Helping People Grow Beyond Their Job Titles

In this episode of the Product Agility Podcast, host Ben Maynard shares a practical approach to helping people grow beyond their job titles—an approach that improves collaboration, accelerates delivery, and supports meaningful development without adding unnecessary bureaucracy. At the centre of the conversation is the concept of a “Market of Skills.”

Originally introduced by Lisa Adkins in Coaching Agile Teams, the Market of Skills encourages individuals to share the skills they have and the ones they want to develop, making capability visible and growth more intentional. While rooted in Agile, this method has proven valuable across departments—from product and design to leadership and operations.

Ben reflects on recent experiences facilitating this approach and offers guidance on how to bring it into your own team in a way that feels natural, human, and impactful.

Topics include:

• Why focusing on roles limits potential and skills-based thinking broadens it
• How to create space for peer-to-peer learning and reduce costly dependencies
• The benefits of visible, self-directed development over formal training platforms
• How to introduce a Market of Skills without overwhelming your teams
• What leaders can do to support learning cultures that actually support performance

Whether you're a CPO, Agile coach, product manager or people leader, this episode provides an actionable, people-first perspective on growing capability in modern product organisations.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Ben Maynard

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Product Agility Podcast

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Transcript

0:00

In yet another solo episode, I want to enlighten you to a concept that always has the potential to reshape how we develop talent, increase cross functional calibration, and deliver more value, faster and happier without burning people out or without creating additional bureaucracy. It flies in the face of knowledge management tools and platforms that people spend shit loads of money on. And I want to tell you a little bit about something called a market of skills, which you may think it's just an agilely team thing, but let me enlighten you as to maybe how it can be useful for you outside of agile teams. Welcome to the product Agility podcast, the missing link between agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. So as I mentioned, I want to, as Church GPT would say, shine a light on something for you. I want to delve deep. I don't want to do any of those things. I just want to talk to you about something which I've always found has the capacity to develop talent, increase collaboration, and as I said, deliver things faster and happier without burning people out, without adding layers of bureaucracy. And that concept is a market of skills. I was aware yesterday at a client running a market of skills workshop for the first time in a while and it really reinvigorated my passions for the human connection and true knowledge management that it can initiate. Now if you're a product manager, product leader, CPO, or even a product coach, wondering like this is just an agile thing, isn't it? Like surely this isn't for us. Stay tuned, I mean. If you ever really wondered how to grow and support others in your organization, then market of skills could be something that might tickle your fancy because it isn't just theory. It's a practical, lightweight approach to really unlocking the capability and improving how things flow across your products in within your products and within whatever organizational construct you're thinking from. I'm going to cover where the idea comes from and why it's so powerful. So also, let me give credit where credit is due. The concept of a market of skills isn't something that I created at all. It was introduced by Lisa Adkins and a brilliant book, Coaching Agile Teams. They're one of the early, really great agile books. And in it, Lisa describes a way for teams to visualize and exchange their capabilities like a currency, creating a dynamic, transparent, living picture of what people can do and where they want to grow. But here's the thing was Lisa framed it in the context of agile teams. You know, I've seen it flourish far beyond that. I've seen it in entire departments supporting cross functional initiatives. I've seen leadership teams be involved in it. I've seen managers be involved in it. I've seen dev OPS and operations people being involved in it. And there's no reason you couldn't extend out to marketing, commercial and finance to also be involved in these markets of skills because this is more, but just saying what we're good at, it's more than just sharing our skills. This is a way to really unlock real fantastic collaboration and build trust and engagement within any organization. So for me, the big shift that a lot of us need to get our heads around is that we're not talking about roles here. We're talking about skills. And let's face it, everyone loves their roles. Everyone loves a racy, so take that back. Not everyone loves a racy. But I'm still surprised at how in this year modern age, so many people I speak to still want to produce a racy. And I swear I've never seen a racy really have any benefit other than the process of writing it down. So we love races and we love roles. We like the roles because we put them on business cards. If you're an old fart like me, we put them on LinkedIn profiles or org charts. But roles are static. They're assumptions about what we should be doing, what someone else thinks that we should be doing. Maybe what we've kind of evolved, maybe what we