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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Building Successful Communities of Practice

A short insight packed book about building communities of practice. There’s nothing revolutionary but it provides a good overview to anyone interested in starting or improving a practice. Prior to reading this book, I hadn’t considered using skill benchmarks as a way to pair individuals with a learning parter or buddy. Worth the time.

andrewclark.co.uk

Product Management in Practice

I was wrongly skeptical of this book before reading it. In hindsight, I should have read it sooner. I thought the book would attempt to cover product management end-to-end without depth. Instead, I found the book focused on where theory hits practice and things don't work as you expect. Clearly, the author's been in the trenches and experienced that cognitive dissonance between theory and practice. And for that, this book deserves a place on your product management shelf.

andrewclark.co.uk

Strong Product People

This is a great book, packed with relevant frameworks and tools. It does a great job of outlining all of the activities you behind developing great product managers. However, the book takes on too much. It tries to describe product strategy and product discovery in just one chapter and fails to do those concepts justice. It would have been a better book if it focused just on hiring and developing Product Managers.

andrewclark.co.uk

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.

• 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