Learning from Other Product People: Jennifer Michelmann on the Product Community of Practice at XING

In a recent post, I defined the concept of “Communities of Practice” and explained that I’ll be focusing on this topic throughout 2022. Did you miss that post? You can find it here. One of the goals I outlined was to conduct interviews with product people who are currently involved with Communities of Practice to gather their firsthand accounts.

Today, I’m thrilled to share the first interview with Jennifer Michelmann, Senior Product Manager at XING. After my initial conversations with Jennifer, my blog editor, Melissa Suzuno, conducted this interview with Jennifer.  

What does the term “Community of Practice” mean to you? And what does it look like in your company?

Community for me is a place where people feel like they belong and they turn to when they need help in any form. On the other hand, it’s a place where people can contribute and help others. 

A Community of Practice is a community in a business context, when it comes to a craft or a role. People come together to learn about their work and to exchange with others who do the same job. 

Communities of Practice are especially interesting for product managers, because product managers can sometimes feel lonely on their teams. They’re often the only one while there are multiple developers and designers. It’s important to have a place where they feel safe enough to share their struggles and can learn new things. 

At XING we have around 140 product people and we have quite a vibrant Community of Practice. We’re still iterating and trying to make it work with COVID, which I think is the biggest challenge.

Could you talk a bit about the meetings, rituals, or anything you have on a regular basis? How do you try to promote interest and participation?

When I joined XING, there was a community, but we didn’t pay special attention or focus on it. We had the idea that we were doing quite a good job when it comes to product management, but nobody knew about it. 

We wanted to get a better understanding about what was going on and share with the outside world what people were working on. So we spent a lot of conscious effort on building up the community. Back then we developed a North Star for our product community—where we want to go, what we want to do. We also iterated on various formats, which I can tell you a bit more about now. 

Weekly Recurring Meetings

When I joined XING (around 9 years ago) we had a weekly release meeting where all the product managers came together and shared the status of the different projects they were working on. But at some point we felt it wasn’t scalable because there were more and more teams, and it was replaced by a Slack channel. 

We still have a meeting called “Product & Friends,” which we use to keep everybody on the same page. It’s taking place once a week with everybody who wants to join and share some highlights, like test results or the next big project.

The Product & Friends meeting worked really well in person, I believe it was partly driven by breakfast. People would go to get some franzbrötchen which is basically the northern German equivalent of cinnamon rolls. You just went there, you listened to a talk, and there would be time for everyone to chat and exchange ideas. You knew all the other product managers would be there, so if you had something to talk about, you would go there, sync up with them, and chat for 10 minutes or so. This is kind of tricky in a remote context and we’re still struggling with that. Those lucky encounters get more rare, so we’re trying to think about that and come up with some new formats.

Product Community Events

When we look at events that happen every quarter or so, we have Barcamps, Training Days, and our Product Academy. 

Barcamps are mainly driven by the community, so they are self-organized. People could join with a project idea or something they wanted to discuss and we had a full day at a coworking space or a hotel to talk about those topics. 

We also have Product Training Days. Those events usually have a common theme and a keynote to kick things off. Product managers or other people from the company (like researchers or analysts) share their knowledge with others and do small workshops. I remember one of them was about design sprints—it was a totally new thing back then and some people had read the book but nobody knew how to do it—so this product manager shared learnings about design sprints and how to make it work. 

And then there is a Product Academy which is used to onboard and teach our more junior product managers and fellows (which are basically product management trainees). It’s a week-long event and there are four segments: Understanding Our Users and the Market, Delivering Impact, Data & Analytics, and Engineering Basics. It’s a great way for more senior product managers from within the company to share their knowledge and gain teaching experience. The courses are always sought after and if there are free seats, other product managers can join. 

Did you have an online component, like Slack, before the pandemic?

Our product community goes way back and started before the days of Slack, when all the product managers were in the Hamburg office. But that has changed—now we’re in different places across Europe. 

When we introduced Slack (quite a while before the pandemic), we started a Product Community channel. This is used to share information and updates, anything you want to discuss, or to find the right point of contact. It’s not moderated. People can just put stuff in there. It’s not limited to product managers, there are also designers, customer care people, marketing people, and others. 

I already mentioned the releases channel, which we use instead of the weekly releases meeting. It has two templates to use: One for new releases (which product, which target group, runtime of a test, etc.) and one for bugs. It also helps all the other functions in the company to have a better overview of what has been released and what is going on at the company.

And of course there are a lot of other Slack channels for the various aspects and groups working on product things at XING. One for accessibility, one for strategic insights, and so on. 

There is also a self-organized product teardown meeting, and I believe this one started fully remote. Product managers use this meeting to “tear down” other products, so basically analyze other products, discuss the findings, and learn together. This is a relatively new format and it works really nicely in a remote setting since they just meet in a Zoom call, someone shares their screen, and they look at it together.

Do you use any other tactics to promote interest and participation?

For the product teardown meetings, it works nicely because people are really interested in that and it requires only one person to prepare something. For the weekly Product & Friends meeting, we had some times when it was tricky to get people involved. 

There is this feeling that you need to present something shiny because it’s in front of everyone and you don’t want to embarrass yourself, so it’s perceived as quite high stakes. We’re trying to lower that hurdle a bit and try to encourage quicker updates, but people still have this feeling that they need to prepare a whole slide deck and practice. That’s something we’re conscious of. 

We’re already thinking about some smaller formats like “Get to know your peers” where people just create a short video or come to this meeting and answer a couple of questions to get going. 

