Want to Launch or Mature Your Product Community of Practice? Start Here!
Are you interested in starting (or improving upon an existing) product Community of Practice (CoP)?
Before we start looking into my tips , let’s quickly recap the advantages of running this type of community.
What Does a CoP Help You With?
A CoP will help product people share best practices and ways to solve specific challenges. It will make it easier for product people to understand how your organization works and how to effectively work with others outside the product team.
For example, you might need to work with the legal team from time to time and someone who’s done this in the past can share their experience and advice. A CoP can filter and curate content so it’s most relevant for your company and context. It can serve as a source of truth for product culture—how does your company approach work and are there any specific frameworks, tools, or methodologies you tend to use? It can provide answers and direction on personal development, addressing that recurring question I get about how to know what to focus on to become a great product manager. It can also be incredibly useful when onboarding new team members or helping product people adjust to a new role. It can serve as a safe space for product team members to share their frustrations. And finally, it can be a catalyst for driving change. While individual team members might have ideas for how to improve your team topologies, collaboration with the user research team, or other processes, they’ll have much more success when they can unite with others.
By the way, if this topic is brand-new to you and you’d like to explore it in more depth, check out my post, Communities of Practice: What They Are, What They Do, And What I’m Hoping to Learn.
Sounds good, right? But how do you start a community? And how do you make sure it becomes a home for all the product people in your organization?
I’ve created a Community of Product Practice Canvas to help you with that. And I use it in my client workshops in a situation where there is no existing product community. This blog post will give you an idea of the topics you need to discuss and the steps to go through when starting from zero.But I’m sure it could be equally helpful if you want to re-energize your already existing network.
Step 1: Create the Minimal Viable Community
After talking to, interviewing, and surveying many product folks on the community topic, I can reveal one secret: There is no active, thriving community where there are no real personal connections in the form of micro-learning clusters.
Let me explain: n Communities rarely start as 30–50 people gatherings. They start small, usually with two to three people, all interested in learning more about a particular topic (something like: finding a new tool to do a job better, experimenting with new methods to give your thinking more structure, or trying a new storyline to rally the team behind a shared goal). These folks are sharing their progress and learnings. And that is usually it. The smallest possible community.
Once they went through their first few do/inspect/adapt cycles, they realized how helpful it was to share with others and they thought about inviting more people to learn and share more.
Communities that start like this and grow from these small micro-learning clusters are the ones that tend to be more active, generate more insights and value for their members, and re-energize themselves when needed. (People often consider themselves too busy for community work. But healthy communities bounce back once task-crunching mode is over. The artificially built ones tend to die after some time of inactivity).
The best thing you can do to start a community is focus on small, personal learning/sharing groups first. Give them the time they need to build rapport and trust and the time and space they need to learn and share in their own ways.
If you are a product lead or working in HR or product operations, you can ask them if they need something and if you can help. (They often need small things like a workshop room for half a day, a facilitator for a learning group retro, or budget to buy a bunch of books to run a book club). But don’t get too involved. Don’t be the driving force. People love their autonomy and deciding what they want to learn and sharing with colleagues is a great way to experience autonomy.
The goal of this first step is: ignite learning and sharing in small groups. And that’s it. Done. Now leave them alone and see where it takes them.
Starting a Community of Practice - Part 1: Ignite learning and sharing in small groups
Step 2: Give it some structure
If your product folks have found a way to share learnings, recommend great learning resources to each other, and learn together, you are already ahead of the game. Most companies I know have these super siloed PMs that “don’t have the time” to share how they are doing their work. The only thing they usually share are product updates like “what are we working on right now” or, slightly better “what are we testing right now,” or even better, “what have we learned this week, where have we minimized risk, where have we moved the needle on an outcome that we wanted to achieve.”
But what they are not doing is reflecting on a meta level about what has worked for them or which tools, methodologies, and frameworks made them successful. And which of these tools/frameworks/methodologies/ways of thinking/ways of working felt good for them, for the team, or even were fun to use.
So if small groups of product people in your organization have started to talk about their struggles, challenges, successes, and triumphs on this meta level, you are already doing great.
But how can you up your community game? How can you bring the benefits of shared learning to everyone in the product org? How do you get from the small personal learning groups to a more solid network of connections?
The challenge is to keep the small groups (don’t mess with them!) but add a ritual (meeting, training, or something similar) that allows everyone to engage. And this ritual has to add value for everyone involved. Otherwise participation will be low and the idea of a community dies before it starts.
Starting a Community of Practice - Part 2: Give it some structure and help build bridges
Here’s what I’ve seen working at several companies:
Ask folks what they would like to learn in the next three to four months. If there is a regular feedback loop (such as quarterly feedback sessions), it’s a good time to ask them right after that. If there is no such thing, you could encourage every product person to review their role description or to use something like my PMwheel to assess themselves and the Future Self to create a development plan.
