My learnings from building creators of products

Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash

In 2019, I was mentoring a bunch of young folks who were either early in their product management career or were trying to break into product management roles. Talking to them, helped me understand the dilemmas these people face and gave me a chance to share some of the things I had learned in my career and have a relook at all the mistakes I had made. However, the number of requests were increasing and I was unable to do justice to most with my time limitations. I realised there could be a better way to connect these young or experienced creators. Last year around the same time, I put the following poll on Twitter -

From twitter.com/pentropy

And without thinking much, I started a telegram group called ‘Creators of Products’ with an aim of creating a safe place for people who want to share and learn the art and science of creating products. I saw some communities already existing, but they faced the same problem that product companies face — Silos. There are communities of product managers, engineers, designers etc which are brilliant in sharpening the individual crafts but over years, I have realised that building products need a lot more than super-smart individuals solving for their function or their tasks independently.

Here are some things I learnt while steering the community in last 1 year -

1. There are a lot of helpful people around. Most times we don’t see them or we don’t find them and that’s because we are looking in the wrong places
2. Lot of us feel — ‘I don’t know enough to help’. While ‘I don’t know’ is always true, but our experiences even though they might look small or embarrassing are good enough to help a whole lot of people out there
3. We did a lot of things in the community, figuring out which should we think through in intricate detail (The first expert speak session and alpha users group) and which one should just be launched (hiring excel) has helped balance impact and speed
4. It’s necessary to have well-defined principles even at a small scale. Our principles of transparency and respect have helped create a non-negative environment in the community
5. Getting feedback is important, but predictions like ‘This won’t work’ can be ignored as they just plant doubts which aren’t useful
6. Open communities have their challenges but from the perspective of improving the overall level of creators, they do a better job than closed elite communities. They reflect the same problems that are faced by multiple product companies where decision making happens in closed circles.
7. Product creation in the coming decade will not be limited to geographical centres. Though there is merit in having these ecosystems in cities but open, location-agnostic communities are proving that there aren’t any barriers to reaching to people anymore.
8. The Internet can be a very toxic or a productive place, it will be as we make it. At creators of products, we keep a strong eye on weeding out any discrimination or bullying. A lot of my time early days went in flagging and deleting any pirated content that’s shared (which is sadly a common practice). Another thing we keep course-correcting is lack of gender neutrality. Having done these in early days, we hardly see these concerns in the community conversations.
9. It never feels enough. There are always a hundred more things we need to do or we want to do. Oddly satisfying feeling that.
10. The experts in the field are very human. As we break the imaginary doors, we realise that they speak the same language and that validation helps change the mindsets of young creators.
11. The younger generation will have a much faster career graph ever seen. The 30s are now the 20s, the 40s are the 30s. Create and rule the world.

Some things that helped me grow the community

1. Seek help. One doesn’t need to do everything themselves
2. Don’t wait for launch till features are fully cooked. A basic google sheet worked as the hiring sheet, a basic form helped map mentors
3. Don’t waste time on things that aren’t working or helping anyone
4. Use social media, especially Twitter as much as possible. Interact
5. Try to be inclusive, but don’t be worried if everyone is benefitting all time time. In a community, those who engage and give end up learning a lot more

We are just warming up at creators of products. I am so grateful to all the 40 people who have volunteered over the last year. What a fascinating group of people! To take the community to the next level, we have decided to give more responsibility to some of these team members by making them co-founders. We will post more details on the Twitter handle on the same.

If you haven’t joined the slack channel yet. Here is the link — creatorsofproducts.com/join

Photo by Jean-Philippe Delberghe on Unsplash