Episode 90 | How Skillable Uses Technology to Fuel Hands-on Learning with Nate Barrett

Nate Barrett  00:03

We often say we should be solving problems and be focused on what are, what is the problem that we’re trying to solve, and not necessarily that we have solutions that are looking for problems. And so I think that oftentimes we have to look at AI as it is a solution to problems. But does it necessarily need to be the solution?

Voiceover  00:03

Welcome to the “Lead at the Top of Your Game” podcast, where we equip you to more effectively lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. Each week, we help you sharpen your leadership acumen by cracking open the playbooks of dynamic leaders who are doing big things in their professional endeavors. And now, your host, leadership tactics, and organizational development expert, Karan Ferrell-Rhodes.

Karan Rhodes  00:37

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone, and thanks for joining another episode designed to help you better lead at the top of your game. Now, as you know, for season three each month, we’re featuring leaders who have fascinating roles in a particular profession or industry, and today’s episode is part of our special series featuring chief technology officers and VP level leaders who lead expansive technology teams, and now enjoy the show. Hello, my superstars. This is Karan, and welcome to another episode of the Lead at the Top of Your Game podcast. We are super thrilled to have on today’s show. Nate Barrett, who is the Senior Vice President of Product at Skillable. And I know you probably heard of Skillable. They’re very famous, but they’re a company who is one of the premier developers of Training Management application software which is intended to empower organizations to accelerate technology learning through hands on experience and skill validation. Now Nate has is a huge has a huge executive role at Skillable, and he manages the product management, design and data teams. He brings a wealth of product leadership experience to Skillable, having LED products at companies such as Pluralsight, Kanopy and Instructure, I always want to call it infrastructure. It’s Instructure. What welcome to the podcast. Nate,

Nate Barrett  02:05

Thank you. It’s so nice to join you. Karan.

Karan Rhodes  02:08

Oh, we are just so honored to have you, and we are thrilled because, as you know, you’re part of our special feature featuring technology executives and still delving into some of the leadership challenges and things that you’re having to face, both now and as you think, into the future. But before we delve into all of that and the great things that skillable is doing, we’d love to learn a little bit about you. So for as much as you feel comfortable, would you mind giving us this a sneak peek into your life outside of work?

Nate Barrett  02:41

Yeah, absolutely. So I’m married and I have four children. So my children, two of them are adult. One just actually graduated from University of Utah and is headed to London for a fine arts degree. And so there are a lot of my hobby, but I love to be outdoors. I love to travel and I love great food.

Karan Rhodes  03:03

Okay, we’re sisters and brothers from other mothers. I love to do the same thing, and it sounds like you have an absolutely wonderful family. So congratulations on that.

Nate Barrett  03:13

Thank you.

Karan Rhodes  03:14

Well, let’s dive in. So I would love to have a start out by, can you give us the Cliff Notes version? And that tells you my age when I say cliff notes, but the Cliff Notes version of your journey starting out in the tech field to where you’ve risen now as recently joining Skillable.

Nate Barrett  03:32

Yeah, I my whole career has been really product management in technology and in a lot of various technologies from internet service providers, which also ages me as well ISP and and webpage hosting to telephony services to internet security to family history and genealogy to tax accounting. And really where I’ve, I’ve ended up, kind of finding a home in what we call ed tech, you know, in really advancing education in the technology space.

Karan Rhodes  04:07

And so can you tell us a little bit more about your actual role at skillable? What are you responsible for, for leading?

Nate Barrett  04:15

Yeah, so it’s skillable. My role really is helping guide the vision and strategy of where the product should go. And like many product leaders, it’s really understanding the market. It’s understanding our customers. It’s and really the thing that I love about product management is understanding people’s pain points and problems and being able to find creative solutions that are going to help solve those problems in a elegant way and so and that’s made up of, as you mentioned, product managers, product designers and data and we combine all of those things together, working with our partners in engineering. To to develop the product and put it out to market and get, hopefully, great feedback, but also learn from people’s feedback of what’s working and not working and and trying to improve it on a daily basis. Oh,

Karan Rhodes  05:14

That’s amazing. What is your primary target market? Are you mostly an enterprise level solution, or do you have offerings for different segments of the market?