did do at that time, at that time, but that's it. At that time, they're frozen. Skills never handle fluid. They should be fluid. They're dynamic. They're portable. We prioritise skills over roles. We stop defining people by their job titles and start unlocking their potential, seeing them as whole humans. We open up the doors to all kinds of extra collaboration, unexpected innovation. And that matters, especially for those of us that are involved in digital product creation. Because product success depends. And this is no surprise if you're an avid listener to the podcast. Product success depends upon how quickly we can learn, adapt, and how quickly we can do that via collaboration and cooperation. This isn't just a fluffy culture conversation, it's a performance conversation. So practically speaking, what is a market of skills? So if you break it down, a market of skills is a lightweight, transparent mechanism where individuals can share a handful of really simple things. Who they are, what motivates them, what are some of their characteristics, what makes them who they are? And then importantly, let's get to the get to the action here. What skills do they have which they're willing to sell to others? And what skills do they have that they've been looking to buy from others? And by doing this, you can extend it if you want, but it's cool. That's it. By doing this, we're making a very clear line of a sand saying I'm a human, I have these skills, but I'm not perfect. I want to learn these skills. And here's how you can relate to me as a human, because this is where this is what motivates me. Maybe you see some of yourself in me. And I think that's really like really, really impactful now some may say. That when you're putting these lovely little market stools together, that you can do it in my row, you can do it in another electronic tool. I think you know what? Fuck that. Initially, what we need to be doing is doing it in a physical space. We want stuff on the walls. There's nothing better than what I witnessed yesterday when there is a group of fantastically engaged people going around reviewing 30 other of their colleagues market stalls, being surprised about what motivates them, being amazed at what they knew they they would never open about being dumbfounded, but there was something that that person could learn from them. The the talk, the hubbub, the atmosphere was brilliant. And you just aren't going to get that in the same way if you do it electronically. They're not discounting saying no, never do it in my row. I probably will do it in my row in a few weeks time. I'm I'm accepting of that, but I would much prefer to do it in person. So what matters in all of us to visibility is energy and what brings it to life, right? What we do, and this is perhaps something that I've evolved a little bit on from the standard market skills approach, is that we like to have a slip system. So we make it really easy for people to be clear in a written form what it is. I'd like to learn who they'd like to learn from and where they are at the moment. We get people to put the where they are on a scale of one to 10, so maybe we can ask them to reflect and see if the conversation upped it a little bit. We like to have the data because we can begin to understand, you know, if everybody wants to go ahead and learn quantum mechanics or how to build a flux capacitor or something like that, then we know that actually only one person that can do that and that person's really busy. So we need to find a way to bolster our capacity, our capability in that way. So as leaders, as product leaders, as Cpos and Ctos, whatever it may be. And actually, this is a really awesome way to focus on our capability. Because the challenges that we're facing scaling our capability, enabling autonomy, reducing dependencies in a shipping valuable products faster or hinge upon our people growing in the right direction. Because we can't keep on hiring more and more people, spending more and more money for less and less return. We need to be growing our people and in small organizations, you know, that's the very essence of it. We can't afford to hire more and more people. Very, very few organizations can really afford to keep on hiring and hiring and hiring. So let's make sure people are growing in the right direction. So if we connect the dots between the market skills and our strategic goals of speed, right, Teams mean that they can then cross skill, they compare, they can share knowledge, they can move faster, they can remove bottlenecks, they can wait less, they can hand over less, they can adapt more. I talk about adaptability. When people grow beyond their formal roles. You build bench strength, someone's gonna leave, someone else will step in. New opportunity. You got options like autonomy. A-Team see that they can act on their own learning needs. They have to then wait for decisions to be made about how they're going to learn. They can make smart decisions faster, relying on you to solve that. And that all comes from having them build those social connections, creating that trust, understanding the skills that are available within their peers. Yeah. Skills market drives personal growth. It makes it visible, makes it self-directed. And with all of this, you know, we don't want to waste money by hiring the wrong people and we don't want to waste money by losing great people. So let's make sure that we keep the good ones that we've got, right? Let's say to everyone, we believe in your growth. Let's give people the space and opportunities and tools to pursue it. You know, that's wrestle maybe some of us away from HR and say that this is our strategic capability system. It's