Today marks a special milestone; it is the two year anniversary of the product meet up group PM Huddle. It’s been truly an amazing ride and I thought it would be worth taking a trip down memory lane and tell the story of we came to be, through my rose tinted glasses of course!
I got into product management literally accidentally in 2010 and fell head over heels with both product management and agile development. I was fortunate to find the Agile MY community early on, but struggled to find a product management community that regularly met up in Malaysia. Maybe I wasn’t searching hard enough, maybe I wasn’t really serious about it at that time, perhaps I searched in all the wrong places, but save for one product hunt session that I went for, there was none. I had been trying to get things going, but nothing much was taking off and by around 2016, I told myself that I was going to get this product thing going by hook or by crook.
It was at this time that I reached out to Olha Yohansen-Veselova, and lo and behold, we had the same thoughts!
In fact, she had been working with another product manager Serene Gan and they were in the midst of organising the first meetup and I was invited to be part of it. What was it called? PM Huddle.
And so, on April 6, 2016 at approximately 7pm, PM Huddle was born.
Much has changed since that first meetup:
- Olha traded the heat and humidity of Malaysia for the cool and windmills of Amsterdam.
- Serene traded the LRTs of Malaysia for the MRTs of Singapore
- PM Huddle is now helmed by Chin Wye Jin, Maria Visanoiu and myself
- We now have a Twitter handle @pmhuddle
What will the future hold? I don’t know. Will PM Huddle still be here to celebrate its third anniversary? I certainly hope so! But what I do know is that the desire to continue growing and maturing the product management community in Malaysia is still strong, and I’m still head over heels for (almost) all things product management and agile.
Happy Friday and Happy Birthday PM Huddle!
