How we accidentally built a valuable product community of practice
I don’t know about anyone else, but I am constantly surprised by how difficult it seems to be to build and maintain a flourishing product community of practice (CoP). As product people we seem to be really good at sharing our work externally, presenting at events and conferences etc. But when it comes to sharing our problems and finding time to connect as a community inside an organisation — well, I’ve never seen it done really well. And where it does exist, it seems heavily reliant on individuals to keep them going. I look across at the design, delivery and tech CoPs and think…why aren’t we doing that?
So I wanted to share a story of an accidental success we’ve had at the Co-op recently. Not in the wider Co-op Product CoP (that can still feel a bit tumbleweedy unfortunately), but in our own little corner of that world — the Loyalty portfolio. This is the group who own the Co-op App, Co-op Account, Member Offers, the Co-operate platform and wider membership stuff. We have 3 Product Owners, 3 Product Managers, 1 Principal and a Head of Product in this area.
About 6 months ago we started putting in weekly catch ups to talk about things happening across the portfolio. We’d just ‘re-branded’ as a portfolio and had a shared decision stack for the first time. It felt like a good opportunity to get together regularly to chat stuff through.
At first it wasn’t the best meeting in anybody’s calendar to be honest. We didn’t do a great job of defining the agenda in advance, we all knew one another to varying degrees depending on how long we’d been at the Co-op and whether we’d ever needed to work together on something. The ‘I just need to skip this one’ rate was pretty high.
But then, over time, we gradually started to get to know one another better. We started sharing things we weren’t sure about and asking for advice where we didn’t feel confident. We didn’t bring things to present, we just shared WIP miro boards and word docs and other artefacts. We’d built enough trust to start really using the group effectively.
We recently decided to add a bit of formality by centring our discussion each week around a broad product theme. We’ve been working through the following questions, one per session, just discussing as a group how we do things in our team and reflecting on what we can learn from each other and what we might want to do differently in the future.
So far the questions we’ve asked ourselves are:
- How do you share information with your stakeholders?
- How do you identify new opportunities or problems?
- How do you make decisions on what to do next?
- How do you help your team understand the bigger picture?
Our catch ups now feel like an opportunity to share ideas, get support and lift our heads up from the day to day. We are taking the time to consider how we’re actually practising our craft in our day to day jobs. Which gives us the chance to reflect on where we might need to grow as product people and how we might build even better products and services in the future.
It’s the best community of practice I’ve ever been part of.
