Community of Practice as People Development
Build and evaluate a product community that scales growth cheaper than courses or coaches
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 85%
A case for running a community of practice as a low-cost, high-ROI way to develop product people, plus criteria for judging whether a community is worth your time and a canvas for building one. It shifts people development off the individual manager's desk and distributes it across peers.
Origin
Petra Wille's research year on communities of practice, informed by surveying clients and strangers and by interviewing Teresa Torres about her community; she uses a 'community canvas' with clients.
Core principles
- 01A community of practice is cheaper than trainings, conference tickets, or external coaches, with high ROI and network effects
- 02Distribute the workload across many people — a community resting on one-to-three shoulders isn't sustainable and becomes a pyramid, not a community
- 03Signal-to-noise is a better success metric than raw engagement
- 04Sharing what you learn brings clarity to your own thinking — the contributor benefits too
How to run it
- 1
Define purpose, values, and success
Run a workshop (using a community canvas) to agree the community's purpose, its values, and how it defines success — and revisit these as membership changes over time.
Pro tip Purpose is not stable; periodically pause and re-reflect as members come and go.
- 2
Establish rituals and rhythm
Set recurring rituals and a cadence that keep the community active, learning from what others (e.g. Teresa Torres) tried and what did and didn't work.
Pro tip Some level of activity is essential — too many communities are effectively dead.
- 3
Distribute roles into circles
Avoid one person being the center. Organize as smaller circles of interest (groups of 10-15 around a topic) and build bridges between them; give people roles like moderator, ritual organizer, curator.
Pro tip The leader connects dots and adds impulse, but others should curate best reads and videos too — don't be the beacon of all answers.
Watch out If one person polices and runs everything, it's organized like a company pyramid, not a community, and won't be sustainable.
- 4
Curate for signal over engagement
Prioritize content curation and keep signal-to-noise high, especially early on. Treat engagement skeptically as a success metric.
Pro tip Fund a decent amount of someone's time for community management — it needn't be full-time, but it can't be nobody's job.
- 5
Evaluate a community you might join
Judge a community by: does it help you network with interesting people; do you learn a real nugget every now and then; can you contribute what you know; is there mutual trust; do you enjoy the people; and is there genuine activity.
Pro tip Look outward too — external communities (Torres's, Mind the Product, Lenny's) exist alongside any internal one, and many people have never heard of them.
In the wild
Lenny described his ~10,000-member Slack (gated to paid newsletter subscribers) deliberately built so he is NOT the center — the goal was to bring smart, filtered people together to help each other, with a core team (Trey curating conversations, Ria on meetups, Jess on mentorship) distributing the load.
→ A vibrant, self-sustaining community with worldwide monthly meetups, mentorship, and mastermind groups — validating Petra's point that distributing responsibility off one or two shoulders is what makes it sustainable.
Common mistakes
Resting the community on one-to-three people
If a handful of people carry everything including unpleasant policing work, it collapses and behaves like a company pyramid rather than a community. Distribute workload and responsibility across circles.
Using engagement as the success metric
High engagement can just be noise; it doesn't guarantee value. Signal-to-noise is the more meaningful measure, so curate hard, especially early.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product leaders wanting a scalable, affordable way to develop their people, and PMs deciding which community to invest their time in
Not ideal for
Situations needing immediate one-on-one skill remediation, or organizations unwilling to fund any dedicated community-management time
From the transcript
“it's actually a pretty cheap way of doing people development because trainings are expensive conference tickets are expensive getting an external product code expensive”
“it's not sustainable if the whole Community is on the shoulders of one two three people so you need to distribute the workload”
“I think more of it as circles different Circles of interest and then Building Bridges between them”
“a lot of communities that I see use engagement as a success metric and I'm actually not sure if this is a good success metric”
“this community canvas that I use when I'm working with clients”
From the episode
How to be the best coach to product people
Petra Wille (Strong Product People)