When participation was low, we also joined forces with our UX community, since they have a lot of things to share as well and there is a big overlap. So for now, we meet every two weeks with all the designers and product managers together and that seems to work well. 

We have to get good content to make people join the meeting. But when the participation rate declined, it didn’t make sense to share things there anymore. So what we’re trying to do now is increase the participation rate to make the leaders aware that this might be an important meeting, and if they’re there, their directs might be there as well. And also make people managers aware that they should encourage their directs to present in this meeting because it’s where important things are shared. It’s one way to create alignment and get early buy-in for your ideas. 

But of course, in the end it’s up to the product managers if they find this meeting useful or not and if they even want to contribute. We’re currently running a survey and that’s something that we learned—that people aren’t even aware of what they could share with the community, so that’s another hurdle we have to tackle somehow. 

Were there any other major takeaways you learned from the survey you conducted?

The biggest takeaway for me personally was the decline of the general feeling of community. I guess this is partly due to COVID and the remote work situation. We just don’t meet each other in the hallways anymore or have the chance to chat casually over lunch. And we have to find ways around this. People want exchange, but maybe not in this big meeting where you have the pressure to present yourself. 

Another interesting thing for me was that the timing or our Product & Friends meeting doesn’t suit people because they have standups at the same time. I was never worried about missing a standup—for me, the team could do it without me. But apparently it’s an issue for other product managers that they don’t want to leave their teams alone for that meeting. It was eye-opening for me because I didn’t see that as a problem. 

And then there was the issue of people not knowing what to share and being worried about presenting the obvious, which I also found interesting since this might be something that we can change. 

Do you ever bring in people from outside your company?

Yes, for our Training Days we have invited external speakers. And that’s something that actually got easier with COVID. Now, you can just have really cool speakers participate remotely from all over the world. We had Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked and David Bland who wrote Testing Business Ideas. It was really cool to listen to them and get their ideas and some external input. We really enjoyed those sessions and people from other departments in the company also joined because they were interested in those topics. 

And what was the format like for that?

It was mostly keynotes with a Q&A at the end or a workshop. 

Talking about getting external input: We also tried another format called “company exchanges.” We basically had a list of companies that we think are really cool or interesting. A group of us would reach out to them, meet them, and later present their findings to the community. Same with conferences. When people went to conferences, they would give a presentation of the key takeaways from the conference they attended afterwards and that sparked some nice discussions sometimes. 

Which aspect of the Community of Practice had the biggest impact on you personally?

We used to have offsites and I loved them. It was once a year and it was super nice to be together. Everyone from the product organization would go, stay at the same hotel for a few days, and it was sometimes coupled with those training days or workshops and some nice evening event somewhere. It’s something I remember quite fondly. 

We’d do some weird team exercises, like building a functioning float out of random things. One team had only balloons and some sticks, but they managed nonetheless! It was cool because you got to know your colleagues. I think it’s really important to build those personal connections, to learn who is doing what, and to not be afraid of talking to them. Those offsites were fantastic for building relationships and trust. The importance of trust in product management is so high, you need to know how others will react and have good working relationships. 

Is there a reward for participation in your Community of Practice? Why or why not?

That’s a tricky one for me to answer. When it comes to contributing to the meetings, what people get is visibility and alignment. I tell people to present their stuff early so they can get buy-in. It’s about informing others before everyone gets confused and that’s a form of reward in itself—early alignment by sharing. 

For people who help with organizing the community meetings, events and so on (like I do), it’s mostly driven by intrinsic motivation I guess. Those people believe that it’s important to have a good product community and that’s why they put in some effort. We do have a kudos system, but to be honest, that’s not used a lot.

We’re trying to send the message that it’s okay to spend some time participating in the Community of Practice as part of your regular work activities. We want people to know that even though it might feel like something “extra” or outside of their work responsibilities, they don’t have to do it in their free time.

In the survey, people said they wanted more topics, a broader range of topics, etc. But at the same time, they said they don’t have time to contribute. So there’s this mismatch of benefiting from the community on one side but on the other side not really finding time to contribute. 

What are the things you would like to see your community do more of? Any plans on how to improve it in 2022?

We have a community steering group that meets regularly to try to organize the community. I’d love to experiment a bit more and get a better grip on this remote situation since it’s been two years. We need to find better formats since this is the way forward—we won’t have everyone in the same office and people are more spread out. We used to be really Hamburg-centric, but we’ve bought some companies and we need to get the hang of this remote situation. 

I’m thinking about doing more and smaller meetings, so people can grab a coffee and join if they have time. Things might come out of spending time together without a goal or agenda. Something like “Coffee and Colleagues.” I’m not sure if it will work, but it’s worth a try. The serendipity thing is hard to recreate outside the actual office. I would also like to try out more around peer-to-peer exchange. We used to have this format where you talk through your product management challenges with some colleagues and get their advice, and maybe that’s something to give a shot. 

Is there anything not covered by these questions that you’d like to mention?

We’re a large company so we have a large internal product management community. There’s always somebody to talk to or get advice from. But I would be interested to hear from people who are the only product managers at their company. How are they finding a community to join outside their companies? There’s Slack groups like the one from Mind the Product, but those are huge and can be hard to navigate. I think it would be interesting to look into those online communities and social media platforms for people who don’t have a lot of product colleagues. 

Do you participate in a Community of Practice? If so, I’d love to hear from you! I’d be grateful if you could take a few minutes to participate in my survey, or if you’re interested in being interviewed, get in touch with me here.