Learning from Other Product People: Priya Biswas on the Product Community of Practice at ATB Financial
Throughout 2022, I’ve been conducting interviews with people who lead and participate in product Communities of Practice (CoP).
I’m excited to share the next installment in my series, featuring Priya Biswas, Director of Product Management, Business Analysis and Organizational Change Management Practice at ATB Financial.
If you’d like to read the other posts in this series, check out our interview with Zainab Arilesere of ProductTank Lagos and Omnibiz Africa here, Teresa Torres about her Continuous Discovery Habits community here, Patrick Sauerwein of Deutsche Telekom here, and Jennifer Michelmann of XING here.
What does the term “Community of Practice” mean to you? And what does it look like in your company?
To me, a “Community of Practice” is a gathering of like-minded people that come together to share ideas, share learning, show strength and support, celebrate, acknowledge, welcome, and say goodbyes. As part of the Community of Practice we also adopted best practices for product training, frameworks and certifications.
One of the things I wanted to do with our CoP of over 250 members at ATB was not only to have the community for product managers but also for roles that enable and support product managers, such as product operations, experience design team members, and anyone in the company who is interested in learning and growing more in understanding product management.
I believe that the more team members from all parts of the organization understand the role of product, the better as an organization we can truly understand our customers, build better products, and meet the needs of our customers.
We have an internal three-month immersive learning program called the ATB Product Academy. It is designed to train internal team members from different parts of the organization—like client care, developers, or designers—who are interested in moving into product management. The community is a great place for the students as it creates a safe learning environment and also creates networking opportunities for them as they look into career changes into product management. We’ve already had 60 graduates from this program so far with a conversion rate of around 35% moving into Product Management roles.
We also partner and provide external Product Management training and certification opportunities for the Product Management community to further grow and support their careers in Product Management.
Could you talk a bit about the meetings, rituals, or anything you have on a regular basis?
We have a variety of things we offer.
Lunch and Learn sessions: We have monthly Lunch and Learn sessions ranging from lessons learned from product launches, product optimization, payment modernization, storytelling, strategic and competitive insights like open banking, etc. It’s a mix of internal and external presenters. We’ve had a large audience of 70+ members attending, so it’s a great place to speak about your product.
By using the full Google suite, we are able to provide seamless virtual sessions. If people go to the office, they can book a room and do a hybrid version of it too.101 sessions: As a financial institution, we have many different types of products and we wanted to give everyone the opportunity to learn more about all of our product portfolios. For example, a product manager who specializes in cards might not know very much about lending and vice versa.
The 101 sessions are monthly events on a particular topic like Service Design, Behavioral Design, Lending, Profit and Loss, etc. These sessions have been great for all our product teams to have that breadth of knowledge in various areas that they may not be working in right now. These sessions are all recorded and added to our Community resource library. We also use them for onboarding new team members as well as a reference material to promote cross-pollination of talent between different product portfolios.Product book clubs: We also have product book clubs that are smaller than the other events. Generally 10–12 folks join them. The last one was on Product Roadmap Relaunched. We did the usual book club format of reading and discussing different chapters.
Another activity that worked really well was building roadmaps with all the learnings at the end and sharing it with the cohort, just as one would with stakeholders. It was summer when we were putting this into practice, so someone built a roadmap for their garden landscaping and someone else built one for their wedding. It was interesting to see how the frameworks could be applied outside of work.
You mentioned earlier that you have a product management learning library for your community. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
We have so many chats, so many spaces where we share great articles and videos, but if you don’t see it at the time, you miss it. This library captures all these resources in one place. It’s your one-stop shop.
We use a Google Sheet document where I get a lot of questions from team members asking about product management. There’s a lot of material that defines what product management is and it also creates a funnel of awareness for future participants in the ATB Product Academy. There are also tabs for partners, newsletters, blog posts, etc. and each one collects all the resources in one place, including the recordings from our Lunch and Learns and 101 sessions.
