From a local meetup to a global community
How COVID brought the UX & Product world closer together
This week we changed our logo for our UX & Product Community. But behind a smaller change there is actually a bigger story to tell.
Little did I know what I was starting, when I setup the first Munich UX Meetup on Jan 24, 2017. Back then I was Head of Product & User Experience for Delightex. I would like to give you more insights about what happened so far, how we grew and what we are aiming for in the future.
Beyond push conference
Let’s start in the year 2016. Together with my friends at push.conference, we already formed a large, annual conference for digital product designers and creative technologists. Uniting 600 people from all over the world at Kongresshalle in Munich every October for six years already. The two days are great and I always came back with tons of ideas, extremely motivated from the talks, connections and inspiration I got. But something was different that year.
I was missing a continuous series of meetings, not waiting for the big bang once a year. It felt like I didn’t want to wait for the Octoberfest to happen once a year, I wanted to go to the Hofbräuhaus, which is always open and you can meet likeminded people there for a drink ;)
Founding Munich UX Meetup
I began to research for local meetups and found some like the UX Monday Munich, the local IXDA Munich chapter or the München UX Practitioners. They offered great talks and speakers to the community. Unfortunately all of them happened very unregularly once or twice a quarter which was hard to predict. And I simply missed them most of the times. What I was looking for was a regular exchange, something I could predict, like every first week of the month. Giving me the opportunity to actually be there.
And furthermore I was in recruiting mode for UX people back then and I personally believe that you need to build your employer brand out there to attract good talent. This brand needs to be authentic, to prove this authenticity, you need to go out there and show the world, that you know key topics in the field and engage with the talents directly.
I had the feeling, that I need to do something. That’s why I went to meetup.com on early December 2016 and setup the Munich UX Meetup with a first logo inspired by a local soccer club and two sentences about why you should join:”You love to draw user journeys and enjoy to get lost in tons of post-its? You value early prototyping of products and services? Great, let‘s unite and exchange for the greater good!” That was it.
Like I knew it from work already, I defined a first, fast experiment before I acutally host a meetup. It was “Attract a minimum of 70 people in the first four weeks”, if I can make it, I will continue. If not, I will try something else.
I used this metric more often in the past, as I misused meetup.com as a channel for measuring interest of a specific industry topics like self coaching, smart home or perfumery. Starting a meetup around those topics and measuring the appeal: Is this attractive? Will people join? Let’s wait and see :)
I got over 100 meetup members for MunichUX in the first four weeks and called the experiment successful. (Sidenote: I tried an Emerging Tech People Meetup with the same conditions and I could collect only 50 people, closed it without a meetup)
Before hosting the first meetup event two months later, I was asking the group members which formats and topics they are interested to match their expectations best. Around 70% of the members participated (which was already a great sign): It appeared that people wanted an 2–3 hour afterwork event on Tuesdays or Thursdays once a month with a set of quick ignite talks formats (max. 10 slides / 10 minutes) followed by a casual get together over a beer in an office of another company you are not familiar with, yet.
You could argue: Why haven’t you used the push.conference brand? It was a conscious decision to start this new format as a satellite and see how it evolves. I didn’t want to risk to blur the push.conference identity as this was focused solely on the everyday UX practices, while push stands for inspiration, visionary and critical thoughts around the world of digital products.
The shift to UX & Product Munich Meetup
After the first meetup success with around 60 happy participants, I continued running bi-monthly meetups with 4 to 6 speakers switching locations within Munich and growing the meetup community to around 500 people by end of 2017.
In between, on August 3, 2017 I turned father of a beautiful daughter. This was a turning point for me in regards to afterwork activities. I was lucky that the community was already strong and Jan.Korsanke stepped in to become the official co-host which was a huge help. From time to time Sergey Ilin supported us, when I was travelling for a project.
Furthermore I sensed a shift in our members and my own personal interest. It turned out that only half of the audience of a UX meetup are actual UX people. Surprise.
The rest of the audience are product managers, founders, business consultants, marketing managers and tech people interested in the topic of user experience. Their key interest was not only listening to the talks (that’s just the good excuse to come), but mainly engaging with UX folks right there. And as the aspect of product related topics and people were raising, I wanted to include the members of the meetup under one brand. That’s why we started to call us: UX & PRODUCT MEETUP MUNICH.
