, excited to be here.
00:01:22
Harish: So Kapeesh, you’ve been Head of Growth at Coursera, there’s a lot of inquisitiveness and curiosity about all of us here about what all we can talk to you about with the aspect of the role of MOOCs in future relevance. So I’m going to throw the first question, throw you in the deep end right at the start. What do you think is the role of MOOCs in thinking about future relevance?
00:01:49
Kapeesh: Yeah, absolutely Harish. If you think about what’s happening in the world right now, technology is changing very rapidly and it’s hard for people to keep up with that technological change. People’s jobs are changing at a very rapid pace which has never happened before. That’s really the space where MOOCs like Coursera and all of the other platforms are playing. So all online platforms can help people keep up with the pace of change of technology. This is especially relevant if you are already working in a technology field like machine learning, AI, software engineering or if you are interested in breaking into any of these fields. That’s really the core of the use case that we are seeing today for MOOCs in a nutshell.
00:02:40
Harish: Yeah, thanks for putting it in a very concise manner. How should people really be looking at Coursera and the other options available in terms of immediate skill that “I’m missing out on this skill in my current responsibility role so I should go and do something.” Should it be more in terms of certification and adding credentials or thinking long-term future relevance? Is there a separate, different kind of a role that these platforms play for a corporate profession?
00:03:14
Kapeesh: Yeah that’s a really good question. I think the answer is all of them. The way we think about it is, you can segment any learner or any person into, what we call a career enhancer, an upskiller or a reskiller. So that’s how when I was at Coursera, we looked at it. Reskiller is somebody who has to completely change their skillset to get into a new job. So typically we would see that somebody who’s driving an Uber and they want to become an entry-level IT worker, they need to learn a completely different set of skills. Then there is an upskilller which is let’s say, you are working as an analyst but you want to get into machine learning. So you have some skills that are relevant but you still have to make a pretty significant jump. And then the third ones are enhancers, you are already somebody who’s pretty happy with their career but you are really motivated and you want to continue to enhance your skills and grow even faster. The same person could be in any of these three buckets at different points in their lives. You might start as a reskiller and become an upskiller and then become a career enhancer. Or go back and forth. So the way you think about online learning completely changes depending on which category you are in. What we see is for somebody that’s a reskiller, you typically want a very meaningful, substantive programme that will get you all the skills that you need for your new role and then you need a lot of additional support and services as well to actually train you on how to interview and get that job. If you are a reskiller you may be afraid of jumping right into the programme so might want to do some preparatory work before that. For upskillers, you don’t need a full programme, you might need shorter content but certifications might still be relevant for you to show employers that you have made that jump and you qualify for the jump you want to make. And for enhancers, it’s purely about developing yourself and there is where people can take a longer term perspective and not just think about I need to make this presentation, I need to show some skills but also how can I develop my leadership skills or strategy, design thinking skills to help me over the next several years. That’s generally at a high level, how people can think about different types of offerings within MOOCs and what to take.
00:06:00
Harish: Right, yeah that’s very interesting Kapeesh. Have you seen, what are the trends like? What are people doing more of? Is it reskilling, upskilling or enhancement at different stages and also probably, geographical distribution might be different? Is that true?
00:06:29
Kapeesh: That’s a good question. I think the big trend that we have seen happen over the last year and a half which is especially accelerated due to COVID, is there are a lot of people who are looking to reskill and into sort of tech jobs. That’s the area where there is fastest growth in the overall MOOCs segment so you would see a lot of people that, especially with COVID, a lot of service industry jobs were disrupted definitely in the US but globally as well. So a lot of people who were out of work turned to online learning to really bolster their skillset and people are thinking about future proofing themselves. Next time anything like this happens, I want a job that’s not disrupted. People are seeing. People are seeing that people in tech jobs are able to work from home, work remotely and there’s all that convenience and that’s one big shift growth area that we are seeing. These entry-level jobs can be anything from IT, customer service to low-skill within the tech ecosystem that don’t really require a college degree, here in the US at least. That set of content we are seeing grow actually across the board, both in the US as well as in India and in other markets. So it’s truly a global phenomena. The other area which is really big obviously is both software and data science but what we are seeing emerge is Cloud. The Cloud wars are on with Amazon, Google, Microsoft. So we are seeing a lot of growth in terms of Cloud and IT certifications. That’s something that people are pursuing quite a lot. Another interesting trend has been with the pandemic, people are turning to a lot of courses on mental wellbeing and happiness as well. Those who can afford to make the time are investing in their own wellbeing. So it's another interesting trend.
