What Product Communities Actually Do (And Why That Still Matters)
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Daniel Thulfaut for the saas.group podcast. We explored the topic of product communities – both internal communities of practice and the broader, public communities like conferences and meetups. It was one of those thoughtful conversations that made me reflect deeply on my own experiences building communities over the past 25 years.
I've been fascinated by the power of communities since the 90s, when I researched "virtual communities" – those semi-exclusive email groups where people around the world connected over niche topics. Since then, I've been involved in communities of all kinds: joining the Hamburg UX Roundtable early on, co-founding ProductTank Hamburg, helping build an internal product community that grew to about 100 people, and co-founding Product at Heart, one of Europe's leading product conferences.
The landscape has changed dramatically over these years. We now have access to more learning resources than ever: online courses, training platforms, AI assistants that answer questions instantly, countless Slack communities. Yet communities of practice remain one of the most powerful tools for product organizations. Not because they're the only way to share information – they're not. What communities actually DO goes far deeper than just sharing information.
Three Types of Communities, Each With Its Own Purpose
Before we dive into what makes communities valuable, it's worth understanding that not all communities serve the same purpose. In my experience, there are three distinct types, and understanding the differences helps you build and participate in them more effectively.
Internal communities of practice are what most of this post will focus on. These are stable groups within an organization, built around shared context and oriented toward shared goals. In my experience, a rhythm of monthly meetings plus quarterly deep dives works well. This is where the deepest organizational value lives – where you build shared understanding, establish standards, and shape product culture.
Public or external communities operate differently. Think ProductTank, Product at Heart, or your local UX meetup. These are about weaker ties, broader networks, and serendipity. You can't plan for benefits the same way you can with internal communities. It's more about curiosity, staying connected to the broader field, and learning what's happening beyond your organization's walls.
Then there's a third type that I think deserves more attention: digital subject matter communities. These are smaller, typically invite-only online groups – often on Slack these days – focused on a very specific job role or professional interest. I'm part of a product leadership coaches group like this (thank you Randy Silver!). We discuss highly specific questions: how to handle taxation in different countries, how to shape our offerings, what marketing approaches work.
This isn't a new phenomenon – I was researching similar email groups in the 90s – but tools like Slack have made them easier to create and maintain. The tricky bit with these communities is finding the right balance. You need enough diversity for complementary perspectives, but enough homogeneity to keep topics relevant and people engaged over time. They also benefit enormously from existing personal bonds (maybe you spoke at the same conference) and occasional opportunities to meet in person and freshen up those connections.
One thing I've noticed: these groups can't scale infinitely. There's a critical group size threshold where too much "invite momentum" dilutes the relevancy and that feeling of connectedness. After a certain point, you probably need active measures like creating sub-groups to keep members engaged.
All three types of communities matter in different ways. For the rest of this post, I want to focus on internal communities of practice, because that's where I've seen the most profound organizational impact.
Drawing From Practice: The XING Product Community
Much of what follows draws from many years of initiating, growing, and running the XING product community of practice together with a group of colleagues. Looking back, I notice that during that time, company growth and employee retention – particularly for heavily sought-after roles like product manager – was of strategic relevance to the company. This made it comparably easier to get the kind of funding, attention, and top-level management support I'm describing here.
In comparison, the current reality at many companies looks different: short-term profitability focus, shrinking organizations, plenty of talent available for hire after layoff rounds from various companies. This seems to leave less room and justification for such activities. You'll likely be met with more skepticism from top management initially.
I would argue, though, that the potential advantages of communities of practice remain the same. It's still worth pushing for it, even if the path might be more challenging than it was for us back then.
Six Things Communities of Practice Actually Do
1. Share Best Practices Within Your Specific Context
Here's something I discovered in practice: we could bring in external trainers to teach us about working with metrics and tracking, but most of them would show us how to do everything with Google Analytics. But the problem was that we didn't use Google Analytics. We were using some Adobe tooling at the time.
It was much more valuable to have one of our own product people who was strong in working with data share how to do it in our context, with the tools we actually had. That's the power of shared context – it makes learning applicable, not just aspirational.
