Pipedrive’s PM Community–a unique bond of a million little useful lessons | Part 1

A great work environment is one that supports each team member’s individual contribution to the company’s success story. But what if there was another way of becoming better at what you do every single day? There is an old proverb saying that a friend’s eye is like a good mirror. Pipedrive’s product managers (PM) community is just that: a unique bond of a million little useful lessons, which you can always learn from. As a collaborative platform for sharing experiences and adopting new skills, the PM community serves as a safety net for its members.

Over the years, Pipedrive has grown both as a company and as a team. We have approximately four dozen product managers (PMs), each working on a specific aspect of the product to help customers grow their business. It’s a job like no other: It requires not only creativity but also the ability to sense customers’ needs and an open mind to explore different possible solutions. To validate (and sometimes refute) their gut feeling, PMs work closely with research, design, engineering, marketing and customer support teams to identify demands and find the best solution to address them. A little bit of passion does not hurt either: The freedom to invest time in studying the product and executing ideas has played a significant role in refining many great projects at Pipedrive.

So why is there a need for a community? With combined experiences and lessons learned, there is a lot of hidden potential within the team. Sharing practices helps each person grow as a product manager. By supporting its members when they need it most, the community serves as a safety net for the entire team, regardless of members’ background, professional experience, tenure, or physical location. Not to mention, it also brings value to customers in the long run. Perhaps one of the most important values of the community is serving as a constant reminder that success is not just about crossing the finish line. Instead, it’s about the journey itself. The lessons product managers learn through it allow them to grow even if they weren’t actively involved in the project at hand.

How it started

The formula for creating groundbreaking product concepts is normally quite simple. It consists of curiosity about customers’ demands, the courage to experiment and try to build great products with the team and one secret ingredient: perseverance, since it takes time to polish a product. As work tasks tend to be very different from one another, it would normally take a lot of time to perfect the recipe. Over time and experience, committed PMs can increase the success rate of started projects.

But there is another way to gain product experience, and this is where the PM Community comes into play. Approximately two years ago, Arseniy Titorenko, one of Pipedrive’s group product managers in ecosystem, started conceptualizing a structured format for learning from each other’s experiences systematically.

“We used to and still have Lunch and Learn sessions, which is a great format, but I realized how easy it is to skip them or simply not pay attention to them, for example, due to workload and other responsibilities. I wanted to start a meaningful community that would benefit our PMs. But I wasn’t sure if my feeling was just subjective or a unanimous challenge, so I created a survey and sent it to fellow PMs. The survey results were conclusive: We needed a community. The concept of the community is very simple: We’d present initiatives that’d help learning the challenging parts of our job from diverse perspectives and keep changing the roles,” explains Arsenyi.

The architecture of the PM community

Our community has its guildmaster and rituals, designed to exchange ideas with each other, learn, share experiences and stay aligned. The community is all about people and we are building it together. This means that if any of the PMs has an idea or a challenge, they are more than welcome to invest in the community’s growth and improvement.

The community is not just one club rather it is a set of unique initiatives, each serving a particular purpose:

— To be aligned with the company’s strategy

• Product strategy roundtable sessions are held once per month. They serve as detailed discussions where team members discuss how to implement the strategy and collaborate on it.
• Product all hands are held once per month as well. We use them to discuss topics that impact the product organization.

— To talk and get to know your colleagues

• Random coffee breaks are held bi-weekly and help us break boundaries in a world that’s becoming more virtual over time, keeping us away from a random chat in the kitchen. As product managers work on the same product from multiple locations, this initiative helps build bridges despite the physical distance.
• Meet my culture is an initiative that aims to strengthen the PM community and improve collaboration between different stakeholders by learning more about fellow PMs and how other cultures compare to theirs. The goal is to bring more awareness, understanding and empathy in a relaxed, friendly and naturally curious environment.

— To promote feedback

• Weekly PM critiques promote deliberations between PMs. They tend to focus on early-stage initiatives and ideas–aka “bets”. During these sessions, participants share feedback and ask and reply to questions to help them define their next steps and improve alignment between different product areas. These sessions make a great opportunity to assist fellow team members and practice one of our core values here at Pipedrive: “be teachable.”

— To learn and exchange experiences

• PM F-ups sessions are held monthly. As the name suggests, the concept comprises voluntarily self-roasting. As a result, people get to learn from each other’s mistakes.
• Pipedrive product sense sessions are also held on a monthly basis and are dedicated to improving product skills. During those sessions, participants discuss what makes a product great and its impact on business, allowing them to hone in on the key areas a particular product solves and come up with ideas to make it even better.

— To revisit the old good practices

• Weekly product lunch and learn sessions enable PMs, designers, product researchers and product analysts to learn from previous successes and flops. Each session follows the 15x15 format, meaning that after the 15 min presentation, a 15 min Q&A session follows.
• Product PPP (Progress, Plans, Problems) is a management technique used widely at Pipedrive for recurring (daily, weekly, or monthly) status reporting.

— Tools to keep learning

• Possibility to learn actively with Kindle and Audible accounts
• Monetization and engagement course
• Common education budget

It’s the people building the community

In short, the PM community is like a joint tool for all the PMs working at Pipedrive, enabling different ways for sharing product experiences. As one of the community’s principles states, it’s the people building the community, not the other way around. No matter your background, work experience, or even physical location, the community stands for a certain sense of togetherness that helps build team chemistry and work together to develop product organization.

Despite the structured format and agreed principles, involvement in the community is voluntary. It’s important that people want to take part in it. And that is actually the core essence of the community: it’s not just another work obligation, rather a unique bond of a million little useful lessons shared by all the people who are part of it.

Interested in-depth? Read Part 2 here.

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