00:08:48
Harish: Right, yeah and with so many MOOCs and certifications, how can people really show that they have learnt something? Is there a danger of these certificates or losing the value that credentials should ideally have? If you look at LinkedIn or your feed, someone or the other has done something in data science these days. I’m wondering whether that person really knows something. Is that a danger or a valid fear?
00:09:28
Kapeesh: I think that’s a definitely valid concern. I would say that the trend is actually in the opposite direction which is in the early days of online learning, this is pre-Coursera, many or for a couple of decades, online credentials have had low signalling power because there has been or used to be this stigma attached to online learning somehow being inferior to learning on campus. I think as it kind of becomes more prevalent, the stigma is going away and these credentials are being more valued. Now even on platforms like Coursera or Udemy, there’s a big difference in the quality of different courses. And the way the credential value works is at the base, when an employer sees that somebody has a certain certification, you at least know that they are self-motivated. You know something even if you don’t know the extent of it. But then there are some certifications which are backed by much more rigorous exams and you have an employer who is vouching for those signals. For Coursera one of the areas of fastest growth is professional certificates which are backed by companies like Google or IBM. That’s a very strong signal to hiring managers and to learners like “okay this actually means something.” What a lot of platforms are doing now is striking hiring partnerships so it’s not just about you’ve earned the credentials, there’s also employers on the other side saying that “if you have earned this credential, we’ll give you an interview.” Those sort of things are things to look out for as a person who is considering these certificates. These things are some proof that there’s a lot of value in the job market attached to this. Then for a lot of MOOCs, especially for the career enhancers or in areas like leadership for example, a certificate won’t really be that useful, it’s really about what you demonstrate and what you learn about your self-confidence and your own ability to demonstrate those skills.
00:11:56
Harish: Right, yeah. Different areas will probably be seen in different light in terms of what you have been exposed to and in terms of what you have done.
00:12:04
Kapeesh: Yeah exactly.
00:12:07
Harish: So, from a learner’s point of view, what are the limitations of platforms like Coursera? Like we just spoke about exposure versus actually showcasing something.
00:12:20
Kapeesh: Yeah, so one of the big challenges with the MOOCs-style type of learning experience which is pretty self-paced is that if you are somebody that’s really self-motivated, it works really well but you have to bring in a lot of motivation to the table. If you fall behind it's easy to just stop learning because you are mostly by yourself. That is one limitation of the learning experience. There’s a lot of work happening to address that. For Coursera, there’s a lot of investment in the community to provide that kind of support and things like cohort-based courses which are trending again to sort of provide that kind of community experience. Another one is because the price point is either free or really low, there isn’t a ton of coaching or tutoring available and for somebody who wants that and needs a lot of support and structure, that can be a limitation. Again, Coursera and others are doing a lot of things to address that, like at really low or free price points. Those are the two biggest limitations of the MOOCs-style experience. Now, Coursera solves that in a couple of ways, it has a portfolio of offerings for different price points for different needs. Coursera has free content, then there’s the certificates for scaffolding and support and then there’s online degrees which have everything. Lots of other companies or MOOC platforms are now following the lead and building that strategy of what we call these stackable credentials. There’s an offering at every price point and at every need that a learner might have.
00:14:19
Harish: Right. You mentioned cohort-based courses. What’s your take on that? We see a lot of people offering cohort-based courses these days.