my role in this organization to drive that strategic capability growth, or it's my organization to ensure that that happens because any coaches that are listening to this, your goal should be to increase the capability and by virtue of increasing the capability, increase the organization's performance. So, you know, it may or may not be a surprise that the biggest thing then that stands in the way for most organizations really performing is learning. And learning gets in the way when it's in formal and it's top down and people don't even forced to go to book clubs or forced to join communities when we've noticed a gap. And then we panic and we scramble to plug the gap by, yeah, pushing some training or hiring some people. We push people into courses with absolutely no context. We buy expensive learning platforms that no one ever logs into. We create more job descriptions that are already outdated the day they're published and don't talk to people really and motivate them to do any work. And the result of this is all quick fixes that fail for my systems thinking friends out there, it's silos deepened and nothing gets any easier. And market skills challenges that because it invites that collaboration, invites that transparency. And I am not saying here that it's a panacea. I'm not saying that you're going to have success with it unless you really change the culture in some way. But a market of skills is a really fascinating way to begin to evolve that culture. It draws a line of a sand, a leader, say, look, let's come together. Let's speak in the language of connection, all right? And instead of wondering who you go to for help, see our glance, see who's skilled and what, let's make those new little social contracts with each other so that we can create a natural system of learning and mentoring and distributed expertise. I think that the saddest thing for me is when people miss out on career growth opportunities. It's when people I'd know feel that things are pretty shitty in the organization and they don't get the opportunity to learn. Like not everybody, it's going to be in a position in their life where the organization that they're in is the organization that they will always be in. But what we can do as leaders is give everyone of the organization that deserves it. It's your call to decide who deserves it, Everyone that deserves it, the opportunity to grow, the opportunity to learn and build connections so that they can leave with a stronger CV, so they can leave a positive experience. Even when they do leave, they can look back and say, do you know what? It may have been this and it may have been that, but there was a leader there, there was a coach there. Like they really invested in me and they helped me take this next leap. And sometimes that's one of the most rewarding things that we can do as leaders and coaches. So how do we introduce this without creating a huge amount of noise and anguish? How do we bring it in without it making feel like just another bloody workshop? And my recommendation is start, start small, start local. Think of your next team get together right or the next retro, whatever it might be just per side an hour to say that visa skills, I have visa skills I want to learn and encourage everyone to add a few posters, give us some feedback, make those connections and see how people react. It's really interesting if you do it in this light, informal way and always take people by surprise. You'll be amazed at how quickly people want to talk to each other. Think yourself in that coaching stance and ask the question, how could your life be easier? What skills are missing? And if we begin to do this, if let's say we continue doing at this small, low level level and we zoom out, we can begin to do this across all the teams, across the whole organization and build a living map where you can take all this data and do it periodically. So we can keep on with this fantastic mine of interesting data about what people want to learn and what they can teach. And for me, that's really kind of future fit product thinking. So if you're going to be real about it, you're going to get some pushback. You may hear people say I would be too busy to learn and this sounds really fluffy and bullshitty. You know, we've done so many workshops before, we've already got performance reviews, we've already got this. And they say, I think I would always respond by saying, so what's slowing you down then I can guarantee that many delays are related to dependencies like a clarity missing skills and market skills begin to address those so. If you can ask me what's the biggest delivery risk, what's slowing you down, 9 times out of 10, it's going to be a people problem. It's that dependency. So if we can find ways to begin to resolve some of that in a fun, engaging way, then we're going to get people on board. What we're talking about here is making those dependencies and making those risks the solutions to those visible and intentional. So we don't need to buy them for the whole organization. We can start small, prove the value and that the results speak to themselves. So if I think of CP OS and heads of product that I have the pleasure of dealing with and to working with over the years, what I hear is that things grow fast and we struggle to scale capability. Some of the teams are really fantastically autonomous and others are really dependent upon various other people and say what we want is people to own their own development in this case, but no one's got the time. Too many teams are still working in silos, etcetera, etcetera. And then you know, that horrible thing that an agile coach will scrum masters will say. And no offense