Communities of Practice: Making it Engaging

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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. 

But what else is there to do? 

That’s what this series is about.

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Example of the filled-in prioritization 'tray'

Running a Cross-Team Initiatives Prioritization Brainstorm

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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.

This post is about how I set up the brainstorm.

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Creating Team-Driven Product Management Principles

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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.

The board was set up  like this, in Miro:

[sticky note] even over [sticky note]
[sticky note] even over [sticky note]
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Careers in Product #OhioTechDay

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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?

Take a look!

Book Review: No Rules Rules

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★★★★★

Cover of "No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention" by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

https://www.norulesrules.com/

“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.

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Learning Tech Basics for Non-Technical PMs

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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.

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Book Review: Continuous Discovery Habits

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Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value, by Teresa Torres

★★★✬☆

My notes from the book
My messy notes

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.

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How vision, strategy, objectives, epics, and principles relate to one another

Book Review: Strong Product People

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★★★★★

Strong Product People: A Complete Guide to Developing Great Product Managers by Petra Wille


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.

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Blurred out view of the top half of our blueprint

Service Blueprints: A Tool for Mapping out Complex Problems

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As a product manager, I recently had a new team added to my responsibilities. One of my new priorities was to help improve a complex flow that was taking a lot of our team’s time, and was the source of some pain points for our customers.

While there was a pre-existing idea of what we needed to do, I wasn’t sure it was the right first step to take. Instead, I wanted to take a look at the process more holistically, come up with ideas, and prioritize.
This flow involves our customers, people at our company in contact with the customers, and people at our company doing more work behind the scenes. It also involves our public website, our app, and multiple back-end systems.

Given the complexity, a service blueprint seemed like an obvious choice to help me understand what the flow is today, and how we could improve it in the future.

Example blueprint from Miro, with physical evidence, customer actions, onstage contact actions, backstage contact actions, and support processes
Example from Miro
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Showing PM at the intersection of technology, data, business, and UX

From UX Director to Product Manager

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I recently gave a talk for UX Akron on the similarities and differences between being a UX director at an agency vs a client-side product manager. I made that switch mid-year 2020, after more than 6 years as a UX director.

I covered:

  • A brief definition of what a digital product manager is
  • The differences in terms of where I spend my time as a UX director vs a product manager within a given project
  • The skills needed for a product manager vs a UX director
  • Resources to learn more about becoming a product manager

You can watch a video of the presentation, look at the presentation itself, or check out my summary below.

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