00:14:27
Kapeesh: Yeah, I think in general, the concept of learning in a cohort, that’s how learning has happened if you think about traditional class, it's a cohort-based world. It’s really trending these days and I think what people are doing is enabling content creators from just putting out static content to actually take people through the same community experience. You know Coursera has had cohort-based courses since its foundation and I’ve spent a couple of years working on this, even as we went from cohorts offered once or twice a year to being fully on demand. We work to preserve a lot of the good aspects of cohort-based courses. So having a schedule enables motivation, having a community is both motivating and helps guide through the course. And a lot of the value in a cohort-based course just comes from the peer interaction and the peer feedback and the community that you gain. That’s all really positive. So I’m very bullish on the learning format. The downside of it is it requires a lot of effort to maintain, the prices are higher and it’s inflexible so not everybody can go through it. So you are basically trading off reach for more intense learning. There is a market for it for sure. Then the other thing that I really like about what’s happening is this is enabling a lot more creators to create content than otherwise would have. It’s unique or different types of learning experiences where purely content-based courses may not have been as effective. That’s really interesting.
00:16:31
Harish: Right, we’ve had some interesting experiences running some cohort-based programmes, I wouldn’t call them a course but cohort-based programmes. We got interesting feedback where we had people say we don’t want to wait till the next month, for the next cohort to start, can we start something right now? We said you’ll miss out on the whole experience of the group. They said no, we are okay with it because that’s how they were wired. It was interesting. So, in fact that brings me to the next question, Kapeesh. What kind of ground work can a learner do before committing to a MOOC?
00:17:11
Kapeesh: That’s a really interesting question. So it really depends on where you are starting. Lot of MOOCs are free and really beginner-friendly and for a lot of people, I would say, don’t have to do a lot of groundwork. You don’t need to commit to a MOOC, you can just explore, see if you like it and go from there. In fact what we hear from a lot of learners, somebody who’s been out of college for 15-20 years, never really done any learning after college, they start off with a MOOC, then realise they can learn new skills and then it builds confidence to them to continue learning. Then they want to apply for degree programmes and sign up for much more difficult learning. Those kinds of stories really stuck with me. I would say groundwork really depends on where you are starting from. So the basic preparation is to make sure that you don’t start with something difficult, especially if it is somebody that is intimidated with a MOOC and feels the need for groundwork. I would say Coursera, a couple of courses are extremely popular. We have a course called ‘Learning How to Learn’, which teaches you the fundamentals of how to learn effectively. That’s actually a really good place to start and it’s a fairly short course. Lot of people come to Coursera to learn programming and we have a course called ‘Python for Everybody’. That’s a really great starting point and more than 2 billion people have taken that course. It’s a fantastic professor named Dr Chuck Severance. So finding those really easy, straightforward materials like MOOC or something else and just doing 30 minutes of learning will be really good groundwork for learning those skills and getting that early win to then continue learning.
00:19:38
Harish: Yeah, in fact, like I was mentioning earlier as part of our CTQ compounds known as Future Stack, we give exposure to 26 different topics in 26 weeks, covering timeless skills like storytelling, influencing and also your upcoming things like AI/ML, AR, VR. We’ve seen people actually do this. In the one week there’s a primer and some reflection around where do you think it applies to their day-to-day work? And then people say “oh no, this was great, I’ve chosen to do some online course on these three topics because now I see the connection between those things.” That brings me to the next question, Kapeesh, that are you seeing more organisations looking to let employees take charge of their learning. We’ve heard some startup founders say that no, I’ve no L&D team or nobody is looking after L&D. I’ve just given a budget to all my employees like you can go and sign up to any course, we will pay for it. Some people have said yes, a lot of them went ahead and took the course, like you said the self-motivated ones. Lot of people have said there’s the budget and all of them know that the budget is there but nobody has utilised it. Are you seeing this trend where a lot of companies take care or charge of your learning? What are the pros and cons of it? The reason I’m saying this is that a lot of our audience comes from that background. So they do the job of identifying these skill gaps and telling the person that this is the gap that you need to pick up on. If there’s nobody telling me and I don’t have the sense to reflect upon where I stand, then how do I even find out what I should go and learn? What is your take on this?