Ask if they are up for sharing their learning goals with their peers. They are usually happy to. I recommend doing this in an in-person workshop, but you could use a digital whiteboard as well. Ask if they want you to facilitate or if someone else wants to be the MC. The goal for the session is to see if there are several people with similar challenges or learning goals or if there are topics everyone is interested in, like learning more about how to do OKRs the right way. This is often the case!
Once you have a few topics most people are interested in, go find a good format to tackle them. This might include:
Reading a book together and discussing it (AKA a book club)
Finding three good talks on a learning topic, watching them together, and discussing them
Attending a meetup together and bringing the insights back to the group
Several people share how they are approaching a similar topic
These are all good things to start with. Make these events a “one-off.” Don’t worry too much about setting them up as community rituals in the first place.
Once that is done, again: Step back, observe, let time go by and people do the things they wanted to do and learn the things they wanted to learn. And when I say “time,” I’m talking about several months. These product people have a job to do, so learning, reflection, and self-progression are by-products of what they do. And the learning should add value for them.
If (though this is rare) people are not taking any steps or initiating any sessions after you had that initial workshop, you have to ask yourself (or the product lead, or all product folks, depending on your company culture) if there is a systematic problem with time.
People need to invest a bit of their time in learning and reflecting to gain mastery and to become better product folks over time. So if none of that is happening, not even after you’ve engaged them to invest some time, there is a systemic issue. In that case, you have to revise workloads and make sure people know that the company wants them to learn and to invest some of their working time in that.
But if everything goes well, people are doing what they said they wanted to do in the workshop, and as soon as you see learning/sharing activities taking place, you might want to call your first product community retro.
I imagine you're already familiar with how to run a retro (I recommend looking at the retromat to help you find a good format), so I won’t dive into that right now. But I would like to give you a few tips on things you should focus on:
Like with every retro: You want to end the meeting with some activities the participants can start working on and maybe a few ones someone has to address to other stakeholders/leaders. Focus on the action!
Start the session by setting the stage. It needs to be clear to all participants that you as a group are reflecting on personal development, learning together and from each other, applying new skills, and furthering the craft of product management within the organization. You therefore have to make sure people understand that this session is not about product work and project updates. It’s not about the daily grind or about complaining about team staffing or tight roadmaps. If things like this are coming up you (or the facilitator) have to make sure that you are looking at the issue from a know-how/skill perspective. For example: “We are doing OKRs wrong in my part of the company” needs to become “We want to learn more about OKRs and how to use them in a beneficial way and we want to make sure to bring more people on this journey.” From here you can create an action plan.
If you don’t have much time to prepare, use the good old “Keep, Drop, Add” format to ask people what they would love to change.
Once the group starts to talk about activities/actions, you could give them four headlines to think about:
The purpose of our community
How our community defines success
The rituals we’re considering running
Our time investment (and management’s support on investing this time)
The goal of step 2 is to start creating a real community connecting all the product folks in the organization. You want to do this by helping them to get in touch and find meaningful things to learn together or from each other (the best format for this is a workshop). If successful, you end this phase with a retro discussing the benefits of the community, what has worked for the participants so far, and what they want to keep in the future. And you hopefully learned more about the community members’ success definition (When is the community a helpful entity for them? What makes a good “return on time invested” for them?), the purpose they think the community should have, and which community rituals they want to run.
Step 3: Formalize it and find community management allies
Most of the clients I have been working with have been one year into their community-building effort before they started to think about really formalizing the community’s work. Time investment so far has been low. There has been some meeting preparation here and there, maybe a bi-weekly or monthly community session plus the individual PMs sharing their learnings with a few colleagues in these micro-learning clusters. So what triggers further formalization of the community work?
The ideal trigger is: the community itself thinks it would be beneficial to spend more time together. This often is the result of one of the community retros where participants showed interest in doing more with the community, e.g. “We would love to organize a two-day product offsite to be able to spend some more time together and to bring in some external stimulus” or “Five of us would love to attend conference X because speaker Y will talk about topic Z and we want to bring some learnings home with us to share with our wider product community.”
This desire to do more usually raises questions like:
Who of us has the time and the bandwidth to organize such an offsite/trip/…?
Is there any budget that we can get to keep things going?
Are all of us allowed to pause work for a few days to focus on our personal growth and our growth as a product team?
If your product people are raising questions like this, it is more than a good sign for a healthy, curious community and you should offer help wherever you can.
