SaltStack's core product was built on Salt, an advanced open-source automation framework. Salt is a robust tool that can deploy, configure, maintain, and secure large fleets of servers, operating systems, and applications. However, like many powerful DevOps tools, Salt requires a strong technical background in systems administration, making it difficult to understand without this expertise.

Not everyone at SaltStack had that expertise. Of course, engineers were able to easily onboard and use Salt, but employees with non-technical backgrounds often struggled to get up to speed. This was particularly problematic for new hires in non-technical customer-facing roles, who needed more knowledge of the product to unlock their full potential.

To address the challenges with onboarding new non-technical employees, I started the Salt Study Group, inspired by a similar group I had successfully led as a lecturer at Utah Valley University.

During the study group's first kickoff meeting, we established our meeting cadence and ground rules, emphasizing a supportive and shame-free learning environment. We opened every study session by encouraging everyone to ask questions and remember that not knowing something only meant you are “one of the lucky 10,000 learning something new for the first time.”

The Salt Study Group met weekly to identify key knowledge gaps and prioritize topics for collective learning. I organized targeted sessions to address these priorities, bringing in subject matter experts from within the company to speak on the featured topics. Each session was recorded and made accessible through our internal knowledge base, ensuring a valuable resource for ongoing learning and support.

The Salt Study Group was a resounding success and quickly became a favorite among employees. Over the year it ran, an impressive 25% of the company participated weekly. Key highlights included:

• The week that a sales engineer gave us his standard sales pitch for our product and we learned real-life stories of how various businesses had used Salt to solve some incredible problems.
• A month-long series where one of our developers taught us how to set up virtual machines to get hands-on experience working with Salt.
• The spontaneous formation of a book club to read and discuss Nadia Eghbal’s Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software.

The group not only achieved its primary goal of spreading knowledge throughout the company but also significantly enhanced overall product understanding among employees. More importantly, it fostered lasting connections and collaborations, enduring well beyond the group’s conclusion following SaltStack’s acquisition by VMware in 2020.