Unlocking employee engagement and retention - Mindaugas Petrutis (Coho)
Mindaugas Petrutis - CEO of Coho
He is on a quest to build a collective approach to problem-solving, skill development, and personal growth through peer-learning.
The full transcript of the podcast can be found below for those who prefer reading rather than listening. The podcast is hosted by Frank Albert Coates.
The Guest
What fascinates me is; how do people build relationships and learn from each other when you bring a group of people together. If this is successful, it falls way beyond the kind of basic learning tools because you start tackling, truly tackling employee engagement and retention with something like this. And that unlocks very different budgets and speed as to which you can move within an organization.
Mindaugas Petrutis is the CEO of Coho, which is enabling companies to curate peer groups at scale. This came as a spin-off from On Deck, the global startup community for founders. For Mindaugas, his journey in community building began nearly a decade ago, creating spaces for meaningful interactions and learning while working at InVision and On Deck. Through his work in assembling nearly 400 peer-groups, he unearthed a key insight: true professional growth stems from a blend of challenge and support found in diverse, thoughtfully curated peer groups.
Now he's scaling this concept and the v1 will be out later this year. The goal is to democratise access to this rich learning model, ensuring professionals across all fields can tap into the power of peer interaction. This approach counters the prevalent issues of loneliness, disengagement, and retention in the modern workplace.
The view of the Garage
Peer learning is an integrated part of the social learning process when joining a company, however it is often done in an ad-hoc manner without formal structure.
For a company like Coho, the question is; how will this become a must-have solution for L&D/HR teams to invest in? Which means to be on the priorities list together with learning platforms, content authoring tools and perhaps even skills-based talent development tools. To get this started, a few things need to concur:
Leadership buy-in and culture shift
To fully appreciate the value of peer learning, there needs to be a top-down mandate to embed a continuous learning culture and less emphasis on formal authority & expertise. Leaders must advocate for the value of peer learning, not just as a supplement, but as a core component of the employee development strategy. How can leadership be encouraged to prioritize peer learning alongside traditional training tools and formats?Defining metrics that matter
Defining and measuring the impact of any learning program is critical. Traditional L&D metrics may not fully capture the benefits of improved teamwork, communication, and job satisfaction that peer learning fosters. New metrics might include employee engagement scores or direct feedback on peer interactions' effectiveness in solving real-world problems. What are KPIs that are impactful and actually measureable for such an initiative?Seamless platforms & tools integrations
Any new learning platform needs to integrate smoothly with existing LMS and talent development tools. Both to get data from existing systems and send it back to provide better learning & talent development opportunities. How can you leverage AI and machine learning to dynamically adjust learning groups based on emerging needs and feedback from existing systems?
Overall, as a first step Coho needs to clearly demonstrate how corporate (group) peer learning directly contributes to business outcomes, such as faster onboarding, higher employee retention and more rapid skill acquisition. With these proof points in-hand, it will be easier to start advocating and selling into L&D/HR and leadership in companies who can benefit from accelerating their social learning.
What do you think is needed for peer learning to be successful in companies? Feel free to comment 🗣️
Coho company profile
Segment: Corporate learning
Business model: B2B
Geo: Global
Year started: 2022
Funding: Pre-seed
Location: (remote) Lisbon, Portugal
Transcript
FA: I wanted to dig more into the peer learning space, which I'm deeply fond of and worked on lots of projects in and around that. Interested to hear what Coho is bringing to the table. So if you want to start off with just with the short 30 second, elevator pitch for our audience.
MP: Sure. Peer learning. It's something I'm very passionate about. I could talk about it all day. We were born first as, as a community for kind of mid to senior level designers, engineers, data scientists, chiefs of staff.
And through that, one of the components we built was very curated peer-groups, and kind of landed on a unique insight that, hey, there's a much bigger opportunity here and many more people should benefit from peer learning. So now we're building actually a platform based on those insights and the unique system we've developed to essentially give that to a lot more people.
So, still early building our MVP, but I'm very excited to, to open up access of true peer groups to many more people.
