Learning from Other Product People: Patrick Sauerwein on the Product Community of Practice at Deutsche Telekom

As part of my ongoing research into product Communities of Practice (CoP), I am continuing to interview people who organize and participate in these communities, both within their companies and in the larger external product community. 

In today’s post, you’ll hear from Patrick Sauerwein, a Technical Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom AG.

One thing that stands out to me from my conversation with Patrick is the way that each CoP at Deutsche Telekom has its own format and ritual. This is a radically different approach than what Jennifer Michelmann described at XING, where there’s a single CoP that organizes different formats and events for all members. If you’re curious to hear more about XING’s approach, you can find that interview here.

What does the term “Community of Practice” mean to you?

I like the Wikipedia definition: “A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly."

Basically coming together with colleagues who share the same passion to master and learn something in a specific discipline—it can be cross-functional or in a function like becoming a better product owner.

And what does it look like in your company?

I think it is similar, as we are in charge of shaping the CoP in the way it makes sense to all of us.

We have several different CoPs and the number of participants depends on the specific CoP—some of them have around 12 to 15 people, some have more, and some have fewer participants. For example, I participate in the CoP on data analytics and the one on product management in general (“Product and Friends”) and I run the CoP that focuses on product discovery.

Could you talk a bit about the meetings, rituals, or anything you have on a regular basis? 

It’s worth mentioning that we run CoPs on both the department level and program level. As my company is really big, we’ve found that to be the best way to collaborate and break silos. 

Every CoP has their own particular format: 

• The data analytics CoP meets once a month for an hour without a particular agenda. It’s an informal session where everybody is encouraged to ask questions or share learnings.

• The CoP I run on product discovery gathers once a month for one hour as well. We use the time to discuss learnings, share external material we consider helpful, and other things like this. This is a program-level CoP, so all of us are working together to solve similar user problems.

• The Product and Friends CoP, which is department-level, primarily uses the “Masterclass” format. These are curated sessions where one speaker does a talk or someone holds a mini workshop. In some cases it is a moderated discussion amongst CoP participants. The Masterclass is usually held twice a month for one hour and it’s open to everyone in the company to attend. There are around 100 potential participants and about 10–20 people show up every time. It’s a core group of people who are engaged and help keep the CoP active. 

These days everything is online—Zoom, WebEx, Slack groups, etc. Before COVID it was a bit different. We’d usually gather everyone in a room and sometimes bring in people from the outside.

Could you share more about the Masterclass?

It’s on a volunteer basis, so people can choose to join. There’s usually an expert on a specific topic who’s trying to share things to our bigger community. For example, I ran a session on product discovery because I’m very passionate about this topic. Everyone is encouraged to bring their specific problem and get advice or tips from other participants.

Is everyone required to join everything?

No, not at all. It’s encouraged but optional.

And for the meetings that are not required, what is the attendance like?

On the department level, about 15–20 people join regularly, but the overall number of people that could be joining is around 100 people, which means around 10% are actively taking part. This may be due to the time or the topics we are picking, I don’t know exactly. But as it is a small community and everybody knows each other, we are still getting a lot out of it and are happy to learn and exchange. 

If we talk about the program-level communities, it’s a little different. Maybe one-third or one-fourth of the people join those sessions.

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

I can only speak for my CoP here. Sometimes we do a pitch about the things we’re going to discuss in the next session, sometimes we share some insights when we believe we have something that’s worth sharing to a broader audience in advance. This might be some slides or a little presentation. We try to attract people by saying, “If you’d like to learn more or get more background, please join the session.”

Do you ever do anything to provide external stimulus, like bringing in people from outside your company?

Yes, the company organizes LEX (Learning from experts) sessions where everybody from the Telekom corporate universe is invited. That often means meeting colleagues from various subsidiary companies. John Cutler, for example, joined us as a keynote speaker in another format at the Agilista Barcamp for one of those sessions and it was lovely to hear him talking at Deutsche Telekom. These experiences inspired us to bring in external speakers on the department-level CoP now, too. So we’re going to have an onsite called “Product Chapter Summit” and a hybrid meeting in May and we will have some external speakers there. We like the idea of “stealing from the best” and that’s what we try to ignite by inviting both thought leaders like John and product practitioners from other big tech companies like Google, GitHub, Meta, Nvidia, Stanford University, MyManu, and Gartner.

