Rituals for Product Communities of Practice: A Round-up of Ideas & Inspiration
In the early stages of product Communities of Practice (CoPs), you simply need to provide the time and space for people to gather and share knowledge. But eventually, as your CoP matures and grows larger, you’ll probably want to establish some regular rituals, whether it’s meetings, workshops, casual get-togethers, or places to share information.
Good rituals are like glue: They hold things together and provide a certain rhythm to community activities. They help establish norms and expectations, foster a sense of belonging and shared identity, and facilitate learning and collaboration. And for larger companies with a wide range of CoP activities, they allow people to prioritize which rituals are most aligned with their personal and professional goals.
In case you missed it, I spent about a year conducting interviews with CoP leaders and organizers and ran a survey of over 100 CoP participants. (By the way, you can explore all my CoP content here.) Through this research, I’ve gathered a lot of tips and tricks about creating regular rituals in your CoP.
In this post, you’ll find both a high-level overview of common rituals as well as some in-depth advice from CoP leaders I interviewed.
Because this is quite a lengthy and detailed post, here’s a summary of all the content that’s covered here.
Feel free to skip ahead to the section that’s most relevant to you!
But First, A Few Guiding Principles
Types of Rituals and Meetings
Inspiration from Existing CoP Leaders and Organizers
Final Thoughts
1 - But First, A Few Guiding Principles
Rituals play an important role in CoPs. Rituals can be formal or informal, and they can include things like regular check-ins, shared meals, or celebratory events. Rituals can help to establish a sense of belonging and shared identity within the community, and they can also provide opportunities for informal learning and social interaction.
When it comes to meetings specifically, they should be well-planned and organized, with clear agendas and goals. They should also be inclusive and participatory, allowing all members to contribute and have their voices heard. It can be helpful to establish ground rules for meetings, such as respecting others' viewpoints, staying on topic, and actively listening to others.
When adding new rituals, it’s rarely a single person’s decision. While there may be one active community contributor who suggests a new idea, the decision of whether to add this ritual will probably be a group decision. If you find yourself in the situation of considering new rituals to add, I’d recommend taking a moment to revisit your CoP’s purpose and success metrics. If you don’t have these defined already, this is a good reminder to do that! Here are some examples I’ve gathered from my research.
CoP Purpose Examples:
Building social connections
Creating best practices (smaller task groups)
Identifying and addressing skill gaps
Learning from others
Learning together
Sharing with others
Talking about and solving problems together
Sharing success stories (what worked for us)
Success Definition Examples:
Return on time invested for members should be high
Self-sustaining (the CoP is not reliant on a few people)
Safe environment to share and to learn together
Improved employee onboarding
Increasing mastery (as described by Daniel Pink)
Deciding Whether to Add a New Ritual
Here are some questions to ask when considering introducing rituals to your CoP:
Which rituals deepen the bonds among members?
Which rituals embody the community’s values?
Which rituals mark specific milestones in the membership experience?
Which rituals are members-only vs. open for others (engineering, design, the public)?
Which rituals help us run or mature this community?
Which rituals happen online?
Which rituals happen in person?
What is the right rhythm for the rituals?
Being Thoughtful About Content & Curation
Many CoPs include at least one element of sharing or curating content for participants. Here are some questions to consider about your approach to content and curation:
What content creates value for the community?
How can the community tell the stories of its members?
What content will create deeper bonds among members?
How do members contribute valuable content to the community?
How do we bring in external stimulus? (one person attending a training/meetup and bringing the learning back vs. external speaker)
How can content support the ritual's rhythm? Editorial calendars = stability + freshness
2 - Types of Rituals and Meetings
Now that you’ve given thought to some of the big questions about rituals, let’s look at some of the common formats and cadences. I’ve curated these lists based on responses to my survey and what I’ve learned and observed while working with clients to build and grow their CoPs.
Btw most successful CoPs take time to define their community guidelines while they are introducing rituals. These guidelines are often designed to create an open environment where people feel comfortable sharing. But they could also be used to outline the purpose of your CoP or any other guiding principles you'd like participants to keep in mind. Find some real-life examples of community guidelines here.