Nate Barrett  05:23

Yeah, primarily enterprise, we do have some specific channels that we are we’re targeting. So one that I’d call out, for example, that is a customer is skill soft. So Skillsoft is, you know, an aggregator of a lot of learning and so some of these skills and learning aggregators, but also enterprise, sometimes we refer to it as enterprise internal, meaning enterprises that are trying to train and educate the employees within their organization, and then enterprise external, where organizations are trying to educate outside of their organization on the the software and products that they use. So any way that that people are trying to educate in particularly technology and or software based skills is, is our sweet spot Wonderful?

Karan Rhodes  06:13

So, you know, the question is coming Nate, how has Gen AI and other technologies really impacted the way you strategize and think about your products and solutions.

Nate Barrett  06:26

Yeah, it is. I knew it was coming. It’s at the heart of everything, really in technology today.

Karan Rhodes  06:31

Yeah, it is.

Nate Barrett  06:32

Ummm. In fact, I was just last week in Seattle at Microsoft build. And every talk, every presentation, mentioned, AI, you know, with Microsoft specific, specifically Co-pilot. But you know, if I had a blackout bingo card for every time they mentioned AI, I certainly would have won. And so it very much a part of everything that people are doing in technology and and that really hits home for us at scalable because at the end of the day, we’re all about educating and helping people build skills and validate skills in different areas. And this new, this really is a new skill set, prompt engineering, to Gen AI, to large language learning models, and everything that’s going on with AI is is impacting us both in in the fact of our customers are wanting to educate people and how to use it within their organization, as we mentioned, internally or externally, of what are they doing to to educate their customers on what they’re doing, to make AI a component or a part of what they’re doing. And then we have to look at it also from from a product standpoint, of what are we doing within skillable to leverage AI and so and we’ve already implemented some interesting things, even in our own products, where we’re using AI to do what we call instruction translations so on the instruction sets of how to do certain things, we’re using AI and and really even we have what we call templates to help get people started in authoring different content. And one of the key focuses, or maybe what I’d call domain areas, is AI. So it certainly is. It’s you know, I look at AI and say it’s probably the biggest thing to happen in technology since maybe the iPhone or kind of, you know, touch screen type enablement, and then maybe even back to the internet itself. I think it really is changing the landscape of technology.

Karan Rhodes  08:42

You know, it truly is, and I so agree. But this is the technology in its empathy has been around for quite some time. It’s just now been brought into the consciousness of the mainstream, a lot more, from my experience, because my listeners know this at the Microsoft a long time before I started the firm, and we were talking about it. Here I am that telling my age, but 15 years ago, maybe of the baby, you know, it’s starting out, but even I can imagine how quickly it got into the mainstream, and now it’s, you know, everybody’s trying to like you said, understand it and then see how that is going to impact their own businesses or the way they work. So how do you and your team keep up with the latest and greatest and at the enterprise level, they usually those type of customers demand a lot of customizations for what they are trying to implement. So as a tech leader or executives? How do you think about balancing keeping up with the technology and the knowledge of what is possible and then coaching and counseling your clients on how to move forward, whether it’s in baby steps or one big push? How do you think. About leading that effort?

Nate Barrett  10:01

Yeah, I love that question. And really, I think it’s, it’s a at the heart of product management, to me is, is, you know, we often say we should be solving problems and be focused on what are, what is the problem that we’re trying to solve, and not necessarily that we have solutions that are looking for problems. And so I think that oftentimes we have to look at AI as it is a solution to problems. But does it necessarily need to be the solution? And should we be trying to solve? You know, are we are looking at it from we have to have aI just because everyone’s doing it, or should we be looking out of like, what problems do we have within our organization, or whatever it is that we’re trying to do that it may be able to solve better, faster, more efficiently, and so that would be my biggest thing is, is really trying to align, what are the problems that we’re trying to solve, rather than Trying to find us a problem that AI can solve. Let’s look at things and, you know, for example, you know, back to your previous question, I think, just, just going back to, well, what are some, some creative ways. So the first thing that we did with skillable, with these was the AI translations. Well, that’s it. That’s a very simple problem that is kind of like, almost commetized Today, to be able to to put something into a Google Translate or something like and so it’s a very fast way to automate this problem. But I think there’s a lot of fear in people as well. There’s always this fear of change. And so I think we also have to to look at it from a standpoint of not being afraid of it, but trying to see how it might benefit. But through problem solving.

Karan Rhodes  11:44

That’s true. And you know, and people, and here’s my HR background, coming out, and psychology background, people have different readiness for change, as you know, yes, so you have to kind of think through helping those at every stage of change, from your early adopters to your laggards and everybody in between. So helping, bringing everybody along the way, is going to be very important, right?