00:21:51
Kapeesh: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I think the reality is a little bit nuanced. Companies are adapting online learning like Coursera, LinkedIn Learning or Udemy in record numbers, all of these companies are seeing a lot of growth in companies and organisations like binder solutions. But I think there’s like a few very distinct patterns in how companies use these providers and I think it depends on whether the company is an incumbent that is worried about digital disruption or if it is a disruptor. If you take an example of let’s say, you are a large automobile manufacturer, especially in the US, there’s a big trend towards electric cars and if you think about what that means, it means that a pretty large part of your workforce probably doesn’t have the skill that it needs over the next 5-10 years. Today, the company is really worried about having to lay off their employees and them not having the skills that they need and they are also worried about attracting the kind of talent that they need. Because they want to work for Tesla, Google etc. So then the companies are putting in a lot of effort to help people identify their skills and tell them exactly what content they need to get the skills that will keep them relevant. Those employees also tend to need that guidance and that’s one clear trend that we see and that’s one category. There’s a lot of industries and companies where that’s happening. Then there’s a lot of companies where it’s more of a perk where learning is more of a perk offered to employees, we see that as a trend but it’s not as common. Another big challenge that a lot of companies face is that the L&D teams don’t have that expertise or skills to guide the employees or identify skills gaps. Or there’s a lot of effort involved in mapping skills to content. So what many companies are doing and Coursera definitely has a big offering around this, sort of connecting the dots for the company. In Coursera’s case, we launched what we call, we started the pilot with Data Science. We called it the Data Science Academy and then we launched this product called the skillsets. We have some pre-configured skill sets but we also help companies customise it. So if you are managing a data science team you can work with Coursera, tell us skills you want your employees to learn and then we actually map out our curriculum, like showing you the learning content which best prepares you for those skills. Then for each of those skills we’ll give you a skill score based on how you performed on those assessments and comparing it to everybody else on the platform who has taken those assessments. We use a model similar to chess rankings to actually determine your skill score. Then the managers can see what skills the employees are learning. That kind of data analytics and statistics can be really helpful to companies for things like internal mobility and so on. This is the long-winded answer but I think companies are definitely letting employees take charge a little bit more but the big need really is to help people navigate digital transformation, is to provide a lot more scaffolding and structure and then get people flexibility with that broader structure.
00:26:12
Harish: Right, that sort of addresses most of what I wanted to ask you on that particular question. So Kapeesh, before we move to the next section, I know you love your quizzing and we have quizzed together in the past as well. So I’m not going to let you go without asking you some quiz questions. But these are all right up your alley, closely related to you and what you’ve been doing. Let me start with the first one for today, this must be part of your syllabus by now. Andrew Ng who co-founded Coursera, in an article had said if typical people can do a mental task with ____, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future. So what is that? Fill in the blanks for me.
00:27:!2
Kapeesh: I feel like it’s ‘within a second’?
00:27:14
Harish: Yeah! You answered it with less than one second of time, Kapeesh. So I think this is going to be automated by Andrew very soon, is it? That was the right answer. He said that with less than one second of thought and we’ve actually used this line as a context setting question for a lot of our discussions and people sort of reflecting upon what they are doing today. Sets the tone in terms of what I’m doing today that can be automated, a bot can come in. It starts the thinking around future relevance. What is the value that I bring to the table? In that context, I thought this is a nice segue to the next section, the first question in that section. Given this, what we’ve spoken about in the last one minute, how should Coursera be thinking about its future relevance? Who or what would be disrupting Coursera? And how can Coursera be relevant in say 2025 or 2030? What’s your take on that?
