8 tips for running a great product management guild

Back in 2012, Spotify released a whitepaper talking about how they scaled their company. One of the ideas that they introduced was a community of practice called a guild. Here’s how they describe it:

A Guild is an organic and wide-reaching “community of interest”, a group of people who want to share knowledge, tools, code, and practices.

(Of course, Spotify don’t have a monopoly on the guild concept, for example, here’s how Hootsuite describe their take.)

Inspired by Spotify, Trade Me’s Product Management Guild kicked off in early 2015. It is made up of all of Trade Me’s product managers (about 22 at the time of writing) and our primary touchpoint is a three-hour in-person meeting once a month where we share knowledge, tools, and practices. Topics include things like:

• Downloads from conferences and workshops like Mind the Product, Leading the Product, WWDC and Google IO
• ‘Lessons learnt’ case studies on products we’ve built (e.g. shipping), or approaches or experiments we’ve tried (e.g. metrics-driven development)
• General tech trends e.g. how Kiwis use their mobile phones, social media usage
• General information sharing sessions from other parts of Trade Me like Platform and Operations, Marketing, Legal or UX
• Discussions on our tools (e.g. tips on roadmapping) and processes (e.g. how to best capture ideas)
• Zippy WIP — a fast, round the table, ‘what are you working on?’

Every 6 months or so we run an offsite too, where we spend the whole day together to go a bit deeper, both in terms of the relationship and how we do product management.

Unlike some of the other guilds at Trade Me, and the original definition from Spotify, ours is an invite-only group — essentially if you work at Trade Me and have ‘Head of Product’ or ‘Product manager’ somewhere in your title you are expected to be part of the product management guild, and if you don’t then you can’t just turn up uninvited.

We also have a charter that describes the behaviour we expect of one another. It looks like this:

As product managers at Trade Me, we agree to:

1. Communicate well

We communicate frequently and clearly with one another, with our squads, with our colleagues from across Trade Me, and with our users.

2. Help one another

We seek and provide input and advice on new ideas, initiatives and projects. We actively listen, we respond in a timely way, we share knowledge, we engage. We want to learn from one another.

3. Constructively challenge

We deliver candid and constructive feedback and we strive for specifics — describing what is wrong, what is missing, what isn’t clear, or what doesn’t make sense. As a group we demand well-considered product decisions, even when those decisions don’t directly impact the products we are responsible for.

4. Put users first

Our aim is to improve the lives of people who use the products we build. We strive to deliver stable, elegant, innovative products that deliver more than our users ask for. We are advocates for our users and act with them in mind, whether it be developing new features or acting fast when things go wrong.

5. Innovate

We build with the future in mind. We experiment and take risks, we iterate fast and well, we accept failure is a by-product of the innovation process. We consider day-to-day business-as-usual alongside 10x bets on the future of the company.

6. Be openly professional

We are a passionate and engaged team, success-driven and quality-focused. We pursue alternate viewpoints. We are transparent in our communication and reasoning. We prove the value of product management through the work we do, and we inspire those around us. We are never dismissive. We aren’t dicks and don’t tolerate those that are.

Best practices and tips and tricks

Lego. That’s a tip — use Lego

Here are a things that we would recommend if you wanted to set up a guild:

• Think carefully about the frequency of meetings — err on the side of more frequent to begin with, and adjust over time. We started off by alternating informal ‘drop-in’ style sessions with more formal, compulsory sessions but ended up dropping the ad hoc sessions when the attendance dropped off.
• Begin with a retrospective and use the pain points as a starting point for topics. I think guilds work best when they aren’t just about talking, but when there is some aspect of doing, and what better thing to ‘do’ than fix the things that aren’t working well?
• Take good notes. We write up minutes of our meetings on the company wiki, for all to see. It acts as a handy place to drop slides, and if anyone misses a session then they can peruse the previous 33 meetings at their leisure (it’s great for new PMs too!)
• Get out of the building. Some of the more memorable, brain-stretching guild sessions have been when we’ve visited Air New Zealand or the Police Innovation Centre, gone to our national museum (handily, just across the road from the office), or taken an all-electric car for a spin.
• Encourage culture of self-governance. It started out with me as Chief Product Officer organising the guild, but these days we have rotating hosts who help curate, coordinate, and administrate the guild. This makes the guild resilient — it doesn’t fall apart as soon as someone is sick, on holiday or leaves.
• Invite non-Product Managers to speak. We often invite internal people to speak to us on a wide variety of topics: what claims we can make from a legal point of view, Elastic Search functionality or third-party usage of our API. We’ve only had external people a couple of times, from Lightbox and PwC Digital, but we should do that more.
• Encourage continuous improvement. Our last session we had our first themed meeting, all about pricing. We’ve recently extended the in-person session from two hours to three. A few months ago we agreed to invite mentees to our sessions. We are tweaking things all the time.
• Do a Zippy WIP. People discussing what they are working on can be pretty dull if it’s not something that intersects with your own work. So we do what we call a Zippy WIP (WIP = Work-in-progress) — the idea is that the update is short and it is perfectly acceptable to not give an update at all. Our product managers find this really useful, in order to better understand how to leverage one another’s experience.

Good product managers take stewardship of their craft seriously. We’ve found that providing a space to talk shop, through a vibrant healthy guild has been a great way to grow the product management practice at Trade Me.