Continuing in the series of how to keep a community of practice engaging, for our PM Club, we’ve had a number of ‘special guests’ that have led to interesting conversations.
We were lucky enough to have Rich Mironov present to us one time, which led into an interesting conversation. We followed up that conversation by reading another one of his blog articles that related to that conversation, and continuing the conversation on our own.
To encourage engagement in a book club or a community of practice meeting, have everyone vote before you start a conversation.
It’s a lot easier for people to agree with what everyone else is saying, or just stay quiet, but if they have to vote first, then you can have more conversation about where the group has variances in how they voted.
Depending on what tools you’re using, you can vote anonymously, or you can have team members vote in such a way that you know who voted for what. The advantage of the latter is that you can call on people to ask them why they voted the way that they did. Of course, you don’t want anyone to get defensive or dislike the workshop, so this will depend on the topic and how close-knit your group is.
It can be hard to keep regular meetings interesting, whether that’s a book club, or a community of practice such as the “PM Club” that I lead weekly with my team.
Even with good questions as prompts, I found just bringing together the group to talk about an article or a chapter didn’t seem to be quite enough after a while. Particularly as the team grew, it became harder to have great discussions. And what came out of the discussions? Could I really be sure that everyone walked away with an understanding that they could apply to their work? Particularly when we did this week… after week… after week… for months. It got a little old, honestly.
Every week, our Product Management team has a “PM Club”, where the goal is to grow and learn together.
One week, we read The Art of Product Management, by Ken Norton. Sometimes we read articles and then just discuss them, but I wanted to do more than just talk about this one, so I created a ‘workshop’.
Late in 2022, I was looking to get alignment on cross-team initiatives we’d work on in 2023 across multiple teams. I wanted input from a certain group of engineering managers and product managers on:
Which initiatives we wanted to go after
What our order of priority was
Whenever possible, getting input from everyone involved leads to far better results from both a buy-in perspective and from a two (or more) heads-are-better-than-one perspective than just making the decision yourself in a vacuum. You can’t always make decisions by committee, but you can get input that way. In this case, I was able to both get consensus and the input ended up changing my mind so that I was aligned with the group on the priorities.
Inspired by Martin Eriksson’s Product Decision Stack video, I set up a brainstorm for my team. What were our PM principles that could act as “shortcuts” in helping us make difficult decisions that would also ladder up to our strategy and vision?
The product managers watched a few key minutes of Eriksson’s video, and then we brainstormed.
Recently, I had a conversation with Jariatu Mansaray and Mike Belsito about careers in product for Ohio Tech Day, facilitated by Shawn Leitner. Shawn asked us about:
How did you get into Product Management?
What’s your day-to-day job like?
What’s your advice for those considering a future in Product Management?
Over the last year, I’ve interviewed dozens of candidates and reviewed hundreds of resumes for various product manager roles. One of the challenges that I’ve run into is the varying definitions of “Product Manager” and “Product Owner”.
I’ve put this graph together to roughly represent what I’ve been seeing.
“No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention” by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
This book is incredibly well-written. I loved the back-and-forth between Hastings’ viewpoint and Meyer’s. Each concept is told with excellent stories surrounding them. Having Meyer’s voice as someone telling the story as seen from the outside is a powerful counterpoint to Hastings’ first person knowledge.
For anyone who is leading a company, or in a position to influence how a company is led, this book is invaluable. Hastings and Meyer walk you through the building blocks to Netflix’s winning culture, block by block, explaining how each relies on the previous one for the next to be possible.
Note, however, that this isn’t a generic leadership book. If you’re not leading a company or can’t influence how one is led, it’s likely to be interesting, but not that useful. I can’t see many of the principles and ideas in this book working at a departmental level.
As a product manager without a technical background, I’ve faced challenges in getting a deep enough understanding of the tech used at my company to be able to effectively understand the conversations that I’m a part of.
In my past career as a UX director, I worked a great deal with various eCommerce systems (Websphere and Hybris) as well as CMSes (mostly Adobe Experience Manager). But now that I work at a B2B SaaS company, the technologies are considerably different. And since we’re 100% remote, it’s not possible to overhear developer chatter and pick up on context.
While obviously I can (and do!) ask the developers directly to explain key concepts, I’ve found some great resources online that have helped a great deal.
Every time that I hear a new technical term that I’m not familiar with during a meeting, I write it in a doc. When I have a free moment, I look it up and add a definition to the doc, creating a great resource for myself that grows over time.
In this article, I’ve listed out a variety of free and paid resources that might be helpful for others in a similar position.
Continuous Discovery is a how-to book, with a series of clear instructions on how to do discovery, definition, ideation, and assumption / value testing. It also explains the why behind each step.
Personally, I’m used to the model that looks something like Discover > Define > Design (& iterate) > Develop > Deliver > Measure (& iterate). I was expecting 100% of this book to fall into the Discover category, and was surprised when it went beyond that.
While Teresa does emphasize at a few points that her methods are meant to help develop the right mindset, rather than a be-all end-all “right” methodology, the book still ends up being mostly an instructional book. And since it covers a lot of ground, the book covers one methodology at each step.
So if you’re looking to go from goal setting all the way through assumption testing with a step-by-step instruction book, this book is for you. However, if you’re looking for a comprehensive overview of different discovery methodologies and ways to document discovery findings, look elsewhere.
The book does have a lot of practical tips that I plan to bring back to work. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 were the most valuable chapters for me.
When I was offered the opportunity to become Head of Product Management at my current job, I looked for resources to help inform my approach.
I couldn’t have dreamed up a better or more practical resource than Petra Wille’s Strong Product People. The book is simply packed full of useful, tactical, real-world advice.
![[sticky note] even over [sticky note]](https://www.jackiegreenfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/even-over.png)