As I’ve written in my book Strong Product People: “You (a person in a leadership role) have to make sure every person on your team is continuously learning and getting closer to mastery so that the work they do gets better over time, and they stay happy and motivated.” And if your team has built a community and is actively engaging, this is one less concern on your to-do list.
So you basically just need to get out of their way (again) and help them get the support and sponsorship they need to follow their passion. One thing that is left for you to do: Make sure their overall learning goals are in line with what the company needs. (If using OKRs is not at all on the agenda, it still might make sense for a few people to look into the framework to see if that could help in the future. But in that case you don’t want the community to spend a two day off-site focusing on that topic).
At some point, communities tend to grow to a size where it might make sense to allocate several people’s working hours towards community management. Let’s say your community has around40 members and they are meeting in 3–4 different rituals (small learning groups, the community monthly, a quarterly retro, and an annual off-site). Organizing all of that—and organizing it well—is a lot of work. So it makes sense to ask three or four people to form a community management team and allow them to invest five hours a week to deal with any community-related work (like preparing the sessions, organizing the offsite, and onboarding new community members).
Now you might ask, “But Petra, there are professional community managers out there, why are you not advising to hire one of them or why can’t our HR team do this task?” Great question! Thanks for asking.
It is my personal observation that communities run by PMs for PMs provide more value to their members since the ones taking care of a big chunk of community work are familiar with all the challenges this work can bring. And asking the individual contributors to do the community management themselves is a great way to retain senior product people —doing more than the actual product development work makes them feel more valuable to their peers.
Once you have found these community allies, make sure they get the support they need to do this part of their job well. And if they get stuck at any time or if they just want to professionalize their community work a bit more, consider reaching out to me.
I run a “Product Community supercharged” Workshop Series in which we can assess the state of your community-nation and discuss things that can be improved to make sure the time folks spend in community activities is time well spent. We will have a look at my very detailed community canvas (which I’m just providing a high-level overview of here).
The main topics that we’ll cover in the workshop series are:
Purpose, Values & Success Definition
Finding Rituals & Rhythm
Incentives & Sponsoring
Roles, Channel & Plattform
Contents & Curation
Each one of these buckets will be discussed in detail. I will bring more than 80 guiding questions and loads of examples of how other companies have been setting up their communities, what rituals are working for them, and how they are dealing with content curation.
At the end of the series, your community management allies will have a long list of activities they could try to make sure the community is a home for every PM—a place where they can learn together, share what they learned, and further the product management craft as a whole.
Whether you decide to get some external help or decide to work on it with the people you already have, make sure they are covering the buckets of the canvas over time. It will help your community to thrive, your product people to evolve, and the company to deliver better products over time.
I know I’ve covered a lot of material here. Don’t get overwhelmed. Start small. Get going and the rest will follow.
A Screenshot of the Community Canvas I use in my workshops
A handy summary of this post
This is your cheat sheet if you want to come back to this post but don’t want to read all of it again. So if you want to start a product community to encourage learning and personal growth, here’s your three-step-plan:
Step 1: Inspire personal learning groups
Goal: People start to share what they are learning or start learning together
Your work: encouraging people to share in small two to three person groups, thinking about who could be great matches in sharing.
Company investment: granting people the time to reflect, share, experiment, learn.
Benefits: People understand that the company values that they are getting better in what they do → Effect on their intrinsic motivation by gaining mastery. And if people are getting better, the products are ultimately getting better as well.
Step 2: Give it some structure and help building bridges
Goal: Connecting the small learning groups to a bigger community network. Allow more people to share and care.
Your work: Running the first community workshop (help them find learning topics and get started learning together). And, a few months later, running a community retro to discuss topics like “The purpose of our community” and “What do we expect in return from the time we spend together?”
Company investment: Still just a bit of time. Time to reflect on community work and time to do the actual learning/sharing.
Benefits: A community on this level can easily become a competitive advantage when hiring new employees. And it helps retain every employee because they are constantly learning.
Step 3: Formalize it and find community management allies
Goal: Make sure community work is in line with company initiatives and goals and optimized so that every member gets a good return on time invested.
Your work: Find people that are willing to take on some of the “mature the community work” and encourage them to look into the Community’s Purpose, Values & Success Definition, Rituals & Rhythm, Incentives & Sponsoring, Roles, Channels & Plattform, and Contents & Curation
Company investment: A relevant share of a few people’s working hours → Community Management takes love and effort. So they need a weekly budget of working hours and you have to reduce their other workload. And usually some budget for off-sites, bringing in speakers, and traveling to conferences and meetups.
Benefits: The impact on employee motivation and employer branding efforts. And usually onboarding of product folks (no matter if they are new to the role or the company) gets way easier with the help of the community members.