As an EdTech company, Knack strongly values education and peer learning. One of Knack’s key defined values is “Lifelong learning and curiosity.” In 2019, I started a practice within Knack’s Engineering called “Hot Topics” that I want to share more about. I wanted a way and to make intentional space within our growing engineering team to share new ideas, knowledge, build capability and learn from each other.

The result was a weekly practice of appointing a presenter to lead a session for the team on a topic of their choosing. That person brings a blog post, article, book, demo project or anything that caught their interest. The preference is for a technical topic though there’s freedom to expand beyond that to business, science or other topics that people think will resonate with the team. They then present about the topic and spark some conversation within the team about it. The intent has been that a presenter shouldn’t need to spend too long preparing a topic and that the presentation would be casual.

We have a rotation across the whole engineering team so a person presents every few months right now. We generally spend about 20-30 minutes in our weekly full team meeting. As a fully remote team, this has been a really enjoyable way to engage and socialize about diverse topics each week.

As mentioned, we’ve be doing this as a team now for nearly 5 years and have had a lot of interesting topics covered! We’ve had presentations on everything from Accessibility, React Native, Hamming Codes, personal finance, DNA, podcasts, SAML, native PHP apps, strategies for successful pull requests, lessons that apply to both novel writing and software development, Temporal, software development in non-English languages and more!

Public speaking, presenting and writing are all valuable skills in the workplace and all the more important in a remote company. Engineers aren’t typically characterized as people who enjoy doing some of these things. Hot Topics has been a great way to strengthen these skills and give people a platform to speak and present to the larger group.

We did have some challenges about a year ago with too little effort being expended preparing. We aligned as a team and decided that we either needed to lean into having Hot Topics or kill it. The whole team recognized the value of it but acknowledged that quality had decreased. We reinvigorated the practice by committing to each other to put more effort into preparing so that we get real value out of the time it is given each week for everyone involved. It has been very valuable since!

I would strongly encourage any team to try out a knowledge sharing practice like this!