Every goal and project you work on helps you learn new things. For example, how to effectively break down work to ship more incrementally, a new programming language the engineering team has tried, or more depth into your problem domain from customer feedback. In most cases, this tacit knowledge lives and leaves with you.
At Atlassian, here is how we define a learning:
Knowledge gained on a topic from your environment (customers, analytics, team processes, research, etc.) that is useful for relevant teams, both direct and external to the work.
Learnings should be curated, shareable, and evolve over time. That’s why you can always update an existing learning as your knowledge grows and understanding of it deepens.
When it comes to capturing a learning, ask yourself, “what do I wish I knew when I first started this project?”, and, “what would I tell someone else working in this space?”.
Capturing learnings
As a goal or a project owner or contributor, as you write your weekly update, you can reflect on what you learned during the week. You can also capture a learning at any time by going to a goal or a project you own or contribute to and switching to the Learnings tab.
Discovering learnings
Contributors and other teams are notified of new learnings in-app and by email. You can also search for learnings.
When you create a new goal or project and tag it based on topics it’s related to, Atlassian will recommend related learnings from similar projects also tagged with those topics.
Difference between a learning and a retrospective
Retrospectives may occur fortnightly or monthly and are tied to the team running them. Learnings tend to occur at any time as a goal or project progresses, and they are tied to the work, not the team.
While the audience for a retrospective is the direct team, learnings should be useful outside of the team. Therefore, a retrospective item summarizes what’s happened within the team, whereas a learning is an insight from the discussion that’s useful to other teams.
