Product Communities of Practice: Everything You Need to Know

When you work in product, there’s never a dull moment. You’re always learning and growing, whether you’re developing your core product skills, enhancing your understanding of your customers, or helping your team evolve and grow. So it’s no wonder that product people are often asking questions like: What should I learn to get better at my job? How do we scale people development? How do we evolve our product culture?

One of the common issues I’ve seen is that there’s no intentional effort for product people to learn from each other. There are no regular meetings or rituals that allow people to share challenges and resources.

The organizations that do provide these resources and opportunities often do so in the context of a Community of Practice (CoP).

What exactly is a CoP and why is it important to have one?

I think this analogy helps to illustrate the concept: Pro athletes don’t have a match every day. They spend a good amount of time training, which takes place with their teammates, their coach, or other athletes.

For product people, it’s often the opposite. Every day feels like a match day and some of us never spend any time on training. It’s also rare for us to talk to each other about how to improve our process.

While athletes spend 95% of their time on training and 5% of their time competing, for most product people, it would even be a stretch to say that we’re doing the inverse. Even dedicating 5% of our time to “training” with our peers would be a good start. And that’s where Communities of Practice come in.

What Exactly Is a Community of Practice?

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."

The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning. Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice.

Here are a few quotes that further explain the concept:

“They collaborate regularly to share information, improve their skills, and actively work on advancing the general knowledge of the domain. Healthy CoPs have a culture built on professional networking, personal relationships, shared knowledge, and common skills.”

They “...can evolve naturally because of the members' common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created deliberately with the goal of gaining knowledge related to a specific field. It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop personally and professionally.” (from Situated Learning)

What Does a CoP Help You With?

When does it make sense to start a CoP? I find that in companies with up to six product people, this type of knowledge sharing tends to occur naturally. But once you have more than six people, communication starts to break down and it helps to put a more formal system in place. You need to think about things like how often you should meet, which formats work best, how you’ll decide on topics, and ensure everyone gets something out of the exchange. And, perhaps most importantly, you’ll need to define the goals of your CoP.

If this is a new concept, you might not even be sure what a CoP is capable of. Here are some ideas of the types of topics a CoP can cover and how they can benefit your organization.

A CoP will help product people share best practices and ways to solve specific challenges. It will make it easier for product people to understand how your organization works and how to effectively work with others outside the product team. For example, you might need to work with the legal team from time to time and someone who’s done this in the past can share their experience and advice. A CoP can filter and curate content so it’s most relevant for your company and context. It can serve as a source of truth for product culture—how does your company approach work and are there any specific frameworks, tools, or methodologies you tend to use? It can provide answers and direction on personal development, addressing that recurring question I get about how to know what to focus on to become a great product manager. It can also be incredibly useful when onboarding new team members or helping product people adjust to a new role. It can serve as a safe space for product team members to share their frustrations. And finally, it can be a catalyst for driving change. While individual team members might have ideas for how to improve your team topologies, collaboration with the user research team, or other processes, they’ll have much more success when they can unite with others.

Why I’m Interested in This Topic

You might be wondering why someone who describes themself as a product leadership coach (me) is interested in this topic. In my work as a coach, I’ve discovered that CoPs seem to be a “little-known secret” within the product world. Very few companies (or individual product people, for that matter) are currently making use of the CoP format or aware of its power. I decided to explore this topic for two reasons: One, to understand more about why this was the case. And two, to see how I might help spread the word about CoPs and help other companies and teams adopt this model.

To learn more, I conducted qualitative research (17 in-depth interviews with CoP leaders or organizers), quantitative research (a survey of over 100 product people), and began working with clients to grow and maintain their CoPs. If you’re interested in the results from my research, you’ll find links to everything in the later sections of this post.

Getting Started: What Do You Need to Know?

Now that you have a sense of what CoPs are and how they can benefit your organization, you might be wondering how to get started. I’ve compiled my observations and recommendations in Want to Launch or Mature Your Product Community of Practice? Start Here!

Portrait Shots of the 7 people I've interviewed for the CoP interview series

Learning from Other Product People: Hear from CoP Leaders and Organizers

One of the best ways we can learn about product CoPs is to hear stories from the field from people who have direct experience with them. I’ve done a series of interviews with CoP leaders and organizers, including:

These interviews will be especially helpful if you want to learn from people who are actively driving community work within their organizations, or in Teresa’s case, in a cross-organizational setup.

Digging into the Data: My Research on CoPs

I know that most product people love qualitative and quantitative data, so I ran a survey of CoP participants in 2022. More than 100 people shared their experience (or lack thereof) with product CoPs.

Looking for a high-level overview of how I set up the survey and what I learned from it? Check out What I Learned from Surveying Over 100 People About Product Communities of Practice.

Want to explore the answers from people who participate in company internal CoPs? Read Detailed Results from My Survey: Company Internal Communities of Practice.

Curious what people who participate in cross-organizational CoPs said about their experience? See Detailed Responses from My Survey: Cross-Organizational Product Community of Practice Participants.

Guidelines and Frameworks to Keep in Mind

CoPs don’t necessarily need a lot of rules or structure—especially when they’re just getting started. But it can help to set up some community guidelines to create a positive environment for learning and sharing from each other. If you’re looking for ideas on how to draft your community guidelines, I provide a few examples in this post.

Similarly, when it comes to frameworks that define how you communicate, how you meet, and how you share information, there are so many things you could be doing that it can get a little overwhelming to get started. Based on my qualitative and quantitative research, I’ve distilled what I’ve learned into some general frameworks that can help you think through your rituals of communicating, meeting, and sharing. You’ll find all that information in this post.

Need Extra Support to Get Your CoP Running? I Can Help!

If you’ve read through all of this and you’re still feeling a little unsure about what steps to take, I’m excited to share that I now have a Community of Practice package. You can learn more about my offering and book time to discuss it with me here.