Nate Barrett  12:09

Yeah,

Karan Rhodes  12:10

Yeah?

Nate Barrett  12:11

I think it’s very much a little bit of this a fixed mindset, growth mindset type, type thing. Of, you will have people that have a fixed mindset of, we’re happy to do it. This is going to take our jobs. This is, you know, it’s a problem. What’s going to happen with my data? And we can fear the technology, or we can have a more of a growth mindset of, what is the art of the possible? What can we actually achieve with it, and how can we innovate? But I think it’s striking that balance of not doing it just to do it, but let’s do it because it’s it’s actually making meaningful changes in our world, and again, solving specific problems

Karan Rhodes  12:52

Absolutely. So, Nate, what are you excited about at Skillable right now? What are your teams really excited and working on? Or that you can tell, because some of them might be super secret. But what’s going on good at Skillable right now?

Nate Barrett  13:07

Well, I think that what’s going really well is scalable has an incredible technology that really fuels the way we do hands on learning, and that’s at the core of what we do is, is people learn best by doing. That’s just a fact. And so this idea of being able to learn technology or or or different tech skills by doing is such a an incredible thing that skillful has been able to really bring forth. So you know, just to give a quick summary of some of these things. So you know, if you may be learning a new technology, it could be in software development. We allow you to to practice in a programming environment, in an IDE and code along with someone. Or you may be learning a cloud technology, or you might be learning data science, we put you in that actual environment, in real that real world. It’s not a simulation, it’s a real world environment, whether it’s putting you into AWS console and learning the services in AWS or or whatever that is. And so the the ability to actually learn by doing is really, really powerful. And so we’ve had that capability at scalable, which is a really hard problem to solve. And what I love about what we’re doing now at scalable is we’re really trying to simplify the way that be people are able to build this content, and so that they can actually create more content, that they can educate because technology is hap is changing so quickly, yeah, that to be able to create these, what we call labs, or these sandboxes for people to learn in, that technology can change so so rapidly that we need to make it very, very easy to be able to modify the learning, etc. So a lot of our focus is some. Finding that to make it very, very easy to to create this, this content, but I think more importantly, to the organizations and to individuals is, is we’re really focused on on Skilling and thus skillable, or we’re really focused on this concept of, how do we get people to skill up? Because skills are really the future. I think that we, we would all agree that the traditional routes of education are changing, especially in technology. And so people are interested in, not necessarily the degree you have, but what are the actual skills, tangible skills that you have, that you can come in and and from day one, do. And so our focus is is in what we call skill validation. So imagine the ability to be learning something. And so we have what we call guided labs, and then to move into a more, what we’d call a validated lab, where we’re actually giving you problems to solve, and we can validate that you’re actually doing those things. So think about it as an assessment by doing rather than assessment through multiple choice. But, but if you’re learning something and you really want to prove that someone can can code in a specific language or do whatever that technical task is, we can give you basically that, that validated proof that someone can do that, that thing, and that’s the magic

Karan Rhodes  16:27

That’s huge for companies

Nate Barrett  16:28

It’s huge, right?

Karan Rhodes  16:29

For them to have that mind to know that, you know, Karan Rhodes is truly skilled and can do that based on the valuations of me physically doing it, that is just amazing.

Nate Barrett  16:40

Yeah,

Karan Rhodes  16:41

It’s priceless. It’s absolutely priceless. Now, do you all help companies create the content, or you just provide the platform for them to do it themselves?

Nate Barrett  16:52

Yes, yes, and yes. So we are the platform. We are the platform for creating the content, and we have over 2000 labs that we have created in various technical domains that we can sell as a catalog, but really our focus is is allowing our customers to create their own content, or we can help them. So it’s either we have pre made catalog of content, we have the tools for you to create your own content, or we also have professional services where we can help build custom content for you. But really, I think the beauty of of the skillable platform is is really going from generic content to customized content. So again, the back to this theme of skills is, what if you wanted to someone might be learning Python, and but what if they wanted to know how to learn it, to use Python at Company X? Because Company X has this type of architecture and this type of skill set in Python that is very applicable to this company, that is not just generic. And so if you can build these, these labs in a custom format that actually meets the needs of your organization, imagine how, how quickly people are going to be creating value in your organization because they don’t have that onboarding time. It’s just so much faster. And that’s technical skills, but it could be learning other software or anything else, because you’re building that custom to the skills that are needed in your organization.

