Learning from Other Product People: Sarah Reeves on the Product Community of Practice at StepStone
2022 is almost over, but I have one final Community of Practice (CoP) interview to share with you! This one is a little different since I’ve been working with Sarah Reeves and StepStone to help build out and mature the product CoP. Be sure to check this interview out if you’re especially interested in the early stages of getting a CoP up and running.
And if you’d like to see all the other interviews in this series, so far we’ve spoken with Priya Biswas at ATB Financial, Zainab Arilesere at ProductTank Lagos and Omnibiz Africa, Teresa Torres on her Continuous Discovery Habits community, Patrick Sauerwein at Deutsche Telekom, and Jennifer Michelmann at XING.
Sarah, can you tell us a little about your role and the role of Product Operations in general at StepStone?
I work in Product Operations at StepStone and our mission is to support and enable product managers and product teams to deliver the product outcomes that matter by:
Ensuring they have access to the inputs they need
Working in a consistent, scalable, and efficient way
Supporting their personal development
Product Operations at StepStone was established in early 2021, and it was clear that we had a number of challenges to tackle:
Within a very short timeframe, we had brought together all our product, tech, and online marketing teams across our many global brands to become a large product organization across a number of cities, countries, and continents, with different ways of working and approaches to product management.
The pandemic hit and impacted the ways in which we could build relationships—on a day-to-day basis, as a PM, you were most likely to interact with your closest team members and a lot less likely to see anyone else from the extended teams.
We re-organized into a number of domains within portfolios, and portfolios within business lines, and started to see siloed ways of working.
We developed the first iteration of our global product competencies and there were a number of areas (e.g. discovery, OKRs) that were fairly new to our PMs where they would need support.
In late 2021, we had started to create the skeleton of a global training and education program for product people to help them develop their skills and craft. We had gotten a number of excellent coaches in place to help in areas such as discovery and OKRs (Tim Herbig) and product leadership (the awesome Petra), but there isn’t an unlimited budget for training and coaching, so we knew had to start thinking more creatively as to how we could take what PMs learn and scale that out across the product org. That’s where the idea of scaling out our product community came from.
Did you already have any sort of Community of Practice in place?
Yes. We had already been running CoPs in product and tech for a number of years, but they were usually focused on smaller topics. For example, when we used to have separate product teams per brand, a colleague and I co-ran a Notifications CoP for all the PMs working on notifications products. We used to meet in person on a quarterly basis to share learnings and talk about how and where we could collaborate.
We also had smaller pockets of PMs coming together in their local offices or countries and focusing on specific themes. Following a PM training course that all the UK PMs attended, we formed a CoP around implementing some of the ways of working or techniques that we learned about but weren’t doing ourselves. Within this community, we broke into smaller groups who would be focused on particular themes, push them forward, and then come back to the bigger group to share progress and learnings.
Pre-pandemic, our Havant office-based product managers used to have a Friday “Product Coffee,” where we would get together for an actual coffee and share things that happened during the week like successes and challenges and pick each other’s brains on particular themes.
It was a really good format and when the pandemic started, we continued the Product Coffees online, but started to add in like-minded PM colleagues based in our Continental European offices. The coffee quickly expanded to double the amount of attendees and then the word kept spreading and it became the basis of our PM CoP. We added every PM to the group and left it as optional for them to attend, and whenever any new PMs start in the org, we make sure they are included, too.
However the format was fairly relaxed and most of the time would end up being a chat about random topics. A few people started dropping out of the sessions for that reason, so I started to think about how we could make the Product Coffee more useful in terms of learning and sharing.
What were some of the initial steps you took to set up your product community of practice?
“Develop a best in class product craft” was set as one of our key objectives, with the following as the key initiatives:
Formalizing the StepStone Product job levels, career path, and competencies
Implementing a training and education program to develop the skills of our PMs and teams
Building a strong product management community to help product people learn from and with each other
I had read Petra’s book, Strong Product People, and loved it, especially how it was based on common sense and was realistic about the challenges of modern product management. When I joined the Product Ops team, I engaged with Petra to run a couple of Strong Product People book clubs and also do some product leadership coaching with our product domain leads. I spoke to Petra to see what experience she had with setting up CoPs and it was really fortunate timing that she was planning for it to be a key focus for her in 2022.
We worked together during May/June 2022 to formulate the approach to growing the product community at StepStone.
In the first session we decided on key topics and created our roadmap:
The unpolished, work-in-progress StepStone CoP roadmap
And in subsequent sessions, we covered each key theme in detail and in the context of StepStone and the industry.
For example, we defined our purpose, success metrics, and KPIs.
Workshop Results: Purpose, success metrics and KPIs of StepStone's Product CoP (wip)
As well as building on Petra’s expertise, we also heavily referenced the book Building Successful Communities of Practice by Emily Webber.
