Review

This book is light on content and insight, and heavy on plugs for follow-on consulting work. There isn’t a coherent narrative or framework. I’ve been part of some great product communities, this book has reinforced how lucky I’ve been and how special they are.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• A Community of Practice (or CoP for short) is a group of people who regularly interact around a shared passion, that they want to learn about and get better at.
• CoPs were first proposed by Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger in ‘Situated Learning’ (1991). Wenger expanded on the concept in Communities of Practice (1998).
• CoPs are about sharing information, improving skills and working advancing the general knowledge of the domain. CoPs are built on personal relationships, networking, knowledge sharing and common skills.
• Once you have more than six people who are keen, communication gets harder and you need think about starting a CoP to put more rigour around…
• Rituals, cadence, formats and topics of discussion
• You might need to define the goals of your CoP too
• CoPs help product people share best practice and ways to solve specific challenges.
• CoPs can filter and curate content so it’s most relevant for your company and context.
• CoPs can help direct personal development and are incredibly useful when onboarding new team members.
• CoPs should be a safe space to share frustrations.

• Community of Practice Canvas headings:
• Purpose: What does the CoP want to achieve? (limit to 3)
• Values: What’s important to us a community? (limit to 3)
• Success Definition: How does the community define success?
• Roles within the community. Who is the community for and what roles can members play?
• Finding Rituals and Rhythm. Which rituals deepen the bonds among members? (also worth limiting)
• Content and Curation: What content creates value for the community?
• Workshops: Which workshops will nurture the community?
• Shared Experiences: How to create shared experiences within the community?
• Practicalities: How do people join, or leave? What are the rules?
• Channel and Platform: What channels does the community use to communicate and gather?
• Incentives: Are contributions rewarded in some way?
• Financing, sponsorship and leadership support: What is the community plan to be financially sustainable?

• How to start a Product Management Community (Phases / Steps)
• Phase 1: Create the minimum viable community:
• Successful communities start from real personal connections between 2-3 people. Find a couple of people who are passionate, and get going, share and learn from each other. If successful you’ll have some momentum.
• Don’t get too involved. Allowing the group to have autonomy increases motivation.
• Phase 2: Give it some structure
• Steer the conversation from updates toward reflecting no which tools, methodologies, and frameworks made them successful.
• Keep the group small but add a ritual that allows everyone to engage. Make sure it is a value add ritual, else participation will be low
• Create a shared learning goal between peers.
• Start by making these events a “one-off.” Don’t worry too much about setting them up as community rituals in the first place.
• Let time go by, and let people learn the things they want to learn.
• If new sessions aren’t happening organically, there could be a systematic problem with time or culture.
• Step 3: Formalise it and find community management allies
• Ideally the community itself is voting to spend more time together an organise better.
• Desire to do more raises questions like…
• Who has bandwidth to help organise?
• Is there any budget?
• Do we have permission for an offsite?
• Get out of their way and help them get the support and sponsorship they need to follow their passion.
• Align learning goals to company needs where possible.
• At 40 members and 3–4 different rituals consider allocating official time and resource to maintain the community (like prepping sessions etc.)

• CoPs don’t necessarily need rules and structure when they’re starting out.

• Establish rituals in larger more mature CoPs.

• Consult the community about adding or removing rituals

• Product managers can feel lonely on their teams.
• Be careful of CoP presentations feeling like they are ‘high stakes’.
• If participation is low → join forces with another CoP that has some overlap (e.g. UX)
• Management should make it clear that it’s encouraged to spend time with the CoP.
• Expect 10% of people to actively take part and come to every meeting.
• Steal from the best: invite and watch thought leaders
• We really do learn in community, by discussing ideas with each other, by hearing about what other people are doing, and by seeing lots and lots of examples.
• Set monthly challenges: designed to help people invest in a discovery skill.
• Monthly Book Club: read a book one month → discuss the one we read the previous month
• When you participate in a CoP, it’s very important to have a goal for why you’re doing it.
• Crowdsource what people are struggling with. Identify common pain point, then grab material or speakers that can help.
• Just start the community with a few people. Once you build the core, then the others will join and gain value from it.
• Just because there is no visual engagement on a post, that does not mean that the post was not valuable to the community.

• CoPs only work if you can find committed individuals investing in keeping them up and running.
• The smaller and more personal a community is, the less effort it takes to keep it alive.
• Generally people want to contribute, they just need some encouragement.