Karan Rhodes  18:30

Absolutely. Now I’m curious about like your current role, because you have a lot on your plate. You oversee quite a bit, Nate, in the technology realm at scalable. So I’m just curious, as a senior leader, how you approach leading your team. You’re so gracious to share that you had, you know, you do focus on ensuring everybody’s aligned, that there’s accountability and autonomy a bit but, but I’d love to hear from you your philosophy on in leading, in your role?

Nate Barrett  19:04

yeah, well, you know that I call that the my, the three A’s, and really that is at the heart of what I believe in leading. When I think about alignment, I think about creating a clear vision. It’s a destination. It’s helping everyone to know, okay, this is where we’re going. This is, this is the end result that we’re looking for. And sometimes I say this is what great looks like, or this is what the end result is that we’re trying to achieve and and so sharing, creating that shared vision, is so key to both people aligning so that they’re going in the same direction. But it’s also important that they become excited and passionate about that vision, because people are so much more effective when they’re excited and they’re bought into this vision. And so to me, that is so much about alignment. It’s about transparency, it’s about really great communication. Yeah, and it works both ways, right? It’s leading by communicating to those that I lead, but also to my team member members, communicating in return. And I think that really leads into the accountability is, if you know what you’re is expected of you and your and that’s been communicated, and you know what the vision is, you know what the strategy is, then you can be accountable to the certain outcomes that you’ve been hired to drive. And that gives you, again, these guide posts along the way of this vision of I’m accountable to reach this type of outcome, and if you’re not doing it, then we can have, you know, conversations that will help me understand the context of why it’s not working, you know, or do you not have the right tools, do not right, have the right information, whatever that is. And that ultimately leads to that, that autonomy, because no one wants to work in an environment where they feel like someone is looking over their shoulder. But they also don’t want to work in an environment where they’re told how to do their jobs. If I can create a vision that people are aligned to, if I can create the outcomes that we’re trying to drive, however they do their job, to drive those outcomes and achieve that vision, really should be up to them. And that’s where I think innovation actually starts to also come into play, is there’s not one way to do things, and that’s where I think leadership becomes so interesting, is to really identify different skill sets and talents and traits and people that can bring I often reference a children’s book called stone soup of this concept of the community of people Coming, bringing these different ingredients and all contributing to the greater outcome that can come from this. And I think all of those really come from those three A’s.

Karan Rhodes  21:48

And you know what I love about your three A’s, your alignment, accountability and autonomy when they all work together, nice, when they all work together, it gives permission for your team to, like you said, innovate and bring new eyes ideas to the table, find ways for continuous process and improvements, and it just opens up a new world of what’s possible when those are in place and when they’re not in place, They can be the biggest derailers of a high functioning thing, right?

Nate Barrett  22:24

Yeah, and the heart of it is, what I would say is psychological safety is, how do we create this, this, this environment where people feel safe to come to work and do their best work, yeah? But that doesn’t mean it’s all rainbows and unicorns. I think one lesson that I learned very early in kind of my time striving to lead, is this concept of feedback is so important, of finding the right opportunities to give people you lead feedback, and it’s important that people are receiving praise for the good things that are happening. And you know, I probably heard this term praise in public and criticize in private. Yes, and this is so important to find opportunities to give people feedback, to know where they stand. And again, that’s that’s alignment, is giving that feedback of this is what you’re doing well, and this is where I need to see improvement, or the outcomes aren’t being met, or whatever that is. And so those small course corrections along that journey again is so key, so that people aren’t deviating too far off course, right? And so I really, I believe strongly in a like a regular one on one, to be able to be syncing up people. And, you know, just checking in. How are you doing on a personal level? Because we never have the context of how people’s lives are impacting their work. But then, how are we doing at work and getting that context as well?

Karan Rhodes  23:52

I love that. I love that. Well, one of the questions we love to ask our guest Nate is, as you know, we at SDL did significant research on some of the best practices of the world’s high performing leaders, and we came up with the top seven. There were hundreds, but the top seven that were applicable No matter your profession, job or industry, and wrote about our findings in the book, but you were so kind to share that leading with courageous agility really popped with you, and for my new listeners out there, leading with courageous agility is all about having the courage or the fortitude to take calculated risk and to stand up for what you believe in what you think and do the right thing, even when the future or consequences are unclear. It’s all about, you know, taking the best information you can, having the courage to step forward and propose it, and making bivvy steps forward instead of just not doing anything the curious minds want to know. Nate, why did courageous agility really pop for you?