When someone in your community shares how they solved a problem, you never have to do that long transfer of thought: "How could I apply this at our company?" Because it was already applied at your company. The transfer problem just disappears.
Yes, these days AI can provide general frameworks and best practices. But it can't tell you how Faye from the mobile team solved that specific analytics challenge with your tech stack last quarter. It can't capture the nuances of why certain approaches work in your organization and others don't.
2. Help People Understand How Your Organization Actually Works
Every organization has unwritten rules and informal knowledge that doesn't live in any documentation. How decisions really get made. Who to talk to, when, and why. The difference between what the org chart says and how things actually flow.
New joiners especially benefit from being part of a community of practice. They get to see experienced colleagues in action, not just hear about best practices in theory. They learn the organizational context that makes the difference between a proposal that goes nowhere and one that gains traction.
This is knowledge that's incredibly hard to codify but tremendously valuable to have.
3. Establish and Evolve Shared Standards
One of the most valuable things that came out of our product community was a framework for collaborative alignment that we called "Auftragsklärung." I've written about it in detail on my blog, but the key point here is that we created it together, as a community.
It wasn't dictated from above. It wasn't adopted from some external framework. We developed it based on our collective experience and needs, and it evolved as we learned what worked and what didn't.
These kinds of artifacts – living documents that grow with the community – outlast individual meetings. They become part of how the organization works, but they're rooted in shared understanding rather than top-down mandate.
4. Shape Product Culture – What "Good" Actually Looks Like
You can put values on a poster, but that doesn't create culture. What creates culture is reflecting on those values and giving people kudos for actual real-life actions that embody them. That's much more powerful than any wall art.
In practice, I've seen systems where you could nominate colleagues in the community and recognize them for doing something that expressed the organization's values particularly well. What made it powerful was doing this in front of everyone, including board members who regularly participated in the gatherings.
This isn't just about recognition. It's about making culture tangible, especially for new joiners. Instead of trying to explain "what good product practice looks like here," they could see it in action and hear why specific behaviors were valued. Culture isn't what you say – it's what you celebrate and reinforce.
5. Provide Orientation for Personal Development
In a growing organization, you don't always see everyone's work day-to-day. You're focused on your cross-functional team, maybe your sub-organization. But in a community of practice, you interact with people from different parts of the organization.
That exposure is valuable for personal development. You get a sense for what areas you want to improve, where you're already pretty strong and can help others, and what different career paths might look like. You see colleagues slightly ahead of you in skills you want to develop. You discover strengths in yourself that you might not have realized were valued.
This kind of orientation is hard to get from a training course or a career framework document. It comes from seeing people in action and having real interactions.
6. Enable Real Learning Through Shared Experiences
Here's something I've become increasingly convinced of: real learning really benefits from doing something together and from shared experiences. It's not the same as consuming information.
In my podcast conversation with Daniel, he shared a great example. At their product camp in Budapest, they had small groups work on themed hackathons where each team had to build something actually applicable right after the event. They came away with five working prototypes for new product processes that could be applied across 25 companies.
When they did a postmortem on the event, everyone mentioned that THIS was where the magic happened – not in the presentations or the networking, but in the co-creation on a live subject, experimenting together.
That's the kind of learning you can't get from an AI chatbot or a Slack thread. It happens when people work together on something real.
What Makes Communities Actually Work (Or Fail)
Understanding what communities do is one thing. Making them actually work is another. I've seen communities thrive and I've seen them die, and the differences usually come down to a few key factors.
You need dedicated hosts. Not just facilitators – hosts. At a good party, if you're the host, you cannot at some point say, "Now I've had my fifth beer and I'm just one of the guests." You're not. You're a host, and it needs people who feel that responsibility and are willing to take it. (if you want to get into hosting I strongly recommend Priya Parker’s book The Art of Gathering!)
This means caring about the experience, not just running the agenda. It includes the unsexy operational work: making sure there are drinks, planning breaks so people can go to the bathroom, thinking about the room setup. In my experience, this never became anyone's full-time role, but it was acknowledged as real work that certain people were putting time into.
