Why It’s So Hard to Adopt New Skills (with Maxine Anderson, Co-Founder & CPO at Arist)

The Product Manager

Every product manager obsesses over leadership styles, onboarding flows, and GTM strategies—but what if the biggest differentiator of success comes down to something much simpler? Learning. In this episode, Hannah Clark sits down with Maxine Anderson, Co-Founder and CPO of Arist, a text-based learning platform that flips traditional corporate education on its head.

Maxine started her career in rural Oregon classrooms, where she saw firsthand how inaccessible and ineffective most learning environments were. That experience sparked the idea behind Arist: meeting people where they already are, through tools like SMS, Slack, and Teams. What follows is a candid conversation about why more content doesn’t equal more learning, the real barriers that keep employees from growing, and how AI is reshaping not just education—but how organizations function.

Resources from this episode:

• Subscribe to The CPO Club newsletter
• Connect with Maxine on LinkedIn
• Check out Arist

Chapters

1. Introduction to Learning's Impact (00:00:00)

2. Meet Maxine: From Teacher to Founder (00:07:53)

3. How Aarist Works: Text-Based Learning (00:15:27)

4. Less is More: The Two-Three Things Principle (00:17:16)

5. Barriers to Learning and Simplicity (00:20:00)

6. Measuring Behavior Change and Results (00:22:11)

7. AI's Role in Transforming Learning (00:22:54)