FA: Yeah, tell us a bit more about sort of the start of the company. And, I'm also interested in, you know your learnings from On Deck, because I was on On Deck with the EdTech cohort and, you know, had really fantastic encounters with people from all across the globe. In the various formats that were proposed in and through On Deck. So yeah, tell me a bit about that and sort of the spin out and a bit more behind the scenes.
MP: Sure. I'll kind of maybe rewind a little bit, a few years before that. I've been building communities in some, shape or form for coming up to 10 years now.
And so through that experience, I've always just noticed these, these patterns. And what fascinates me is; how do people build relationships and learn from each other when you bring a group of people together in various settings. And so even a few years ago, kind of when I worked at a company called Invision, my role for a couple of years was hosting these curated dinners.
And even there, I started noticing now when I look back, elements of kind of knowledge, peer knowledge exchange. And, I very kind of clearly remember one dinner being curated, 20 people, 20 leaders. It was always, you know, leaders in design, we'd kind of arrive into a city.
And there was one dinner I remembered somebody shared some feedback afterwards where they said, uh, I just couldn't, didn't really enjoy the dinner. I couldn't engage in the conversation. And then when I looked back at everybody's roles and seniority levels, this person was a couple of steps behind everybody else in the room. And what became clear is that they felt like their challenges were different from everybody else in the room. And so they couldn't relate because their day to day was not the same as everybody else's.
And I remember very clearly thinking about that, okay, that's a good example of how you really need to focus to bring the right people into a small group setting. And that's when the true kind of peer learning knowledge exchange happens. And so I followed that path, you know, from hosting these dinners to then joining On Deck, maybe late 2020, where I built the design fellowship.
And again, through that, Peer learning was a big component or masterminds as we kind of used to call them there. And always just continue to keep an eye on, again, the same kind of thing. How do people learn the best? That's something that just fascinates me.
Coming up to two years will be two years in August. We separated from On Deck in a spin out process and became Coho. So we took on the same kind of approach and model. We just basically rebranded. We took design engineering and a couple of other fellowships with us and continued to build the same model. Where we are now is very different from that because last year was, I think, for a lot of companies was incredibly tricky.
And so that forced me to really dig deep and gave me the, I think, the opportunity to explore. Or continue exploring that idea, how do people learn the best? And I just landed on, on this idea that I talked about at the beginning that more people should benefit from these very curated peer groups. And so that's where we are now.
FA: And, say something about the size of the team and funding and sort of exactly where you're at right now and maybe some details on like launches and stuff.
MP: Sure. So, Going through a big transition. I had a team last year as we were building the community, but again there's no kind of beating around the bush here that last year was incredibly tricky.
Like, our model was direct to consumer, so direct to the employee. We added an additional challenge though, which is direct to the employee and then their boss. And you don't often have access to the boss. So in better times, that was fine. But I think last year because of all the layoffs and that that was our target audience, plus, you know, the SVB crisis. I really saw when I talked to, when I talked to, you know, people as well, it became very clear that there was quite a period of time for folks where what they cared about was, can I pay my rent and can I feed my kids?
So stuff like, community, especially, you know, community can be fluffy, depending on how you position it, became not even a nice to have, just like right down at the bottom of the list. Education budgets were being slashed in companies. You know, I talked to a bunch of folks where, um, they said, hey, I had a 2, 000 budget before. Now it's 500. And can you work with that? And so. That meant it impacted us as a, as a business, as a team. And so it's pretty much just me now working on the community, still maintaining the community, although not necessarily focused on, you know, driving new members, the communities there, we have about 850 members.
I've refocused our kind of offering for those. Peer groups are the core product if you will and we run them manually. And now I have a work with the designer and engineer to build the MVP. So in the next couple of months We're already building it. We'll be getting into into the hands of couple of pilot customers, but also testing it ourselves because we run the peer groups for our community too.
FA: Okay. Okay. Thank you for, for sharing that so transparently. Sure. And then I guess the, the, the leading question is, so a peer groups matching up people, what's, so what is your secret sauce? So how will you succeed, you know, in, in doing that differently to, you know, other companies or services, or even doing that internally in companies manually? Yeah. Like what's your edge here?