I’ve also looked elsewhere for inspiration—I re-joined Teresa Torres’s Continuous Discovery Habits CoP (where Teresa recommended Petra’s blog!), have joined various Product Slack communities, and have read up as much as possible on others’ experience.
Did you get inspiration from anywhere else?
Yes—in addition to all the sources I just mentioned, the engineering team at StepStone has been building out the chapters for their different disciplines. Our CTO was keen for us to align to the chapter model as much as possible, so I started to look at how this could work for product, where we already had the skeleton of a CoP, were working on the product job levels, career path and competencies, and setting up learning/training programs.
We spoke to engineering leadership to see how and where we could align our efforts and decided to take a test and learn approach—allow for the engineering chapters to establish themselves, learn from what has or hasn’t worked, and “borrow with pride.”
Can you share some of your progress so far?
Sure, there are a few major areas we’ve focused on.
Giving more structure to the Product Coffee
To help move the Product Management CoP in the right direction, we gave the Product Coffee a better structure, with a greater focus on relevant topics—we now have a structure where one week is “free chat,” and the next week we plan a topic to discuss, e.g. learnings from the MTPEngage OKR workshop, how a group of PMs tackled a piece of discovery, or Accessibility standards and how the PMs can help support this.
We are also openly sharing group training plans and conference attendance, so that PMs can encourage each other to share learnings or insights. I am always nagging people to share their learnings in the Product Coffee.Regularly updating our internal blog
We’ve also ensured that we share regular articles on our internal news blog about the topics discussed, or summaries of conferences or training we’ve done, to raise visibility of non-roadmap work.
The rationale is that if we spend money on conferences or external training, we increase our return on investment if we share the learnings within our organization. Thereby we also build out a culture of learning and teaching and collaboration within StepStone.Developing a Product Learning Library
We (though it was mostly Petra!) also worked on a Product Learning Library, a MURAL board with content for product people at all levels and in various formats, e.g. books, videos, podcasts. It’s intended to be a resource to help product people learn in a way that meets their needs, and the board eventually will be owned, managed, and updated by the PMs. This was launched in Q3 and had a lot of interaction and good feedback; I’m looking to use this to help facilitate and enable conversations around topics of interest.
StepStone’s Product Learning Library MURAL containing links, videos, book recommendations and more.
This sounds like great progress! Can you share any of the challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Of course—there are a few of those as well! They include:
Having the time to focus on CoP activities. The PMs are so focused on the day to day and ensuring they are giving direction to their teams/hitting the numbers that taking the time to come together as a global community and learn from each other often drops off the list of things to do.
What worked well previously was that the CoPs were smaller and co-located so they could regularly meet face to face. There’s the challenge of running the community remotely, with hybrid work, and in different time zones.
When PMs are going to conferences, it’s not always easy to persuade them to present their learnings to the wider team!
There’s no current incentive to join the CoP and give up valuable time. We are looking at how the ‘chapter’ can own/manage a percentage of budget for group training/events and how else to incentivize participation.
It’s quite often the same bunch of lovely people who turn up to the community stuff. They are brilliant, but we need to diversify and help others see the value and participate.
Encouraging product leadership to also participate in the community as practitioners rather than leaders. I’m looking at ways of encouraging them to share their stories from their career, both good and bad.
Finally, can you share what you’re hoping to achieve with your CoP in 2023?
We have a few areas we’re focusing on:
Formalizing the Product Chapter and ensuring that the actual percentage of time that should be dedicated to sharing/learning from each other is committed to.
Continuing to learn from the Engineering chapters, but focusing on the needs of our product people, i.e. really understanding and acting on what they want from a CoP/Chapter
Continuing to build a Discovery CoP. This is a key theme for the year (upskilling), so we’ll place a greater focus in 2023 on how we start to build this out as a habit within the product teams. This CoP differs from the Chapters as it is cross-discipline and about improving our ways of working. The key to our success will also be to look elsewhere for how others in this industry have done this well.
Looking at how we can bring the outside in. Engineering are hosting meetups, so this will be one of the next steps for Product & UX.
Encouraging product people to test training courses or events and bring the learnings back to the community.
Final thoughts from Petra
I love the fact that Sarah has shared all of this. The content of her interview is such a great resource for people starting or formalizing their Community of Practice.
One thing I’d like to shine a light on in particular is the fact that StepStone already had small, individual learning groups in place. As I described in this blog post about starting a Community of Practice, that always has to be the first step. You need to start by focusing on small, personal learning and sharing groups. There is no way to jump from zero to a vibrant community in a single step. You have to build small learning clusters and then focus on building bridges and formalizing things.
I hope you get a lot of inspiration from this post. And even if this is the last interview in the series, don’t worry! I’ll still be publishing some other helpful CoP posts in the future.
Want to stay up to date on what I’m learning and discovering about product Communities of Practice? Make sure you sign up for my newsletter or follow me on Twitter orLinkedIn for all the latest.