I think the big takeaway is that you don’t have to have something complicated and fancy. You can just get started with the tools you already have.
Screenshot showing the Google Sheet
That’s a great lesson. You can always upgrade to a fancier tool in the future, but it’s so important not to let that hold you back from getting started. What's your approach to bringing fresh stimulus every once in a while?
We had a Google chat room for the CoP before the pandemic, but we definitely saw more engagement and discussions during the pandemic.
One of the positives out of the pandemic was that many conferences went online and were available without any travel budget required. We advertised these conferences in the chat for folks to sign up and on the day of the conference we would have an active chat going in the CoP discussing the various talks and key takeaways. We would even share our setup before the conference started, whether it was with our pets, a cup of coffee, notebooks etc. Product School has a DJ so we would share gifs of us dancing to the DJ. We want to have some fun—that’s the whole point of the community.
Even though we were not in the same room, we created a way to share our experiences and learnings.
We have also tried different things like “Fun Feature Friday” where we would share a video, article, and ask questions to the community for discussion of how we can apply the learnings at ATB.
We definitely like to bring in people from outside the company. This is more formal than our Lunch & Learns or 101 sessions. We have had great partnerships in the past, consulting with Melissa Perri, Denise Tiles, and the 280 Group.
I’d love to do more of this in the future and have more external resources, especially product practitioners to share what they’re doing and what’s worked for them. We can also share what’s worked for us. Why go through the same pain when we can learn from each other?
I am also the Director of Community for Product Calgary and would love to see more collaborations and connections moving forward between both the organizations.
Which aspect of the Community of Practice had the biggest impact on you personally?
I have always loved this African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” The Community of Practice has truly proven to me that we all can go so much further when we go together. Just like it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to uplift and mentor a new product manager.
We have alumni from our Product Academy come and present their new roles and their journeys and it’s created this self-sustaining system where you have the graduates coming back to share their experience with the next cohort of students. All these people are aspiring to have a career change and it’s so uplifting to see how we’ve all come together to support them. It’s not just about one person growing their career—it’s lifting up others and helping them grow their careers. It’s also giving them hope when they hear that it’s okay to get rejected and you might not get the first few jobs that you apply to. That really helps the next group say, “I can do this, too.”
I have been personally blown away with how much people give back to the community. Whether it is through mentoring, helping the Product Academy students to learn, grow, and make that next career change, or supporting each other as they mature in their product journey. We have truly built a sustainable system where we nurture and grow each other so we can all go far.
Is there a reward for participation? Why or why not?
We have an internal employee reward program that we use for presenters who come to present to the community or to the Product Academy.
Every time you give a shoutout, there’s a point system. Their leader sees it and they can boost their points, and the community can boost them too. And once they collect a certain number of points, they can use them to get gift cards and things like that.
But what I find valuable is not the points, but the shoutouts. It takes time to do these sessions, it takes time to come and share. People appreciate getting feedback.
There are no rewards for participating and engaging in the community. We believe you will engage in the discussion because you find or give value to the conversation.
What are the things you would like to see your community do more of? Any plans on how to improve it in the next year?
Following the pandemic and as restrictions have been lifted, I would love to see more in-person events, like attending conferences together or having in-person “watch parties” for product conferences. I am planning to put together a Product Hackathon, get more external speakers to come to ATB, and get the opportunity to share our learnings with the product community.
What advice would you give to someone who was thinking about starting a product CoP?
Just start the community with a few people. There is always a core set of people in a community that contribute, so make sure to nurture them and encourage them to interact with the community. Once you build the core, then the others will join and gain value from it.
Don’t fret or worry if you are not seeing the engagement from a post that you expected. People are busy and the community is there to serve them and not the other way round. Just because there is no visual engagement on a post does not mean that the post was not valuable to the community. Many times during a conversation someone will mention something I had posted in the chat that they read, implemented, shared, etc. even if they didn’t engage with it immediately in the channel.
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