MP: So I think the edge is having been doing it full time for three years and running it manually. I think we've probably created about close to 400 groups at this point. And so there's a lot of data, a lot of learnings that you can look at and try to kind of reverse engineer back.
What are those core components that makes groups successful? So I think that is a massive edge here. Because it gives us a really good starting point to build the initial version. Right. And you know, when I call it the MVP, I should call it version one because the MVP is already running. It has been running for three years.
It's just been done manually. And so through that, what I've discovered is that without curating the right group of people, nothing else matters. And I've, you know, looked at, I've talked to a bunch of the, the previous participants, current participants of the groups to really understand how it all works.
And so curating the right group of people is number one. And I think we've developed a unique system nearly like I'm the human algorithm, if you will, for now on curating these, these groups. And it's based on a bunch of variables. I think it's easy to curate a group of peers, let's say six heads of design, six engineers, but we go way, way, way, way beyond that.
We pick out certain personality traits. So our kind of onboarding is pretty complex. We ask a bunch of things. How they behave in a group situation? What are their goals? What are their challenges? And also keeping it just in time. So just because somebody said a year ago in their onboarding form, hey, like this is what I'm dealing with right now.
It's not relevant. It's probably not relevant today. So finding ways how to continuously have that just in time data. And so taking all of that and then curating it down into a group of people is our edge and we've been doing it for, for some time. Plus there are a lot of kind of friction points that could make the group fall apart, like you and I talked about earlier this week.
And so finding and identifying those and with some clever design, removing that out of the group's task list or to do list also adds some real additional value to the group or kind of what may make the group fall apart versus not. And so knowing all of those components, applying some really great design, I think is going to be our edge in being able to pull this off.
FA: That makes sense. And when you talk about the markets and sort of the go to market strategy, corporations, as you say, they have lowered their budget etc in learning and development. How do you see the sort of entry plan and making sure that this is a must have for companies?
MP: A hundred percent. It's such a good question. And when, whenever anyone asks me about like, what is your biggest challenge in building this? I never talk about the product, the design or any of that. I think those things, I'm lucky to have really well mapped out because of having done this for so long. The number one challenge that I constantly think about, and actually this came from; I had reached out to the CEO of Remote.Com, Job. And he sent me back a loom about the product. And he was like, you know what? This is, this is really great. I can see this being really big. He says, the one thing I would love for you to think about is how does this become not a secondary need. Has to be like a primary need for a business.
Like Remote is payroll and all of those kinds of solutions. Without that, a business cannot function, right? So that's a primary fundamental need for a company. So that's what I think about. And so my strategy has been twofold in terms of the go to market, I'm very lucky to have, I think, a heads up of having the community, because if you think about it, I have 850, senior folks in design, engineering, and all of these different roles.
Who have used and benefited from our peer group approach. We haven't even started the go to market plan, but I've been through my feedback calls with some of those folks. They said, Oh, hey, you know what? I should introduce you to my HR director or learning and development manager. Oh, I know somebody at, that's how I ended up working with kind of, or building a relationship with Mars. Mars. com right now, is through one of those conversations. So when I need to activate that community, that's going to be one path. In terms of identifying how do we become a fundamental versus secondary need is having a lot of conversations with experienced leaders, with learning and development leaders, with HR leaders to understand where does something like this fall into their plans.
And what I'm starting to learn is that if this is successful, it falls way beyond the kind of basic learning tools because you start tackling, truly tackling employee engagement and retention with something like this. And that unlocks very different budgets and speed as to which you can move within an organization.
I know it's not going to be easy because we're starting with the largest of enterprises, but I think it has a real power in that retention and engagement piece. And so I don't know if that answers your question well, but that's the two ways I'm, I'm approaching this.
FA: Yeah, yeah, it does.