And I personally love to attend Mind the Product events. This helped me to grow my network substantially and I got to know so many new people. 

I also try to get some people who are outside my company but based in my region. For example in Frankfurt there are plenty of folks who have industry-leading product organizations and are doing meetups and talks. It would be easy to set up an exchange with them.

Do you have any thoughts about being in an external CoP vs. an internal one?

In an internal community, you can talk about things you can’t talk about on the outside. As you usually share company lingo with your colleagues, it’s a bit easier to communicate and people are usually interested in the topics discussed and they’re very open and honest with their feedback or with sharing their learnings and challenges. That’s definitely a plus of an internal community. 

But in my observations, people are more engaged in an external community just because the topics are more diverse. And it’s more exciting to see that other companies are struggling with similar things.

I regularly join an external CoP hosted by Deutsche Bahn. It’s an agile roundtable called DBART. Observing how a company the size of Deutsche Bahn (with around 338,000 employees worldwide) is so dispersed but yet manages to bridge some of the gaps with a format like the roundtable is pretty interesting. Plus the fact that many people from other companies based in the EU or International are attending is so cool. 

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

• Learning and growing - This applies to the CoP I’m running and to those ones I’m attending. I like the outside perspective (of feeling like I can remove my “company goggles”), for example when participating in the Deutsche Bahn roundtable and talking to people with various backgrounds.Another aspect is the networking: this helps me get to know other people, learn about problems others are having, and discover creative ways they are solving these problems. 

• Working in a way successful companies work - I would like to move more in the direction of empowered teams and the benchmark of 10-20 experiments a week that Marty Cagan recommends is something I think we should strive for. This is why I’m running the discovery CoP. 

• Helping and contributing - I consider myself to be an “Active Co-Creator” and am happy if I can give something back to the community. And I like being a matchmaker and connecting people with similar problems and interests across the company or even across companies.

3 circles model developed by Michel Bachmann — as part of our learning journey with Erin Dixon and Sita Magnuson

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

To some extent. Participating in CoP activities or organizing CoP events is something that can be done in our working hours. And we are encouraged to use a certain percentage of our time on personal development and participating in a CoP could be one option.

Learning and growing personally is a reward in itself. I always learn something because I have to prepare sessions and I get to hear a different perspective. Plus colleagues give kudos to those actively organizing or sharing something.

What are the things you would like to see your community do more of?

In short: Higher engagement, even more sharing, and collaboration. As I started the product discovery CoP this year, I’d really love to see more people sharing their thoughts and their work, even being open and vulnerable in the group to learn and getting advice from others. I hope people will volunteer to share their learnings and have great conversations within the group.

Do you have a sense of what’s preventing people from participating more?

Time is a constraint for most people. The obligation to join several communities and the meetings that are associated with them is the biggest obstacle. And the workload is pretty high at the moment, so that doesn’t leave much time for personal development and learning.

This is why “Return on time invested” is an important KPI for our CoP meetings. If people gain good insights, they are more likely to join. Or if they hear something they can immediately apply to their day-to-day work, something that makes their work less stressful. And of course making it fun to learn something new makes them more likely to join.

Any specific plans on how to make it happen?

Maybe we could frame participating in the CoP more as one potential personal development activity. This is just not something people think and are aware of at the moment. Personal development is more seen as going to a training or conference.

We need to continue to work hard to prepare and facilitate CoP meetings. We need to try to find out the most interesting things people would like to learn so we can move the community forward in the interest of everyone. 

Communication-wise, we could focus more on asynchronous communication e.g. via Slack plus announcing meetings more often by sharing the content and topics with potential attendees that are not yet active members of your CoP.

And last but not least, opening our CoPs to wider audiences beyond Telekom. This might spice up some of the conversations and therefore attract more people.

Are there any final thoughts you’d like to share?

The aspect of “experimentation” when it comes to CoP rituals. I think the LEX format could be great to test if people are interested in certain topics. And if many people join a session (that could be anything from meditation to product discovery) you know there is a certain demand for knowledge sharing and learning. And you could spin up new CoPs from there.

How do I define Communities of Practice and why am I publishing these interviews? Learn more in this post. And check out my other interview with Jennifer Michelmann, Senior Product Manager at XING here.