00:28:36
Kapeesh: Yeah that’s a really good question. I think I wrote this one internal memo a few years ago where our team was talking a lot about what are the emerging trends on learning and what should we change based on that? I think that’s important to be aware of but it’s also important to think about what are the fundamental things that won’t change for the core needs that learners have and how can we actually continue to cater to those even better and better. I think for Coursera, the simplest thing to focus on is how can we help the three segments we talked about, enhancers, upskillers and reskillers, get even better and better career outcomes. Because that’s kind of the core audience looking for career outcomes in less time at lower cost and much better quality. So what does that mean? Lot of the focus in Coursera right now is on the two areas - reskillers, the people who are really being affected by the broad scheme of digital transformation and people on our online degree programmes. And in both of these areas, what Coursera is doing is really creating learning programmes at a price point and a quality which wasn’t really there before and partnering with top companies and universities for that. So continuing to excel at that is going to be key and I think addressing some of the aspects which are not presented moves and providing that balance in the flexibility and like you said, people who want to start right now, can start right now. Still giving them that community and cohort-experience. I think that’s really important so that people actually stick and complete and get jobs. The second one is with online degrees, I think degrees are still incredibly expensive and quality is all over the place. So figuring out the ways to use technology and community and smart ways to really bring down the cost and reinvent a degree so that it’s much more job and industry relevant. I think those are the two most important to continue to stay future relevant. I may no longer be working there but looking broadly, those two seem the most important things.
00:31:19
Harish: So when we talk about MOOC, one of the first terms that come to mind is course completion rates. So I had two questions here, are there any telltale signs that sort of help you predict who’s more likely to complete a MOOC? And given all the experiments that you have conducted around course completion, have there been any interesting insights that you’ve seen?
00:31:50
Kapeesh: A lot has been written in the press I think in the early days of MOOCs about course completion rates and that’s really not the right metric too think about, because the fundamental value proposition of a MOOC is you have access to learning and you can dabble, see if you like it. And if you like it then you can complete it. So it’s almost like saying what’s the completion rate of Wikipedia, and I mean who reads a complete Wikipedia article? So if you build on that, what are the telltale signs? I think engagement is the biggest predictor of completion so in the first few weeks people are usually testing the waters to see if something is right for them, but say if somebody makes it past the first module or the first week of module, that’s the best predictor if they are going to see around for the whole thing. Another one is if somebody is interested in earning the certificate, so if they are paying you for the assessment and certificates, that’s a pretty strong signal of career interest and intent and that’s a pretty strong predictor as well. These are both behavioural, I think that the data we can observe about everybody, I don’t have a great answer on any demographic factors or milestones being shared and so on, because it’s hard to observe on an online learning platform. So I don’t have any specific insight on that one.
00:33:26
Harish: Alright and in one of your articles or interviews, you spoke about good friction or bad friction, that was very interesting. Would you want to talk more about that?
00:33:40
Kapeesh: Yeah. I think the best way to talk about it is the example you were alluding to earlier about the programme you had which was cohort-based where people have wanted you to make it available all the time because we don’t want to wait. Making people not wait is removing friction and making people wait is friction, but in Coursera we experimented. The article that you are talking about, we experimented on different course formats, removing all friction. You don’t need to enroll, you don’t need to wait for a course to start, you can start learning right away. What we saw in those experiments was, yes you eliminate friction and you get a lot more people into your funnel, definitely you increase the number of people who start learning but the downside is that they retain at a much lower rate and complete it at an even lower rate. Yes we eliminated friction, but the friction we eliminated was good friction because on balance while some fewer percentage of people started, way more people engaged and benefited from the learning. So when you are building on these products, there’s going to be friction and the question is figuring out the balance, what’s the right amount to deliver value to your user. You go to Facebook, you add friends, there’s friction but it’s going to add a lot of value, your news feed is full or you sign up for something like Pinterest or Quora, there’s an onboarding slog, there’s friction but it helps the app give you a lot more value, so that’s good friction. So as a product manager or a product team, you need to constantly be tweaking or figuring out where that balance lies for your particular user group.