After that small rebranding effort, some magic happened to our group after I got connected to Marianna from Google’s IsarValley in Munich. I heard that Google was actively searching for meetups they can host to become better connected to the local communities. Similar to my initial goal.
They said they can sponsor a venue for up to 90 people, media tech, free drinks and food as sponsoring gifts. For me this was a no brainer. We setup the first UX & Product Meetup of 2018 at Google and this was fully booked within the first 3 hours after announcing it. I was impressed. The Google brand within the UX & Product industry seems to be a powerful one. Surprise?
In addition we had 180 people on the waiting list. From this meetup on we switched to a monthly series at the IsarValley for almost the rest of the year. We grew our community to around 1.500 by end of 2018.
On July 14, 2019 I became father again. This time a beautiful boy which made me shift priorities, again. My main focus turned to my two kids and unfortunately Jan shifted priorities as well, focusing on his new leadership role. Thank you for the crazy ride Jan!
I was lucky to convince two of my push.conference peers Philipp and Henning to step in and continue the efforts of keeping this community alive, engaged and happy. They did and still do in their precious free time. Deep thanks for that!
UX & Product Online Meetups
While the meetup member base was steadily growing we started to play around with new formats like a BBQ meetup at Freeletics in 2019 or a Product Leaders Lunch series with a round of Lean Coffee Discussion beginning of 2020.
Unfortunately the Corona virus, which seemed to be far away in China, was getting real right here. This global threat made us pause all local activities for the first half of 2020. But this state of shock didn’t stay for too long. We realized that, although the world is shutting down almost everything. This is something which will not stop us from learning, connecting and engaging around UX & Product with our wonderful community.
In addition there was an opportunity to team up with Mirela Mus from Product People Berlin, which we found very appealing in times where everyone is forced to operate remotely. The boundaries of local meetups suddenly disappeared. Instead of being sad about not having our local community all together in place, we embraced the change.
That’s why we switched to an online meetup on Zoom in April as an early experiment in collaboration with the Product People and a high profile lineup of Jeff Gothelf and Tom Greever. An event you could consider earning money from it, but we saw it more as a gift for our community after some months of absence. The recordings can be found on our UX & Product YouTube channel by the way.
The frequency of online meetups increased for a while, because they are so easy to setup and join. You don’t need to travel to a location, you can just join from the comfort of your own home. The downside of this easy access is a drastic increase of no-shows. Sometimes up to 70% which is just very hard to calculate for organizers. How many people will actually show up? On the other hand you get up to 300 people on your guestlist and have 90 people present anyways. So what.
Another great opportunity of the remote setup is the fact, that it allows you test something new. Philipp and me started some Bubbly Business talks, spontaenous pre-work discussions for 30 minutes with a glass of Champagne. Why? Because we can ;)
The whole COVID situation didn’t seem to go away and we explored completely new opportunities and formats. We got lucky to get a request from Peter and Jesse for their amazing idea of running a 24 hours global meetup series called 24HoursOfUX. Philipp, Henning and me got intrigued by that idea to not only join forces with german meetups, furthermore joining forces on a global stage.
All we had to do is getting a speaker for one hour and hosting a QA afterwards. Thanks to our great network from push.conference and meetup we could manage to get Phil Balagtas and Jeff Patton on board. Long story short: It was a huge success.
4.000 people joined this series across the globe and where extremely satisfied. Fun fact: One visitor managed to stay up the full length of the 24 hours. Our QA which was supposed to last for 30 minutes turned into a full 1,5 hours conversation with Phil, Jeff and the audience. That’s the beauty of online events, it brings everyone closer together. The distance to the expert speakers almost disappears.
UX & Product Community
After all those experiences, we got into thinking what we are doing here. UX & Product Meetup Munich did feel like limitation to us, rather than a supportive structure. Furthermore meetup.com as a tool was perceived as limitation as well. It’s great to setup local meetup events quick and gain traction. But it performs very poor if you actually want to engage with your audience. The discussion feature is almost invisible and rarely used, although this is something which we currently see as our main mission: Bring UX & Product people closer together. Not only once a month. Actually on a daily basis.
