Is It Really Worth It To Join A Product Management Community?

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Hannah Clark: Humans are social animals, and if I can get a little David Attenborough on you for a moment, our remote, work-from-home lifestyles sometimes distract us from our basic need for community. Since the dawn of humanity, we’ve relied on other people to survive, and after all these millennia, that’s one aspect of human life we’ve never evolved past. How is this relevant to product management? Because every day, I see Reddit threads from product managers who feel isolated, overwhelmed, and not good enough. And if you identify with that and you’ve been blaming yourself, I offer this counterpoint. Maybe, instead of pointing inward, it’s time to look outward and build up your support system.

My guest today is Michael Mordak, who is the Community Product Manager at Black & White Zebra—the parent company of The CPO Club. Full disclosure, Michael and I are colleagues that have worked very closely on developing and launching The CPO Club community, but he’s also been front and center in the development and management of other communities where he’s witnessed countless examples of the power of connection firsthand. Let’s jump in.

Welcome back to The CPO Club podcast Michael, cheers to you for being here.

Michael Mordak: Well, I’m just honored that I got to be considered a friend of Hannah’s. So that’s a big win for me.

Hannah Clark: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you’ve arrived at your role today?

Michael Mordak: Yeah, of course. So for me, it started with having absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life at all.

And therefore, like many other people, just kind of got a business degree because I figured, Hey, with this, I could work somewhere and do something. So my first job ended up being this weird hybrid role of account and project management at a digital marketing agency. And then later moved into a product role within that agency, but quickly kind of came to realize that marketing wasn’t really my calling, so I needed to transition out of that.

And as I was looking elsewhere, my friend that I had worked with previously mentioned that he was hiring, and that led to my current role where I’m managing community products for Black & White Zebra, which, as it turns out, is something that I get an immense amount of satisfaction out of, so it all worked out in the end.

Hannah Clark: So let’s talk a little bit about communities in a broad sense. So first about the value for brands and then the value for members. So to get started, why might a business leverage community as a tactic to support product growth and retention?

Michael Mordak: Yeah, well, I think first and foremost, if community is done right, and that’s the key there is that it creates an emote for your organization.

So it’s a place where your target audience can foster really deep connections with your brand. These are people that are bought into your product and service, and they’re far less likely to look elsewhere to satisfy the needs that they’re getting from your community. And not only that, but these communities are also a place where you can develop ambassadors.

And these are people who are going to go out and spread the word about your offering, because they truly believe that it’s going to benefit other people like it’s benefited them. In this sense, you’re building loyalty, you’re ensuring retention among these people, and you’re also creating a marketing team that’s going to go help amplify the exposure of your product. And I mentioned at the beginning that, you know, doing community right is kind of the key there, because if you’re in it solely for those benefits, and that’s all you’re trying to get out of your community is just squeeze those benefits out of it, then it’s really quickly going to fall apart.

And then for the member side, they obviously get connection out of this. I like to focus a lot on this because we’re in this weird time where, you know, we went through the pandemic and most of our social outlets were completely shut down. And then as we came out of this, AI has become more ubiquitous and it’s kind of becoming more a part of our lives.

And we’re starting to replace a lot of basic but also foundational moments of connection at work with AI. And so where we might once have gone into a meeting room with somebody to, you know, use a whiteboard and brainstorm ideas or plan a project, well, now we’re just doing a lot of that using AI tools, which, you know, might make us more efficient, but it’s also taking away a part of that human connection.

And as humans, we’re built for relationships, we’re built for connecting with people. And so we still need that in our lives. So again, if it’s done right, members are able to gather around their shared interests and they feel like they’re getting something out of it. And that’s the real value that they’re able to extract from communities.

Hannah Clark: What are some key markers of success with respect to branded communities?

Michael Mordak: Yeah, I think that a really common one you’re going to hear as a kind of a key marker is, especially in communities, is hitting your engagement levels, is making sure that people are talking all the time and that there’s a certain level of activity in the community.

I try to shy away from using that as a real marker of success because, you know, engagement can be done improperly. You can have a community that’s focused on a specific or built around with goals around a specific target. But if the engagement is happening about something that is completely different or on a different tangent from that goal, then it’s not really adding value to your business.

And it’s not going to help you to know that you’re hitting this engagement marker if it’s, you know, people are talking about the wrong things or we’re in the wrong places. And so really it’s about finding ways that you can measure things that track back to the purpose of the community and the value that are you really trying to get out of that community.

