What’s the secret sauce for a thriving product Community of Practice (CoP)? While there are many ingredients in the recipe—which can include things like clear guidelines and regular rituals—one of the most critical ones is the sponsor. Like the customer who orders a dish (and pays for it) in the restaurant, the sponsor provides the reason for a community to exist and supplies the resources for it to be successful.

I’m thrilled to announce that my new book, Strong Product Communities is now out! If you’d like to just go ahead and grab your copy, you can do so here. But if you’d like to learn a bit more about the story behind the book and what to expect from it, you’ll find that information below.

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?

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.

When maturing a Community of Practice (CoP), you might want to create community guidelines that encourage freedom of speech but prevent the spread of disinformation and ensure your community is a safe place to share and learn together. But how do you know what to include? For this post, I have three examples of CoP guidelines you can steal (use exactly as they are written) or simply use as inspiration.

In this post, you’ll have the chance to comb through the results from the survey respondents who participate in cross-organizational CoPs. These are CoPs that are offered by a person, company, or entity outside of your employer. For these types of CoPs, members generally choose to participate and may even need to pay a fee for their membership. 

In this post, you’ll have the chance to comb through the results from the survey respondents who participate in company internal CoPs. As it is likely super boring for you to go through all the answers in detail, I’ve aggregated similar answers and each bullet point summarizes them. The examples in parentheses are quotes so that you get an idea of exactly how people were phrasing things.

I dedicated a large portion of 2022 to learning all about product Communities of Practice (CoP). My research involved two main activities: conducting in-depth interviews with CoP leaders/organizers and running a survey of CoP participants. The survey results were such a treasure trove of information that I couldn’t fit it all into a single blog post….

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.

Throughout 2022, I’ve been conducting interviews with people who lead and participate in product Communities of Practice (CoP). I’m excited to share the next installment in my series, featuring Priya Biswas, Director of Product Management, Business Analysis and Organizational Change Management Practice at ATB Financial.

We’re back with the next interview in our series of discussions with product Community of Practice (CoP) leaders. I’m thrilled to introduce you to Nesrine Changuel, a Product Manager for Chrome iOS, who’s based at Google’s Paris office.

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.

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. This post talks about how to get started with your product community and it contains tips on how to mature this community over time.

For the next post in the series of interviews about product Communities of Practice, we’ve got a real treat for you! Teresa Torres is a product discovery coach, teacher, and author of the wildly popular book Continuous Discovery Habits. In addition to these roles, she’s also the facilitator of the Continuous Discovery Habits community where product folks from all over the world come to cheer each other on as they build their skills around continuous discovery.

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 of the goals I outlined in my initial post on “Communities of Practice” was to conduct interviews with product people who are currently involved with Communities of Practice to gather their firsthand accounts.

Today, I’m thrilled to share the first interview with Jennifer Michelmann, Senior Product Manager at XING.

One of the most common questions I got asked in conversations with product people in 2021 was: How do I make sure to learn the right things to do the PM job well? And Product leaders in particular often asked me: How do we scale people development and make sure our overall product culture evolves? And how do we achieve this if our people development budgets are tight?