Informal get-togethers
Product go karts
Product team game night
Product PechaKucha nights
Friday beers
Product pub quiz
Talking formats
In person (in office, at venue, attending a conference together)
Online / remote
Asynchronous (video, chat, whiteboard, quizzes)
“Broadcasting” (newsletter, internal blog)
Learning library (physical books, online learning boards)
Talking rhythm
Daily (“sharing good reads on our Slack channel”)
Weekly (1:1 surprise lunch)
Monthly (learning challenge, product team game night, employee onboarding session, themed learning session, monthly members call—What’s cooking?)
Quarterly (book clubs, learning backlog alignment, product academy (from members for members) / product barcamp, product training days, new members onboarding)
Annual (two-day product summit including an external speaker giving a talk)
Inspiration on how to name your CoP rituals
When it comes to naming your rituals, you could just use a simple descriptive name (which is perfectly acceptable), but many CoPs use this as an opportunity to be creative, as some of these names illustrate.
"Thirst for knowledge" Thursdays
Analytics Brown Bag Session
F*ck-up nights (sharing failures and learnings)
Product Coffee Celebrations
LEX - Learning from Experts Sessions
Lunch and Learn
Looking outside your product organization
Don’t forget that there’s a ton of useful knowledge outside your product organization, whether it’s within other departments of your company or in the world at large. You can use your CoP to help participants gain access to that knowledge through activities like:
Cross-CoP Sessions: e.g. with the engineering chapter or with the cross-functional AI-CoP or the Discovery CoP
Share the Learning: Bring learnings from conferences & trainings back to the company
3 - Inspiration from Existing CoP Leaders and Organizers
I’ve conducted interviews with 17 CoP leaders and organizers, and each one is a gold mine of ideas and inspiration for your CoP. I’ve chosen a few highlights to include here, but you’ll also find the links to the full interviews in case you’d like to hear from any of these CoP leaders in more detail.
Sarah Reeves, StepStone
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 had a lot of interaction and good feedback; I’m looking to use this to help facilitate and enable conversations around topics of interest.
Read the full interview with Sarah here.
Nesrine Changuel, Google
As PMs we are lucky in the sense that we have a lot of rituals and opportunities for learning as part of Communities of Practice. In fact, it’s hard to get them all, so we need to prioritize.
Here’s an overview of some of the CoP offerings we have at Google.
PM Speaker Series
I’m leading a Google internal initiative called PM Speaker Series and I’m driving the EMEA version, where we bring speakers who inspire product managers with ideas and innovation in technology specifically. We try to keep a monthly cadence for these sessions.
PM Summits
These are large gatherings that exist on different levels. For example, I’m on Google Chrome, so there’s a Chrome PM Summit. We try to make sure we meet at least once a year. In addition to Chrome, there’s the EMEA PM Summit that happens around twice a year for all PMs in the EMEA region. That one is not product specific at all. I believe meeting others is a benefit in a big company like Google where you work with a lot of stakeholders across the globe and you don’t necessarily meet face to face unless you attend an event like the PM Summit. Generally the PM Summits feature keynote speakers, lightning talks, workshops, and fun activities. It’s an opportunity to meet and do less work together in favor of networking.
Conference clubs and book clubs
Conference clubs are where we get together to prepare for external PM conferences. This raises awareness about which conferences are available and gives people who are attending the conference the chance to meet.
We also have PM book clubs on a regular basis. It’s not that formal. Anyone can initiate, drive, or moderate these.
Brown bag sessions
Brown bag sessions could be on any topic—not like the PM speaker series where it’s more specific to product management. For example, I recently gave a brown bag session about role models and how they can shape our perspectives and personalities and how we can become better people by identifying and following a role model.
Read the full interview with Nesrine here.