• Find the allies within your organisation

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Chapter 1: Communities of Practice: The Essentials

• A Community of Practice (or CoP for short) is a group of people who regularly interact around a shared passion, that they want to learn about and get better at.
• CoPs were first proposed by Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger in ‘Situated Learning’ (1991). Wenger expanded on the concept in Communities of Practice (1998).
• CoPs are about sharing information, improving skills and working advancing the general knowledge of the domain. CoPs are built on personal relationships, networking, knowledge sharing and common skills.
• Through sharing information and experiences members learn from each other.
• Once you have more than six people who are keen, communication gets harder and you need think about starting a CoP to put more rigour around…
• Rituals, cadence, formats and topics of discussion
• You might need to define the goals of your CoP too
• CoPs help product people share best practice and ways to solve specific challenges.
• CoPs can filter and curate content so it’s most relevant for your company and context.
👀
This is one of the stronger arguments I’ve seen for internal CoPs
• CoPs can define your product culture and your product management approach, through the methodologies you use.
• CoPs can help direct personal development and are incredibly useful when onboarding new team members.
• CoPs should be a safe space to share frustrations.
• They can help drive change, through forming a single voice and view on how to improve company interactions between disciplines.
• Very few companies are currently making use of the CoP format or aware of its power.

Chapter 2: Getting Started: What you need to do

• The author teases a Community of Practice Canvas (but you’ll have pay for consultancy to learn how to use it 🤷‍♀️).
• Community of Practice Canvas headings:
• Purpose: What does the CoP want to achieve? (limit to 3)
• Values: What’s important to us a community? (limit to 3)
• Success Definition: How does the community define success?
• Roles within the community. Who is the community for and what roles can members play?
• Finding Rituals and Rhythm. Which rituals deepen the bonds among members? (also worth limiting)
• Content and Curation: What content creates value for the community?
• Workshops: Which workshops will nurture the community?
• Shared Experiences: How to create shared experiences within the community?
• Practicalities: How do people join, or leave? What are the rules?
• Channel and Platform: What channels does the community use to communicate and gather?
• Incentives: Are contributions rewarded in some way?
• Financing, sponsorship and leadership support: What is the community plan to be financially sustainable?
• How to start a Product Management Community (Phases / Steps)
• Phase 1: Create the minimum viable community:
• Successful communities start from real personal connections between 2-3 people.
• You can’t stick this stage. Large artificial communities tend to fail.
• Find a couple of people who are passionate, and get going, share and learn from each other.
• If successful you’ll have some momentum.
• Don’t get too involved. Allowing the group to have autonomy increases motivation.
• Phase 2: Give it some structure
• If your Product Managers are sharing resources and learning form each other you’re ahead of most companies.
• Steer the conversation from updates toward reflecting no which tools, methodologies, and frameworks made them successful.
• Keep the group small but add a ritual that allows everyone to engage. Make sure it is a value add ritual, else participation will be low
• Create a shared learning goal between peers. You can find the right goal by running a workshop. Find several people with similar challenges then find a good format to tackle them (e.g. reading a book, watching a talk together, attending a meetup). Then bring folks back into a group to share perspectives and learning.
• Start by making these events a “one-off.” Don’t worry too much about setting them up as community rituals in the first place.
• Let time go by, and let people learn the things they want to learn.
• Remember people have a job to do, this make attendance hard but incentive high for learning new skills.
• If new sessions aren’t happening organically, there could be a systematic problem with time or culture.
• We need to invest time in learning and reflection to master our craft.
• Leadership should encourage people to attend.
• Call a product community retro. Focus on the things you can action. Give them four headlines to think about:
• Community Purpose
• Success measures
• Rituals
• Time investment
• Step 2 is about creating a real community connecting all the product folks in the organisation. Help them connect and find things to learn together.
• Step 3: Formalise it and find community management allies
• Ideally the community itself is voting to spend more time together an organise better.
• Desire to do more raises questions like…
• Who has bandwidth to help organise?
• Is there any budget?
• Do we have permission for an offsite?
• This is a sign if a healthy curious community, help where you can
• A CoP can encourage folks to learn and master their craft. It can also keep senior staff more engaged and motivated.
• Get out of their way and help them get the support and sponsorship they need to follow their passion.
• Align learning goals to company needs where possible.
• At 40 members and 3–4 different rituals consider allocating official time and resource to maintain the community (like prepping sessions etc.)
• Generally senior product people like doing community management work. Find community allies, and get them the support to do it well

Chapter 3: Community Guidelines (3 examples)

• CoPs don’t necessarily need rules and structure when they’re starting out.