It's, it's definitely a part of you know, the bigger picture. A follow up question here is, you know, how do you see the service linking in then with the other tools and platforms that are used in, in companies? So from, from the, I would say the beginning of recruitment and onboarding to the LMS LXP systems or also maybe in the middle for some companies, some kind of talent management, skills, hopefully skills system. How do you see Coho sitting sort of within that sphere?
MP: Yeah, I think there's going to be some really interesting integrations that we'll be able to do here. So in talking to various leaders within large companies, they've all placed this at different stages of an employee's journey within a company.
So during onboarding, it can be extremely powerful in being able to give new employees a peer group. Right. I've talked to a couple of companies already where they immediately saw that they knew that that was a problem and they had no easy way to connect incoming employees with existing employees. And that's one way to do it.
And so, 100 percent I see some interesting integrations happening there. And then at the same time, this having run so many groups, you know that these folks are talking about, in real time, the things that they need, that they care about. And so being able to integrate with, say, learning management systems, you then can start building nearly a true recommendation system for the employee needs, right?
Instead of kind of saying like, here's a bunch of stuff that we think you should be learning, you'll be able to start recommending content and courses or whatever it is through that. So again, integrating with those systems, I think is going to be critical because in those conversations lives a lot of rich data that otherwise you're probably only getting from biannual surveys or, you know, that kind of stuff. So I see a massive opportunity here. Way beyond just the concept of, of the peer groups. It's what you're able to learn from implementing those and then how you then integrate with your existing systems to give a better, more personalized experience for your employees.
FA: And the other obvious question I have to ask is, what about AI? You know, how are you integrating or planning to integrate AI? Yeah, it's there. Some sense.
MP: It's, it's a hundred percent there in a couple of different ways. It's actually interesting that I'm building this now because a couple of years ago, this would have been very complex to build and it would have cost a fortune. I probably wouldn't even, I don't know if I would attempt it. But with the availability of certain tools right now, it makes it easier to build.
So yes, of course we're, we're using it. I think one of the ways we're using it is, by building in kind of an AI facilitator for the groups. I don't know how much of that we will build for the MVP because it it's quite complex but for for a future version 100 percent. So again, I've gone through and kind of mapped out looked at the data from the last three years. And what I learned is that the facilitator we assume is critical for a group, but I actually learned the opposite and I've talked to some facilitators recently who when I first said that, of course their immediate fear was that oh, well, you're automating me out of a job. It's actually I'm doing the opposite. What I've learned is that certain nudges at certain points are actually more beneficial than having a facilitator or relying on a facilitator, right?
Having a facilitator for every group prevents any kind of scalability, and two, you're then really relying on that facilitator for the group. Some facilitators can be great, some not so great, they might leave the group midway, we've had that happen, and then the group falls apart. When I traced back all of the different interactions and steps that happen, actually what the group needs are very smart, just in time nudges, summaries of conversations, prep agendas based on previous conversations that they've had.
And so you can build that with AI now, right? We all have note takers in our conversations. It's the same kind of concept. It's then taking that information and constructing a conversation. Kind of like a reconstructing a facilitator type experience. However, what that allows us to build then is an expert facilitator marketplace that you can, let's just take as an example.
One you can introduce a bit more stickiness for the group. So some of the things we're thinking about is to give more motivation and intent for the group to attend their meetings is, hey, if most of you attend most of your meetings, you unlock an expert type feature, right? Where you can bring in the CEO of the company to meet with the group or invite an external facilitator, somebody who's well known for one session. And there you can build in a very clever flow where the facilitator is not wasting time. You know what the group is composed of, you know what they've been talking about for the duration. You can prep the facilitator automatically to arrive, have all of the context and just truly deliver value for, say, that hour.
So these are some of the things that we're thinking about in terms of AI. And of course, we need to build a curation algorithm, right? If I'm going to be selling this to large enterprises, I can't be the one, I can't be the human algorithm that curates all the groups because my goal is that we're, in a couple of years, curating tens of thousands of these groups.
FA: So moving over to some of the challenges and the future outlook. So you talked about, probably upcoming challenge around GTM. Do you have another sort of big challenge that you've been able to solve, since you started Coho and how did you solve it?
