Learning from Other Product People: Zainab Arilesere on ProductTank Lagos and Running an Informal Community of Practice at Omnibiz Africa
As part of my ongoing research into product Communities of Practice (CoP), I have been conducting interviews with 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 Zainab Arilesere who is the Head of Product at Omnibiz Africa as well as the organizer of ProductTank Lagos. Zainab brings a valuable perspective as someone who organizes both an external CoP as well as a small, informal CoP in her company.
If you’d like to read the other posts in this series, check out our interview with Teresa Torres about her Continuous Discovery Habits community here, Patrick Sauerwein of Deutsche Telekom here, and Jennifer Michelmann of XING here.
Can you tell us a little bit about ProductTank Lagos?
ProductTank Lagos is the local community in Lagos, Nigeria for product managers and it’s from a bigger organization, Mind the Product, which has local communities in over 300 cities across the world. We’re sharing, networking, and there to support each other generally.
What does the term “Community of Practice” mean to you?
Community of Practice in the product management space for me is a circle where people share their:
Successes
Challenges—hoping to learn from like-minded people who might have had the same/similar failures in the past
New skills learned
General knowledge
For PMs, who tend to be generalists, it becomes key to belong to a nation of like-minded people ready to support and encourage each other along the journey—and we live by the all for one, one for all rule.
And what does your Community of Practice look like in your company and at ProductTank?
At Omnibiz, there are about ten of us on the product management team, so we’re still a small team. But we have an informal Community of Practice where you’d find people sharing with the PMs from the other pods or “tribes”—because they have a personal relationship with them—or they’ll share with me because I lead the team.
I know there’s not a lot of sharing going around, so I try to share my learnings and failures often with everyone, so they understand they are not alone in this and everyone is going through something similar. Maybe it’s some fantastic feature they’re excited about or some strategy document so others can see they’re not alone in their journey.
With ProductTank Lagos, it’s a very large audience—we have over 3,000 members. Again, it’s very informal. You’ll see people reaching out on LinkedIn or sending an email when we announce or share something. I find time to engage in 1:1 sessions from time to time to share learnings and failures. Sometimes people want to switch jobs or get into product management—they just want someone there to sort of hold their hand in whatever situation they find themselves in.
Could you talk a bit about the meetings, rituals, or anything you have on a regular basis?
I will start with meetings at work. We have a daily call called Scrum of Scrum with all the Product Managers.
Our products are linked—it’s an ecommerce company—and one change I make may affect three other pods or affect the retailers. So this meeting is where we share high-level what are the initial intentions of a change, how we see the regressions into other products, and where we need help from the other teams, and what the desired outcomes are.
We also share impediments and progress on projects—we keep it simple and short, so that people don't lose interest since it’s a daily call. So this is not a Community/Learning meeting. But sometimes learning topics emerge from that daily.
We also have a group chat, where we share articles, feedback that may be useful to other team mates, draft and final roadmaps. It’s a space where people can share anything.
For participation, it's a struggle to get everyone to share because my strengths with sharing may not necessarily be another person's cup of tea. Some people are just ready to receive but not ready to give, either because they’re not there yet or it’s not their style. So I ask that we share often, hoping that others will be encouraged and catch up as we get better and grow.
We have demo days, once a week where everyone has to participate. It does not have to be perfect, but you do have to share, so PMs are ready to answer questions and take feedback.
For ProductTank, before the COVID-19 situation, we had regular meetups where we were together and we’d bring speakers across industries on topics that were pressing issues for our audience. But since 2020 we moved onto more online or virtual events and we try to do this once a quarter. We’re not always able to because people are busy at work and we don’t have enough volunteers to run the show.
With participation, a lot of people are willing to ask questions, they want to share, they’re ready to get advice, but some people are just there. Some people just want to listen, they want to meet people—and some people are just there for the drinks, which is fine as well! We try to make it as engaging as possible, but if you don’t want to participate, that’s okay. Just come and listen, we’re happy to have you there.
Is there a reward for participation in your CoP?
Nope, apart from the fact that others who you may not have interacted with can now perceive your style and are more likely to want to engage in a conversation, specific to work or general.
Is there something you’re doing to encourage people to participate more?
For ProductTank, I encourage people to come, volunteer, speak up, ask questions, reach out to our speakers or any of the other product chairs. We have posts on LinkedIn and Twitter asking people questions, just piquing their interest.
At work, it’s a struggle to encourage people to participate. Because we’re still a small team, people are more focused on execution. “Now that we have the roadmap, let’s get it done.” they say. So I’ve decided to lead by example and I share my learnings and struggles.I’m doing this to a degree where I sometimes think I share too much—I hope I’m not boring them.
And something else I’ve started doing is sharing my views on our industry so that they understand my way of thinking. And they can hopefully learn from that. To give one example, I’ sharing things like: “Hey, I’ve looked at the strategy, that’s what I notice on how the market is changing, and this is how as a product team we’re might want to tackle it.”