00:35:40
Harish: Right, so the next question that came to mind when you mentioned product manager, how did you train yourself to be a product manager? This was pre-Coursera back in Zynga days, so did you take up a course on Coursera?
00:35:56
Kapeesh: I think online learning was very nascent, there was no Coursera, Udemy back then. I didn’t even know about product management. Product management was the first job that I got straight out of grad school. But what I did when I was in school was, I was very interested in working in tech companies and took both courses that seemed relevant. I would go to various startups, offer to work for them for free to learn about how to build products. So in terms of courses, the two courses in school which really helped me, shaped my thinking around product management were, one was at Stanford Design School which is Design Thinking 101, it was the first class that I took and the first day of the first class in school, they asked me to go to a Japanese supermarket and redesign or reinvent Ramen noodles. That’s when I was really hooked and having come from Mechanical Engineering at College of Engineering, Pune. I was like what the hell is this, but that hooked me on to this design thinking path. And then a human-computer interaction course which I took in the computer science department which really talked about user experience design, software design. That was really foundational for me. But then I think production management is something that you learn by doing it and so working with a lot of the start ups was what really helped me learn about how to build products. When I learnt about Coursera, one of the cool things was that the human-computer interaction course that really kind of shaped my thinking and helped me become a PM was one of the most popular courses on Coursera. That did really attract me to the company which was something that was so transformational for me, making that available to everyone in the world for free. But that’s kind of my short answer for how I trained myself to be a PM. When people ask me this question, I definitely recommend taking that course and learning about a wide range of topics, learn a little bit about design, communication and leadership, consumer behaviour and psychology. But then I also ask people to just do it, try to work on side projects and tell yourself to think about building products.
00:38:37
Harish: Right. Any other books? Besides these courses, any specific books that you would recommend to people who are just starting out in product management?
00:38:52
Kapeesh: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think now there are a ton of really great books, blogs and resources on product management. The books that were really helpful for me were, the classic High Output Management by Andy Grove which I’m sure most people have heard of, it’s not about product management but it’s really helpful in terms of being in any sector of any knowledge work kind of role. The other resources that are really helpful these days are a couple of online blogs and newsletters. There’s this guy, Gibson Biddle, who used to work at Netflix, who has a very popular newsletter called Ask Gib, that I like a lot. Lenny Rachitsky, another former product manager from AirBnB has a very popular newsletter community. So these two are excellent resources. The book I have liked, it’s called Product Leadership which has examples from a lot of different product managers. So these are some of my favorite ones. Couple of others that I think are good for specific use cases, so a big part of the PM role at Coursera may be around value adding product markets and talking to learners and so on. There’s this book called Talking to Humans and Testing with Humans, by this guy named Giff Constable. Those are books that I give to a lot of PMs who join my team. Really short 1-2 hour reads and tell you about how to do your research and get useful insights.
00:40:45
Harish: We’ll leave a link to all of these resources in the show notes. I’m going to put you in the spot here, Kapeesh. So what do you know about product management that others don’t?
00:40:54
Kapeesh: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think when I look at all the product management advice that’s out there, a lot of it focuses on framework, product-market fit, ideation and all that. But in a great team, a lot of times as a product manager, you are not doing all of the work, you are really leading a team of engineers, designers, a lot of other functions and the team is really coming up with the answer. So I think the key to really successful product manager, is that they have the ability to actually facilitate the profession, lead the team and help the team with a problem and not necessarily be the one that’s solving the problem so, product management is lot more about the team leadership without the formal leadership authority than what most people think. The more I do product management, the more I have come to learn and appreciate that. I don’t think that’s as well understood as it ought to be, especially for PMs that are new or early in their career.
00:42:17
Harish: Right, so basically being insights and a variety of areas and I think human-centered interaction is something very important in getting your product management chops right.
00:42:32
Kapeesh: Yeah, absolutely.