guys, I've been there. You know, we do T shaped people. Well, you know, guess what? Like you don't build T shaped people like we create the environments where they can do it themselves. And this is what a marketer skills can help to, to help out with, you know, the whole T shaped people thing. It sounds great on paper, but have you ever actually tried to be T shaped? Have you ever tried to, I don't know, really make it reality? Like you don't can't force people into it. If you've made it a success, it's because you've created the right environment for that success, not because you force people into it. It's because they're working on a great team where they really want to learn something from somebody and that person's willing to teach. That's what made it a success. So if we're going to get into the numbers of this, you know, who doesn't love a metric? There are some things that we can then begin to measure. If we run these markets and skills on over a time period, we can get their subjective appraisal of their skills and how they're growing. We can look at the number of blockers are being raised. We can try and manage the number of dependencies or people's sentiment towards dependencies. You know, we can do a whole range of very subjective and some objective measures to see is our increasing of skills and knowledge really making a difference. And I think that's where learning can get real. You knowledge is something that we can acquire and we can test. Skills is something that as you put that knowledge into a contextual situation and really put into practice, so of knowledge, we can test it. We can get people to fill out a survey or something like that. When it comes to skills, we need to think to ourselves, well, what are the leading and lagging measures for this? So I'm familiar of leading and lagging measures. Go and check out my previous week's episode. By going to depth from leading and lagging measures. And I think when we're talking about learning and things like marketing skills or any kind of big knowledge effort, I think they're really understanding is leading and lagging metrics and challenging ourselves is then we is what's going to make for difference. So how do you make this culturally normal? Let's think about the people. The market skills only works when things are psychologically safe, as you've probably picked up, and which means that people are not afraid to admit that they don't know. So leaders, I think this starts with you model it. Get involved, create your market store, post Jones slip, share your growth areas, pair of your teams. Make it OK to learn, make it OK to teach. Make it OK to fuck up and be wrong because the moment people feel like they have to pretend to know everything, growth stops. When growth stops, you suffer and products suffer. So the light in the mood a little bit. I think we always need to have to keep all this very human and fun, that knowledge management. Knowledge transfer works at its best when it's done at a real human level, when it's engaging. So any fun things that you can do to make it light, any music you can play in the background, anything we can begin to do when we're running the market skills or running any of these types of things just to keep it human, keep it insightful, keep it alive, gamify it. I think you can celebrate unexpected pairings. And one great thing that the guy I was running the workshop of yesterday, Chris, you know, he went off and got pictures of all the weird, quirky things that people make, whether it be guitars or little mini jumpers. It was insane. The things that people were capable of doing. We got those up and we celebrated those with the whole group. We made it really human. So what next? So your first steps of your sold in this idea and you wanna know where to start is to send me a message on LinkedIn. Engage me in the conversation. Don't be afraid, I'm more than happy to help. Share some ideas, share some pictures, share my facilitation guide. All you gotta do is contact me on LinkedIn and we will take it from there. You can Google it. There's a ton of great information out there in the market of skills, all of which is freely available, but also check out Lisa Adkins book Coaching Agile Teams. Like there's some great information in there. So final reflections and why this matters. Now we're living in a world where adaptability is the new new stability, you know, where actually moving and changing all the time is the new kind of staying still. Like the teams that win aren't the ones with the best tools or the most processes or the most insightful leaders. They're the ones that can learn faster and collaborate smarter and grow beyond their job descriptions. And what I'm saying here is, and I've really said market skills too many sky times, but this is the last time a market skills one of the simplest, most effective ways. I, I know you have to, I know you can figure out how to make that happen. So whatever the role that you're in, ask yourself personally now, what's that one skill that you want to buy and what would happen to you in your career if you were able to buy that from somebody that you respect? So you're a second invitation then is just to think about that and contact me on LinkedIn, right? Ask me a question, how to start small, how you can run some experiments, how you can, what do the slips look like? Is there a deck that I have? I can answer all of these questions. All you got to do is just hit me up on LinkedIn, say hi, and I'm more than happy to speak to you. So I will sign off. Thank you so much for listening. As you've probably guessed here, I'm Ben Maynard, and this is the Projectivity Podcast. We'll be back again next week.