And if I’m making a change to our org setup or to a direction setting document because I failed to see something earlier, I’ll share: “This is because I failed to notice XYZ” so they know it’s okay to fail to see things and you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. If I get a new book or find a new article, I’ll share that. And I’ve noticed that when I do that, a lot of people will come to me directly. They might not want to respond in a group chat, but they’ll tell me, “I’m also having this challenge. Can you help me? Have you ever had this situation before?”
So yes, I share, encourage other people to share, and let them know other people in the global product community are going through it too, so don’t be silent.
What's the approach to bring fresh stimulus every once in a while?
At ProductTank, when we bring external speakers, this provides a different perspective. Sometimes they’ve done product management for more than ten years—we see that the turnout is bigger and the audience is asking more intentional questions. And that has been something good that we’ve been able to give to our community—we actually brought Petra one time and it was very exciting to have her.
At work, because we’re still a small team, it’s very informal. We usually share books we have learned greatly from or that have really helped our thinking. There’s not so much fresh stimulus since we’re so small, but we’re looking at bringing in an external speaker or another product leader from a similar company somewhere not in our region would be good to help the team see how much more thinking out of the box we’re able to do.
How do you go about selecting the speakers for ProductTank?
We start by crowdsourcing, asking people what particular thing they’re struggling with. When we’re able to identify a theme or common pain point, then we look at product leaders who are either talking about that sort of pain point or who have written books or people we know have gone through such pain points. Then from that pool of people, we see who we have a connection or second-degree connection with since it’s often easier to start with an intro from someone.
Let’s say we have ten people in the pool, six people are out already because they have a ton of LinkedIn messages or Twitter messages and there’s no way we can get to them. So out of the four people, we find who is available soonest because we usually do this crowdsourcing really close to the event. We find who is available soonest and we pitch to them, this is what the community is about, because we’ve found that this topic is a common pain point across all levels—entry, mid-level, even for senior people. Out of these four people, maybe only two will be available, and willing to speak as soon as possible. So that’s how we go about getting people to speak to us.
Which format or event made the biggest impact for you personally?
I will say two things here: Attending my first MTP conference in 2018. It was exhilarating to see a large group of people, together in one place, for the same purpose. And people were willing to share, to guide, to help. They were happy to speak about a challenge with a total stranger. It was exciting to see that I’m not alone in whatever problem that I’m dealing with. People are there to amplify and support you and tell you you’re making a difference, even if you think what you’re doing is really small. That was really big for me. And even though it was four years ago, I still feel like I have a community that’s there for me that I can rely on at any time.
Second—which could technically be first since it was published ten years earlier—was reading Inspired in 2018. I had just come into product management a year before. I knew how to build products based on what I had done and seeing that there’s a story around what other big tech companies are doing, how they’re solutioning problems, how they’re discovering, how they’re looking at how to solve them… My thinking about products took a 360 after seeing how others look at problems and create the products we all love so much. I felt more inspired and had the confidence that the people in the book were making these changes even if they’re at a big corporation and I’m at a small startup, I can make that change because I’m now equipped with the knowhow of how to go about it.
Those are some wonderful lessons—thank you for sharing! What are the things you would like to see your community do more of? Any plans on how to improve it in 2023?
To seek out help and not struggle in silence. There are people who are ready to help in the PM universe. To share willingly, someone out there needs that knowledge you may think is so little.
At work
We are in the hypergrowth phase, which means more product verticals and more PMs. I’d like us to become more intentional about sharing learnings with a structured approach, looking at each pod having team-specific learnings that can be shared with others.
We started a tech blog in May and so far only developers have been contributing, but I want product managers to contribute because we have so much to share about our processes.
Having owners who would plan a different activity for each learning day to encourage participation.
Inviting product leaders from more mature product-led organizations to come share as well. For example, there are fintech companies in Lagos who look like they’re getting product right.
Starting product “out of office” days, maybe on a bi-monthly cadence.
At ProductTank
Getting more formal as well. Right now it’s just individuals reaching out on Twitter or LinkedIn via direct messages, but getting more formal with a platform where the community can discuss issues, and maybe have a moderator.
Form smaller communities within this group, to encourage information exchange with PMs who are on the same wavelength—data PMs, fintech PMs, etc.
Final thoughts from Petra
Zainab is a true "sharing is caring" person who learned about the power of communities early on in her career. And it was amazing to see how easily she switches context from being a product leader and building an internal community to running one of the largest ProductTanks in the world.
I love the fact that Zainab is leading by example. She is an active part of a community and loves both sharing interesting/relevant information she finds as well as her personal struggles so that others can learn from her.
But even for a natural born leader and community builder like Zainab, it still requires quite a lot of effort to keep communities up and running. So if you are planning to start a CoP, or are already running one, please don't get frustrated by the fact that the community needs you as its driving force.
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