00:42:34
Harish: So one more question, Kapeesh. What would you recommend for a product manager in terms of building the right kind of habits? You talked about the kind of books that you would give your team members. Using a platform like Coursera, is there a way people can build good habits from a product manager standpoint, both for themselves as well as for the team?
00:43:01
Kapeesh: Yeah, that’s a good question. So I think to keep learning you have to be extremely curious. I tend to be very curious and read widely. I don’t know how you cultivate curiosity but figuring out a way to be curious about the world around you is really important and cultivating that in your team. Using platforms like Coursera, one thing that’s been successful for me and I’ve seen others do it is have study/reading groups, so you pick a topic or a book or a course, you do it together as a team, and then you discuss it. That’s been a healthy way for a lot of teams I know, to create the habit of learning above and beyond just being super-motivated on your own. As a manager, creating a space for your team to actually do it during working hours, that definitely helps. That’s easier said than done in most companies. But it is the most effective way to cultivate those habits.
00:44:18
Harish: Right, yeah. We know all about that. We do some of that ourselves for some of our clients so we know how difficult it is but people having the right commitment have been able to manage that. So, one interesting thing that I saw, I was going through your Goodreads page and I think I just connected to it in the show notes as well. Just to give people an idea of the breadth of reading that you do, you’ve covered so many different themes and topics there and that brings me to the next quiz question that I have for you. So the origin of this somewhat unlikely meme is a Tumblr meme started by a second-year student at NYU Law school. Disappointed by a certain decision, the student created the meme inspired by a photo of this rapper called Biggie Smalls accompanied by a play of words on another nickname of his. So name the subject of this meme. This is a book that you have read, that’s why I picked this up. I don’t think this might have been covered in the book.
00:45:38
Kapeesh: I have no idea
00:45:40
Harish: Okay I’ll tell you the decision, the student was disappointed by a Supreme Court decision about voting rights.
00:45:49
Kapeesh: Oh, is this, the book I guess is the Notorious RBG
00:45:58
Harish: It is. The Notorious RBG was the subject of the meme and it comes from the Biggie Smalls’ other nickname which is BIG. So that’s where the RBG came from. So to become a great product manager, you’ve to also learn about history, politics, feminism, parenting, everything right?
00:46:25
Kapeesh: Well, I don’t know how much my reading helps with me as a PM but it’s something that I enjoy doing.
00:46:31
Harish: Nice. Coming to the next section. You’ve decided to take a sabbatical now. Talk us through this decision. What keeps you busy? Do you read more books these days?
00:46:48
Kapeesh: Yeah, so I’ve been at Coursera for the last 7 years and going all the way back, a while ago I watched this Ted talk by this designer Stefan Sagmeister and the name of the talk is ‘Power of Time off’ and he tells about how he is a designer, my wife and I who is also a designer really like his work. In the talk he talked about how every seven years he shifts out of his studio and takes a year off, and how it just lets him explore different ideas and creativity and so on. I’ve kind of been enamoured by the idea of taking time off ever since I watched that talk 10 years ago and that was when I was still in college. I tend to be the kind of person who gets really heads-down and focussed on something. So every time I thought about leaving Coursera and moving on, the thought of just interviewing and talking to three companies, picking one of those and then committing to it for 2-5 years didn’t really seem that attractive to me. That was really the big motivator for me to leave my job and take the time off. One of the most important decisions you can make is figuring out what it is that you are going to do. Here is where you can rally in, startups are all-consuming. You are just working extremely hard. I wanted to just decompress just a little bit before I get started on the next thing and also pursue a lot of interests which I’ve not had as much time for and explore different areas before I pick something to do to work on. That was my motivation. In terms of what keeps me busy. I think I’m reading a little bit more, not as much as I’d like to. I’m spending a lot of time with my daughter, I’m taking Courses on Coursera, learning to code and I’m just meeting a lot of people and networking and reconnecting with colleagues and friends and so on. Then also advising a couple of startups especially Coursera being one of the biggest education IPOs, there’s a lot of education or workforce development to different companies that I think I can help quite a bit. I’m trying to do that and it’s really fun.