Chapter 4: Community Checklists and Questions

• Establish rituals in larger more mature CoPs.
• A strong set of product rituals…
• creates a rhythm and glue that holds the community together.
• fosters a sense of belonging and shared identity through interactions.
• facilitates learning and collaboration.
• can be formal or informal.
• are well-planned and organised, with clear agendas and goals.
• are inclusive and participatory.
• have ground rules (respect others, stay on topic, listen to each other).
• Consult the community about adding or removing rituals
• Examples of CoP Purpose:
• Building social connections
• Creating best practices
• Identifying and addressing skill gaps
• Learning from others
• Learning together
• Sharing with others
• Talking about and solving problems together
• Sharing success stories
• Examples of CoP Success Measures:
• High return on time invested by members
• 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)
• Questions to ask when thinking about adding more rituals…
• 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?
• Questions to ask about content sharing 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?
• How can content support the ritual’s rhythm? Editorial calendars = stability + freshness
• Ideas for rituals and meetings…

Chapter 5: Learning from Other Cop Leaders

• Community is a place where…
• where people belong
• where they turn to for help
• where they can contribute to help others
• Product managers can feel lonely on their teams.
• Meeting ideas:
• ‘Product and Friends’ is a great name for an open community meeting.
• Product training day → A theme, a keynote, some activities, wrap up.
• ‘Product Academy’ → to onboard and teach more junior PM. 1 week of:
• Understanding Our Users and the Market
• Delivering Impact
• Data & Analytics
• Engineering Basics
• Product teardown meeting → analyse other products, discuss the findings, and learn together. Only one person to prepare something.
• Be careful of CoP presentations feeling like they are ‘high stakes’.
• If participation is low → join forces with another CoP that has some overlap (e.g. UX)
• Don’t book CoP sessions over stand-ups.
• CoP engagement is mostly driven by intrinsic motivation.
• Management should make it clear that it’s encouraged to spend time with the CoP.
• Expect 10% of people to actively take part and come to every meeting.
• Steal from the best: invite and watch thought leaders
• Internal communities allow you to talk about things you can’t talk about on the outside.

‣

Three circles model developed by Michel Bachmann

• Creating a space for people to come together, share, learn, and talk about what’s working and what’s not working.
• We really do learn in community, by discussing ideas with each other, by hearing about what other people are doing, and by seeing lots and lots of examples.
• I’m done with being the “expert.” That’s not the role I want to play.
• Set monthly challenges: designed to help people invest in a discovery skill.
• Monthly Book Club: read a book one month → discuss the one we read the previous month.
• Design in weekly activities to help people apply what they read in the book
• Have a new member call with everyone who joined in the last two weeks.
• Create a new member journey and an onboarding process. Outline all the things you’d want a new member to do (e.g. introduce yourself, reply to somebody else’s post).
• Conference clubs → prepare for external PM conferences, raise awareness, builds networks
• Large networks are important in Product Management.
• When you participate in a CoP, it’s very important to have a goal for why you’re doing it.
• Friday “Product Coffee” → share things that happened during the week like successes and challenges and pick each other’s brains on particular themes.
• Some people are just ready to receive but not ready to give.
• Post about your failures, make it OK to be vulnerable.
• Crowdsource what people are struggling with. Identify common pain point, then grab material or speakers that can help.
• Start with basic tooling, even an excel sheet of resources can be useful.
• “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
• Just start the community with a few people. Once you build the core, then the others will join and gain value from it.
• Just because there is no visual engagement on a post, that does not mean that the post was not valuable to the community.

Chapter 6: Digging into the data

• CoPs only work if you can find committed individuals investing in keeping them up and running.
• Think about how to reward the right behaviour: learning, sharing, and CoP building.
• The smaller and more personal a community is, the less effort it takes to keep it alive.
• What are rituals/formats/channels that work well for your company’s community:
• Bi-Weekly Call: Random updates + focused learning
• Monthly Events: E.g. Learn about Product Analytics Session
• Monthly informal get-together
• Quarterly formats: book clubs or external speakers
• Quarterly off-sites Product training camp.
• Attend external events and share back.
• Onboarding calls and workshops.
• Product academy/community training days.
• Community newsletters.
• Weekly learning challenges Quizzes.
• Chat tool + weekly roundup.
• Wiki sharing/weekly worthy reading.
• 1:1 matchings.
• Generally people want to contribute, they just need some encouragement.

Chapter 7: Conclusion

• Follow more product people for ideas
• Find others building a product community and swap notes
• Find the allies within your organisation