MP: Um, that's a great question. I think there's been numerous. I think for me, the biggest challenge was when I started realizing the, that I was sitting potentially on a very powerful concept that more people should be using amidst, you know, a very tricky year. I think the biggest challenge was to, to not lose sight of it. And really spend some time evaluating the legitimacy of the idea. What I mean by that is, when companies struggle, a new idea can feel like a saving grace. And so I think what often can happen, you just jump on it because you feel like it's going to save you. But sometimes it just, it just doesn't work because you never spent time to really evaluating the opportunity.
And so what we ended up doing is, reshift and focus, losing focus of the previous thing that you were doing, because sometimes it really is just grinding it out on your original thing, right? And something clicks maybe at some point, or it doesn't. So for me, the biggest challenge was to find brain space among all of the stress to really step away and look at this with as clear of a head as I could. So I think that was the, the biggest challenge amongst like any, you know, day to day things to.
Because also I don't come from, I never ran HR or L&D at a huge company. I've never worked in, in that role. And so I needed to take some time to get myself familiar with that world and understand, am I just kind of living in my own bubble? Or am I on to something here? And so those were some of the bigger challenges. One of the things I learned though through that is that as a founder, being naive on certain things is actually a superpower because you don't get tied down to kind of old ways of thinking. Somebody said this to me. She was a kind of an executive, people executive at, at Accenture and Apple for many years. And, uh, she said, no, no, no. She's like that having that naivety is, is good for you because you're not, you know, tied down to these old constructs. And, and because you could say, actually, this can't be done or this shouldn't be done, you know, that kind of thing. So those probably, that probably was like the biggest challenges.
Like, how to truly evaluate the opportunity amidst a lot of chaos and just burnout and stress and all of those kind of things. And make sure that you're taking a leap into something that means something and makes sense. I mean, it still might not work, right? But I'd rather know that before doing it.
And so I had to take some time to really look at all of those things.
FA: Okay, good, good advice to fellow founders. And when you look, look ahead, are there some specific things that are keeping you up at night?
MP: So I'm doing this with no funding right now. And so I tried a couple of different approaches. I'm not technical, like I can do, you know, I can, I have the design vision. I can lead the product vision. Of course, that's my job. And getting it, getting the MVP off the ground, I had a bunch of false starts.
I thought maybe I should raise some money, but then I decided not necessarily against it. I got some, some really great angels on board kind of quickly, which is helping us get things moving, but looking ahead, I think the biggest challenge is not over complicating the initial couple of versions. Is like just staying true to what I think should exist as the core mechanism of what it should do and not overbuild it.
Just get it into hands of people, get it, get it tested and, and go from there. So not losing sight of that focus and never lose sight of talking to customers. Those are the biggest challenges, I think.
I know this, it's like, it's built into me. I come, I live, I worked in hospitality for, for many years. So like that direct feedback loop, I'm really used to and I love. And so no matter how busy you get or whatever happens, if the business grows, just never lose insight of that is incredibly important and can be a challenge.
FA: And is there any other advice you would give to EdTech startups that are just getting off the ground?
MP: Talk to customers just all day, every day, every opportunity, like every, every opportunity. Honestly, it is the most important thing you can do. That's probably my biggest advice because I know not everybody thinks that way.
And so, building something without having talked to any kind of customers is, is wild. So don't do that. I went to, I remember when I got introduced to, to Mars, it was unexpected, right? And, and at first I was like, well, I, I don't know what, what I'm going to say to them. It's just a concept in my idea, but then I took it as an opportunity to put my thoughts down on what is this thing I think I'm going to build.
And so honestly, I walked into that meeting with a, I think it was like a Notion doc and five very badly designed Figma screens. But then very quickly I was able to validate that like, hey, on a surface level, they get what I'm trying to build here and there was some excitement. There was more excitement that there was confusion or questions and that then gave me like that agency and push to go and talk to more customers, potential customers.
And more than I went to my community members and I said, hey, like I'm, I want to get some feedback from people who have been part of these peer groups.