00:49:42
Harish: Right. So a lot of people consider this at some point in time like you said, you considered this when you were in school. So what would your advice be to people, how should they think about taking a sabbatical? What should they watch out for? What should they aim for? You shouldn’t have an aim for a sabbatical but what should they watch out for?
00:50:07
Kapeesh: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I actually wrote a blog post about this as well. I think for people who are considering this and for me this was a very difficult decision. I agonised over this for a while. It’s definitely a luxury if you can sort of make it work. Financially you want to be secure before you do this otherwise you’ll just constantly be stressing about financial matters instead of just enjoying the sabbatical. What separates a sabbatical from a vacation is that there is some goal or intentionality behind it. And a lot of people who reached out to me and said I really want to do this as well, I’ve been thinking about this. A lot of them have an intention or goal in mind but a lot of them don’t, they’re like I’m not worried about what I’ll do. To me that’s an indication of you’re burnt out or you need a vacation as opposed to you needing an extended sabbatical. The biggest advice I would have is think of some loose goals to give a sense of direction to your time off. The other thing, I hold my network, people I know of who have done this before and got their advice. I think a couple of things are important, like having a structure, I’m figuring this out myself. It’s really important to have structure to your days, your weeks. Time just flies by. Even though it’s a time off, I try to keep a regular rhythm to the day, and have some goals everyday. Another one is, one of the best pieces of advice I received is to think about unique experiences with unique people, this is from the CEO of Coursera who took 2.5 or 3 years between his previous CEO role and Coursera. He was like your family, your wife and your kids, you are going to be hanging out with them all the time but when you have this extended time off, you should hang out with people you wouldn’t usually hang out with. Take a trip with aunts that you rarely see, with your grandparents or a friend that lives in a different city that you don’t get to meet. I thought that was really good advice. I’m trying to think about how to incorporate that in my own time off.
00:52:59
Harish: Or do podcasts interviews like these. Thanks Kapeesh, that was nice. That brings us to the end where I’m going to ask you for your hot takes on a few things. So I’m going to give you some things, terms, words, and I want your hot take on that. What do you think of the future relevance of Silicon Valley for startups?
00:53:28
Kapeesh: I think it’s going to be more and more relevant. Well, I think I’m seeing a lot of startups be distributed and a lot of startups will come from outside of Silicon Valley as well. But I don’t see the relevance going down by a lot in the long term. The concentration of talent is very unique.
00:53:58
Harish: What do you think is the future relevance of universities?
00:54:03
Kapeesh: I think universities are really resilient and as the world has changed over the last 100 years, they’ve really adapted. I think they will continue to adapt in remarkable ways. I think some universities will shut down and the ones that survive will change dramatically to be more career-oriented. They’ll adapt dramatically but universities as a mechanism for education are here to stay.
00:54:39
Harish: And The final one, what is the future relevance of books?
00:54:44
Kapeesh: I think personally, I love to read books and I want to say that books are probably the best way for people to continue learning and really develop expertise on topics. But with online learning, different types of courses and course formats, I think they will cease to be the best ways to learn. They’ll be relevant for the timeless topics but for a lot of the learning that needs to happen which is much more fast moving and technology will overtake books. They’ve already overtaken books and I’ll think it’ll continue to be the case.
00:55:38
Harish: Thanks a lot Kapeesh for giving me this talk into different worlds from product management to the role of MOOCs in future relevance, how you should learn and the kind of experiments you guys did and also sort of explain the type of persona of learners you would see at Coursera. And I’m sure there’ll be a few people who'll be tempted to take a sabbatical after listening to you here on this CTQ Smartcast as well. Thanks a lot for your time, Kapeesh.
00:56:14
Kapeesh: Absolutely, this was a pleasure Harish. Thank you for having me.