You need an active core group. Starting with a small group of people interested in specific learning challenges is key. What matters is having enough commitment to get to first positive results that you can build upon. Without that core group that keeps showing up and keeps investing, nothing else matters.
Continuity and rhythm are critical. I've seen monthly meetings plus quarterly deep dives work well. The rhythm matters. Contrast this with an experience I had trying to organize a mobile product managers community across a whole media group. We tried to do it with just one or two gatherings per year and some calls in between. We never really managed to get momentum because it was always different people showing up. We lacked continuity, and without it, we couldn't build the relationships and shared context that make communities work.
Leadership visibility and buy-in make a huge difference. I've seen the power of having board members participate in community gatherings. This creates a powerful signaling effect: if a board member is showing up and taking the time, it's probably okay for you as a product manager to do the same. It wasn't just permission – it was active endorsement.
I remember when at XING we had Teresa Torres join us for a video call. Even our CEO joined to listen to what she had to say. Some of the points she made helped us reinforce our own thoughts and ideas with our leadership. She was a knowledgeable outside voice saying things we'd been trying to articulate, and hearing it from her in that context made a difference.
You need shared enough context. This is where that media group mobile community struggled. Some people were working in publishing, some were building a social network. The diversity was so great that we spent most of our time on topics that weren't at all relevant to some participants. If people are talking about completely different ways of monetizing than the type of business you're in, you can find it interesting as a hobbyist, but it's much more difficult to stay connected and engaged over time.
You need common ground to build from. Some diversity is fruitful – it gives new perspectives and triggers new thoughts. But if it's too diverse, the community won't hold.
Finally, thoughtful curation matters. This means identifying what the community needs, selecting topics that are actually relevant, deciding how to combine internal expertise with external impulses, and creating space for different formats – sharing, co-creation, external speakers. This is one of those unsexy parts that takes real thought and effort, but it's essential.
What Momentum Actually Looks Like
How do you know if your community is working? Here's what I've seen:
It keeps happening. People keep showing up. The active core and the hosts see enough value in it to keep putting in the time and effort. That's the baseline.
Real momentum looks like this: people from other departments start wanting to join. New artifacts and standards emerge from the community's work. The culture becomes more tangible and shared – you can point to specific examples of "how we do things here" that came from the community.
What kills momentum? Lack of continuity. No dedicated hosts taking responsibility. Topics that are too diverse or context that's too scattered. No leadership support or visibility. Or when gatherings become one-way knowledge dumps instead of real interactions.
Why This Matters Now
The landscape for learning and development has changed dramatically. We have more sources of information than ever. More tools for collaboration. AI can provide instant answers to many questions that used to require asking a colleague or searching through documentation.
This makes communities MORE important, not less. It just means you have to be more deliberate about what you gather for.
Don't gather to share information that's easily accessible elsewhere. That's not a good use of anyone's time anymore.
DO gather for context-specific problem solving. For co-creation and hands-on work. For culture building and values reinforcement. For face-to-face connection and relationship building.
And yes, in-person still matters. It's even more important than before to use these gatherings to let people meet face-to-face and have real-life interactions in the same room. Especially in remote and hybrid environments, the quality of connection you can build in person is something you can't quite replicate digitally.
The Work Is Worth It
So why invest the time and effort into building product communities?
Because they do six things that nothing else can quite replicate. They share best practices within your specific context. They help people understand how your organization actually works. They establish and evolve shared standards. They shape culture by making values tangible. They provide orientation for personal development. And they enable real learning through shared experiences.
Yes, building a community requires dedicated hosts. Yes, it requires continuity and rhythm. Yes, it requires leadership buy-in and thoughtful curation. These things take real work.
The alternative – fragmented knowledge, weak culture, everyone solving the same problems alone, new people struggling to understand how things really work – costs far more.
The best product organizations don't just share information. They build communities where people learn together, create together, and grow together.
That's work that still matters. Perhaps more than ever.