That was the reason for us to open up a Slack community for everyone to learn, engage and connect. This slack community is very internationally from day one: We have people from North America, Europe and Asia there. If you are reading this article and you want to join, feel free to do so if you haven’t already right here.
The UX & Product Slack community has a family-like atmosphere. You can be very open about your current needs or problems. There will always be someone who takes you seriously and replies. Not always immediately, but there will always be a reply. You can simply introduce yourself, share your CV to get feedback, discuss latest product releases, share a good book or event recommendation. And clarify open questions yourself. Furthermore we have private initiatives from our dear membersJohanna, Monica and Henning, who recently started their own Product Playground format hosting virtual workshops from the community for the community.
We are happy welcome you here if you follow our community principles :)
Brand transformation – UX & Product
We didn’t see the COVID crisis as a problem, it’s actually an opportunity which brings the world closer together.
By shifting to virtual meetups and Slack we saw a growing amount of international members from India, Mexico, Taiwan, US, Italy, Spain, Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Canada, China, UK, Australia and Germany to name a some. We got very empowered as we saw that, even though we are distributed around the globe with different cultures and context, we unite around a common goal: Making better digital products for the people.
We really like the open atmosphere we could establish where national boarders blur. Kindness first! ;)
This regular, international exchange in different formats broadens your mind and speeds up the process of coming to a conclusion to make a change in your (work) life. Everyone can discuss critical topics, share experiences, connect and work together from the comfort of your home office. We really enjoy pivoting into that direction.
After all the brand UX & Product Meetup Munich was perceived as something which is limiting us. We got rid of MUNICH, as this is the city where it all started, but not our main hub anymore. Furthermore we got rid of MEETUP, because with all the different formats of engaging the actual community this isn’t our main focus anymore as well.
What is left after all is our main focus: UX & Product
There are global initiatives bringing together product people like mind the product or design communities like IXDA. But we are missing a larger roof which unites UX people and PRODUCT people alike, as we believe both world need to be connected to make a change out there to create digital products which really ad value to people’s lifes.
In the end the logo which was visually following the local Munich soccer club, didn’t fit anymore and we were looking for a visualization which works for small online avatars and on the same hand is special in a way as it stands out.
That’s why we emphasize on the ampersand. A special, organic bond between the disciplines UX&P. Not a + or not a ❤. In reminiscence of our Munich roots we keep the colors of the city: Black and yellow.
As we value our community feedback we spent around 30 minutes of intense discussion about three different alternatives and finally ended up with this new one right here.
Closing the loop: UX & Product Conference
After we transformed not only local meetups to virtual ones, meetup members to participating community members and finally the logo, we wanted to break the continuous meetup cycle a bit as we have the ongoing community. Why not prepare something bigger? Something where UX & product people can unite for longer than a two hour online meetup?
As many conferences are not going to happen in 2020, we felt the need to step in. We discovered a wish to listen to the top leaders in the UX & Product industry and the need to deep dive into longer discussions. That’s why we setup the first UX & Product Conference for February 04, 2021 to kick-off the year with a fresh vibe.
Coming up with some unusual formats to find out what unites us and what seperates the both worlds on one half-day: conference.uxandproduct.com
Our mission: Uniting UX & Product
I know that Simon Sinek told us to start with the WHY, though let me close this one with the reason which drives us.
We, ourselves, have seen that a very deep and close collaboration between product and UX people can drive product success. Creating products which add value to people’s lives. Furthermore Product & UX teams have to work together to evanglise the value of that close collaboration, which evolves around the consumer jobs, the market competition, the technological possibilities and the internal organization structures.
The underlying problem isn’t necessarily product teams not following good practices of team work between both worlds. Not being empowered inside the organization to actually apply those practices, is often the case. We are here to change that by bringing people together around UX & Product (UX&P).
Not only the professionals themselves, as well as the stakeholders and extended teams around core product teams. As long as they want to know more about what it takes to create meaningful, valuable digital products, everyone is welcome.
We at UX&P truly believe that events and communities are the best way to get inspiration, a fresh impulse for change, apply learning, deepen relationships and make new connections to make that change possible.
Therefor we will continue to work on ways to unite UX&P people across the world. 🌐 🤝 ❤️