All I have is some really badly designed Figma screens and an ocean doc and a not super clarified, you know, idea of exactly how this is going to work. But again, then that just takes you to that next stage of validation. Talking to customers or potential customers, potential users, people who have maybe have been part of your idea or what you're building in some other ways, just talking to those folks all day, every day is the best thing you can do.
FA: And I actually have a bonus question around mentoring. Because you know, in many companies there are informal, unofficial, or formal mentoring programs as well, one to one. Which is sort of thinking of the scale from sort of casual, more casual peer learning to mentoring, and then on the other side, you have a coaching.
How do you see that space sort of towards the mentoring because you are effectively touching upon, you know things like that. How just your, your view on that. And you know, why, why not one to one mentoring?
MP: The way I see it is it's pretty much been figured out. It's just going to get better.
I hope that's my hope. And of course, one to one has a big place, so does coaching, but what I see as, I don't know if I would say like more powerful. It's just a different take or how, let me put it this way. Through, running or creating all of these groups over the past couple of years. I just noticed a pattern that that's how people progress the most professionally and personally over a continuous period of time.
And what I mean by that is one perspective is, is good, but five are even better.
And there's just a different dynamic and a richness of conversation when you have a small, really well put together group of people versus just kind of a one to one exchange. Often I think coaches and mentors maybe don't have the agency to, not necessarily to tell you what you do to do. They more ask the questions, right? To, to drive it. You often have, have the answers. So I think peer groups play, have a different, add a different layer and dynamic to this, which is you're able to hear five different perspectives of how somebody has done something like that exact situation that maybe you're faced with or you're dealing with.
So they're not necessarily telling you to do it in a certain way, but they're telling you how they did it. And I've honestly, when I became CEO of Coho, I very quickly realized that the challenges I have are not the same as anybody else that I know or in the company. And I said, you know what? I should use the thing that I'm building. I should use it for myself. And so I reached out to a few founders who were in similar stages and we kind of put together an impromptu peer group for ourselves. And very very quickly the things that were honestly keeping me up at night or I was in a ball of anxiety. I would just say it out loud in that group and somebody would be like, yep, um, I've dealt with this, you know, a few months ago. Here's how I did it. Here's what I did.
And then all of a sudden those problems don't seem so big or hairy or crazy. And so that is really really powerful when you have a few different perspectives and it immediately puts you at ease. So I think it gives a much, a very different layer to one to one mentoring or coaching. My belief is we should have access to all of those, you know, without having to spend thousands of dollars on all of those things.
FA: I love that. And you know, I completely agree with you that there's a span of multiple formats, multiple potentially tools and platforms as well that you need to use. But, the knowledge and skills, you know, they're all scattered across companies and one way to get it faster together to get people to learn faster from each other is to have a group. So yeah, I totally agree with that. Anything else you want to share?
MP: I'm looking for a couple of pilot folks to test out the MVP soon in the next couple of months. So if anyone listening is thinking about employee retention or has tried and failed peer groups. Also, happy to just jam on that. I actually presented in a couple of or kind of ran mini training, if you will, on the how we run, how we create peer groups.
So again, happy to share my learnings. There's, there's a lot of them, because one thing I've learned is a lot of companies have thought about implementing like the true concept of peer learning, but they either started and failed or got scared of the complexity. Because it is complex, right? Let's say you have, I don't know, tens of thousands of employees. How do you put them in groups of six? Without losing your mind or having to hire a team.
I talked to a former leadership, kind of she was a L&D for leadership at a huge company in the US. And they had realized that their Leadership team which was large enough could benefit for kind of a peer group concept. And they looked into how to try and implement it. And they gave up before even attempting it. Because of the sheer complexity of doing it. So, if anyone has thought about it, has tried, I'm so happy to jam. I could talk about this all day. And I have a bunch of different playbooks. And, you know, I can kind of help reduce the anxiety of trying to roll something like this out.
FA: Okay, so call out for anyone in L&D or anyone who is looking into peer learning groups, yeah. Yeah. With that, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to having you on the show and I can't wait for the MVP and find some groups I can test it with or be put in a, in a well curated group.