Priya Biswas, ATB Financial
Lunch and Learn sessions
We have monthly Lunch and Learn sessions ranging from lessons learned from product launches, product optimization, payment modernization, storytelling, strategic and competitive insights like open banking, etc. It’s a mix of internal and external presenters. We’ve had a large audience of 70+ members attending, so it’s a great place to speak about your product. By using the full Google suite, we are able to provide seamless virtual sessions. If people go to the office, they can book a room and do a hybrid version of it too.
101 sessions
As a financial institution, we have many different types of products and we wanted to give everyone the opportunity to learn more about all of our product portfolios. For example, a product manager who specializes in cards might not know very much about lending and vice versa.
The 101 sessions are monthly events on a particular topic like Service Design, Behavioral Design, Lending, Profit and Loss, etc. These sessions have been great for all our product teams to have that breadth of knowledge in various areas that they may not be working in right now. These sessions are all recorded and added to our Community resource library. We also use them for onboarding new team members as well as a reference material to promote cross-pollination of talent between different product portfolios.
Product book clubs
We also have product book clubs that are smaller than the other events. Generally 10–12 folks join them. The last one was on Product Roadmap Relaunched. We did the usual book club format of reading and discussing different chapters.
Another activity that worked really well was building roadmaps with all the learnings at the end and sharing it with the cohort, just as one would with stakeholders. It was summer when we were putting this into practice, so someone built a roadmap for their garden landscaping and someone else built one for their wedding. It was interesting to see how the frameworks could be applied outside of work.
Read the full interview with Priya here.
Jennifer Michelmann, XING
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
These 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.
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.
Product Academy
This 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.
Read the full interview with Jennifer here.
Teresa Torres, Product Talk Continuous Discovery Habits Community
Monthly challenges
The challenges are designed to help people invest in a discovery skill. Sometimes they’re really concrete, like I recorded a real discovery interview with a member, posted it, and asked people to identify opportunities. So sometimes it’s really tangible, concrete, let’s practice a skill together. And sometimes it’s more support oriented.
We’re still trying to figure out what works, what gets people to engage, and what’s helpful, so every month is a wild experiment, but there is a monthly cadence. We anoint a “challenge champion” every month for the most engaged member and they get a free month of membership if they win.
Book club
We used to do a quarterly book club, but we just switched to monthly to increase the likelihood that someone would participate at some point since the book club takes place on a rolling basis. The way that works is we read a book one month while discussing the one we read the previous month. Members basically have a month to read and the subsequent month to apply.
We’re not a typical book club—we don’t have a call and just sit around and discuss what we liked or didn’t like about the book. Instead we design weekly activities to help people apply what they read in the book to their own work. So it’s more of: Read this for inspiration and then we’re going to give you activities to do each week to help you apply them.
Community calls
We do these twice a month. I host the calls, but it’s not a Q&A format. The first half of the call, we do small group discussions, so it’s an opportunity for people to connect with others in the community. I come up with a discussion prompt each month, which is often tied to the book club or the monthly challenge, and we put people into breakout rooms in Zoom and they discuss.
Halfway through the call, they come back into the big group and share some of the highlights from their small group discussions. Then we also solicit topics, challenges, tough situations at work that people just want to talk through. The way we do that is we use the chat channel as a backlog and everybody just puts in their topics. That’s really fun and we get really different people in the calls than those who are the most active in Slack.
New member calls
Every two weeks, I get on a call with everyone who joined in the last two weeks. The purpose of those calls is just to help people get to know a handful of people so when they’re in Slack they already know some of the other members.
Read the full interview with Teresa here.
Zainab Arilesere, ProductTank Lagos and Omnibiz Africa
We 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.
Read the full interview with Zainab here.
4 - Final Thoughts
I’d encourage you to bookmark and return to this post whenever you feel like you miss your product peers or feel the need to share and talk about your work with others. Remember: You don’t have to settle for a boring format if it’s not motivating or exciting to the members of your CoP. The goal is to make it as compelling as possible for people to join and participate!
Need some support in launching or maturing your product Community of Practice? I’m now offering a Community of Practice package to help you with just that! Learn more here.