The Commons Digest (09/27/2021)

The COmmons Insider Newsletter

Welcome to the first issue of The Commons Digest!

We’ll be sending these updates to our amazing community-members every other week. We’ll use these as an opportunity to round up community news, highlight content that’s relevant to all of us and generally level up our collective knowledge and skill sets.

You can expect things like:

  • Highlights of the various wins our Skillfulers are racking up, both in the community and beyond;
  • Round-ups of Slack threads (e.g. in #great-reads), AMAs, fireside chats and more;
  • Outside content that’s relevant to the learning journeys in our community;
  • Upcoming events and other happenings at The Commons; and
  • Candid, behind the scenes updates on what The Commons team is building, and how we’re doing it.

In true fashion for us at The Commons, this issue is the first of many iterations (quick wins, anyone?). So if you have any thoughts, questions or feedback, let us know! And if there’s anything you’d like to share with the community at large, let us know - we’ll almost always be happy to include it in here.

Scroll down to learn more!

Insights we’re pondering 💭

Building a career path at the early stages of startupland can be daunting. Particularly if you’re coming from a larger organization.

Pete, ex Airtable Growth PM and current BizOps at WorkOS recently articulated an easy process to make it easier on yourself. His two pieces of advice:

  1. Focus on sectors that might be interesting to you; then
  2. Build a pipeline of companies based on these sectors. 

Countless members of The Commons community have landed roles by using a similar process, so we can vouch for this. Read more from Pete here.

Bonus: Pete joined The Commons community for a fireside chat several weeks ago. We’ve just released a recording of this interview as an episode of Need to Know, our podcast. Listen to it here 🎙️

The Commons Spotlight 💡

We know that you want to get to know your fellow community membersbetter, so each issue we’ll highlight a mentor or mentee from our community. We’ll also ask them to tell us about their work, motivations and career aspirations.

This week we chatted with Julia Di Spirito, an alum of our Strategy + Operations program who is now a mentor at The Commons after pivoting from strategy consulting at Monitor Deloitte to BizOps at DoorDash 🎉 Check out her story here!

Reach out to Julia over Slack if you’d like to learn more about her and her career path.

The Commons wins 🥇

  • Lucas published a portfolio about his work with Project Juniper, from our Strategy + Operations program: read more here. P.S. Lucas built this using The Commons' Portfolio Builder
  • Skye (Juniper, Spring 21 Cohort) landed a role in BizOps at AtoB, a YC and General Catalyst-backed startup that is building Stripe for the trucking industry

Events @ The Commons 🗓️

We kicked off our 11th cohort of the Strategy + Operations program at The Commons! 50 amazing individuals from all over the world gathered together to learn, execute and make meaningful connections. 

We also hosted two events for the broader The Commons community:

  • Tuesday 08/24: A primer on Product Strategy, w Thiago and Eric (DM for recording)
  • To introduce the upcoming Product Strategy Sprint, mentors Eric and Thiago hosted a primer on Product. 60+ people from New Zealand to Miami learned what product is (and isn't) directly from two people who live & breathe it every day. 
  • If you're interested in joining the Product Strategy Sprint (September 17 → October 17) sign up here or DM Loren. Spots are limited and going quickly.  
  • Tuesday 08/24: F$@k Up Night
  • Fuck ups happen every day and to  everyone  - remember the beloved HBO Max intern?! Kris and James Prince led an informal chat by sharing some stories of their own, and opened the floor up to chat (and laugh) with the rest of The Commons fam 🍻

Job Opportunities 💼

  • Google is hiring several folks for Insights & Analytics on its retail team... this is the group that does custom forecasting and channel optimization for some of its largest retail ad customers. No strict background requirements but must be highly quantitative! Reach out to us if you’re interested in a referral
  • Vidyard is hiring across Strategic Partnerships and Marketing Analytics. Reach out to James Prince if you’re interested in any of these roles.
  • The Commons is hiring a Head of Growth 🚀 We've realized that the larger the size and scope of this community, the more valuable it becomes to everyone in it. Now we're looking for someone to help us put in place the strategies to deliver on this promise. Quickly. See #general in Slack for more details.

One (fun) last thing 🐶

We (virtually) met Brad’s pup. Brad joined Cohort 11 of Project Juniper, which hopefully means we’ll get to see more of this intrepid English Setter 🐕

That’s all for this issue ✌️ If you’d like to access more news and content before the next update, you can hop on over to Slack.

Interested in more?
The Commons Digest (03/09/2023)
The COmmons Insider Newsletter
The Commons Digest (03/09/2023)
The Commons Digest for 03/09/2023
The Commons Digest (03/01/2023)
The COmmons Insider Newsletter
The Commons Digest (03/01/2023)
The Commons Digest for 03/01/2023
The Commons Digest (02/22/2023)
The COmmons Insider Newsletter
The Commons Digest (02/22/2023)
The Commons Digest for 02/22/2023
Skillful is now The Commons.
We’re more than just skills training. We're the place where high achievers come to fulfill their career potential. We combine education, mentorship and community to empower the next generation of ambitious professionals to achieve their career goals.
The time to build the education institution of the future is now. And we're doing it.

Careers are catalyzed through skills-training, mentorship and a supportive network. At The Commons, we're delivering those critical career elements together through learning experiences that are social, mentorship-based and community-first.

Join to learn and stay for the community.