Nate Barrett  24:58

Yeah, I think it pops because, well, I want to break that, that those two words apart courage and agility. And, you know, Courage pops for me because courage is, is taking risks. It’s acting when there is a level of uncertainty. It’s, it’s standing up for like you say, to doing maybe what is unpopular and going against the flow, and that is a hard thing to do, is a really hard thing to do, and but that’s where, again, I’ll come back to this. The three A’s is, if you can create a psychologically safe place for people to thrive, that courage becomes easier and easier to push back, to ask questions, to maybe question the status quo. And then agility, I think I love because in software development that this concept of agility is so key, right in developing product, it’s all about making small, incremental steps and learning all along the way. And so it’s these small little pivots all along the way. And so that combination of things really speaks to me of having the courage to do what you think is right. And you know, for in product management. That is, we sit at the intersection of so many parts of the business where we’re working so so closely with with our partners in cells and customer success in B to B businesses, and with finance and legal and engineering and all these different people and and everyone has certain needs and demands on the product, whether they’re regulatory or governmental issues or closing this deal, or whatever that is, and that it takes courage to say no, and a lot of product management successes, is the Art of saying no, and you’re able to courageously stand up and say, I hear what you’re saying, I understand what you’re saying, and truly understanding and taking the time to understand, but also to take the have the courage to say, but this was the vision, this was our strategy, and we have to hold true to this. But then that agility is learning incrementally all along the way. And so, yeah, I just think breaking that down, it makes so much logical sense. But I also think that touching a little bit on some of the things that we talked about earlier is it’s not having a scarcity mindset. It’s really having a growth mindset of what is possible, yeah, and being able to take risks, and that’s that is at the core of leadership, is being, you know, being vulnerable enough to say I made a mistake, or I failed, or I but it’s also important to say, but this is what I learned, and this is really, this is how we’re going to address this, this issue, or how we’re gonna win the next time around.

Karan Rhodes  28:02

Absolutely, I’m just doing a Virtual High Five tee on that was just absolutely golden. Well, Nate, unfortunately, that’s all the time that we have for today. But before I let you go, we’re gonna have all the information about you and skillable and the great things you all are doing in our show notes. But if you wouldn’t mind just giving voice to where people can find you or the company in case they want to learn more, that would be fantastic.

Nate Barrett  28:31

Yeah, we’re at skillable.com and reach out to, I mean, connect to us on our on our website. You can request a demo there, and would be more than happy to help your organization really understand what we’re doing to to help people validate skills and really kind of move this skilling motion forward in a hands on way. And so we’re at a lot of different trade shows and really providing the the hands on labs there. As I mentioned just last week at Microsoft build, we you’re providing all the hands on labs there. And so, yes, skillable.com.

Karan Rhodes  29:09

And what about in the future, might Ignite?

Nate Barrett  29:12

Yeah, Microsoft Ignite, we’re actually going to be sponsoring Microsoft Ignite in November. And so we’ll be there again. And so, yeah, reach out to us. We would love to talk to you about how you can educate your within your organization or outside your organization, and technology and doing it in hands on fashion.

Karan Rhodes  29:32

Fantastic. Well, thanks again, Nate for the gift of your time and all of the insight and knowledge and perspective that you brought to the podcast today. You’ve been an absolutely tremendous guest.

Nate Barrett  29:45

It’s been my pleasure. It’s so nice to finally meet you. I’ve watched a couple of the previous podcasts, and just love what you’re doing.

Karan Rhodes  29:53

Oh, thank you so much. It means a lot coming from you. Thank you, and thank you to listeners for the gift. Your time, because we know there’s a lot of podcasts that you could be listening to. We don’t take your listenership lightly, and we really appreciate your support for my new listeners. Please make sure to like and subscribe to the podcast, and please share with just one friend, because by working together, we’ll all be able to lead at the top of our game. Thank you so much, and see you next week. And that’s our show for today. Thank you for listening to the lead at the top of your game podcast, where we help you lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. You can check out the show notes, additional episodes, and bonus resources, and also submit guest recommendations on our website at leadyourgamepodcast.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn by searching for the name Karan Rhodes with Karan being spelled K a r a n. And if you like the show, the greatest gift you can give would be to subscribe and leave a rating on your podcast platform of choice. This podcast has been a production of Shockingly Different Leadership, a global consultancy which helps organizations execute their people, talent development, and organizational effectiveness initiatives on an on-demand, project, or contract basis. Huge thanks to our production and editing team for a job well done. Goodbye for now.