Personally, I can speak to what we use internally, which is we measure wins at work. So for us, we’re working with communities that focus on career roles, professional roles, so product managers, project managers. And what we do is when we see within our communities that our members are working together and helping each other get unstuck or deliver on something, we track those wins and we keep them in a slide deck, actually.

We track that number on a month by month basis to make sure that people are continuing to get value out of these communities and we’re working toward that.

Hannah Clark: It’s always fun to look at how you’ve made a difference through a community product or even through the podcast or other kinds of things that we’ve produced in service of helping people when at work. So I’m also privy to the slide deck and it’s really, really encouraging to watch.

So when we think about member experience, what’s required to deliver a great experience for our community members?

Michael Mordak: Yeah, well, you’re about to get an answer that some people might find annoying, but I use it a lot. And you can blame the university prof that I had a while back, but he always told me that the answer to everything is, it depends.

And I really think that it rings true in most situations. But the first thing I would want to know here is what are your members expecting? I assume that if someone signed up for your community, then it’s because they probably read a newsletter or some information on a website or got some kind of material that talked about something that your community does or offers or some kind of outcome that they can expect from your community.

So what’s required to make sure that they have a good experience is going to depend on whether that expectation is being met once they join. So in other words, are you delivering on the things that you say you’re going to deliver on and are you keeping true to your words? And then what you need to consider as well is what are the things that we need in place in order to make sure that they’re receiving that value that they were expecting.

Now that answer is kind of theoretical, so I’ll use a tangible example using The CPO Club community. So that’s a community that’s hosted through The CPO Club website, and it’s targeted specifically towards product managers working in growth stage SaaS companies. And that’s actually the first thing that we see on the landing page.

It’s the tagline is it’s the community for product leaders steering SaaS startups to maturity. Now, if someone signs up for this community and finds that all the other members are working at places like Atlassian or Salesforce or Shopify, they might feel, you know, these are not growth stage companies, I’m in the wrong place.

And so already, that’s a poor member experience, their expectations have kind of been shattered and it’s not going to go the way you want it to. One way we deliver on that is by having applications to our community. So each member applies, I review it, and then make sure that the community is a good fit, given their experience and their role.

And if they’re not, then they don’t get in. And as someone whose job it is to connect people, it’s really hard to turn people away from community. I just have to be comfortable with knowing that I’m not set up to help that person in this space. So rather than waste their time and money, I’m going to limit this to the people that I’m equipped and resourced to help so that I can make sure that their expectations are met.

One more point I wanted to build on that really quickly is that after someone admitted to the community, I ask them outright in a follow up, I ask, what are you hoping to get out of this community? So that way I can make sure that we have the right features and processes in place to meet those needs.

Hannah Clark: That’s like kind of a three pronged approach. Making sure that you are delivering on what you said you would deliver, but also being more particular about, you know, like, this isn’t a community for every single person. This is a community that’s specifically for people who can relate to each other’s needs and struggles and challenges.

And then furthermore, making sure that you’re delivering on your promises in other ways as well. So I really appreciate the kind of being thoughtful about the whole experience from kind of end to end. So how do we balance maintaining a sustainable community culture with supporting the goals of the business?

Michael Mordak: Yeah. I mean, that’s a great question. And this one comes back to something I mentioned earlier, which was a very vague statement, I’ll admit, but it was doing community right, making sure that we’re doing it right. And this takes a number of things into account. So one being that from the start, the community culture has to align with the overall goals of the business.

And if it doesn’t, then you’re on either a slow or a quick path to failure. Because either you have a community that may or may not be bringing value to its members, but it’s diverging from the goals of the business. So this could mean lack of revenue, lack of engagement, whatever. But at some point, you’re going to reach the outer bounds and the business is going to have no choice but to drop it or dissolve their stake in it.

Or you have the opposite of that, which is the community is too focused on the goals of the business. Meaning that there’s an overemphasis on extracting revenue or forcing people to engage and eventually members are going to lose interest and they’re going to leave. So from the beginning, there needs to be conversation around why we are launching this community.

And if the only convincing answer is because money, then it needs to be stopped. Unless it’s a community about finance, in which case that’s a valid answer. Everything always depends, you know.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. And you know, I think that’s the case in so many gray area fields, including this one. So let’s talk a little bit about the member side.

So what are the tangible benefits of joining an online community specifically for product managers or just in general?

Michael Mordak: Yeah, well, I mean, we spoke earlier about the connection that people get, which can affect people in a lot of different ways. But when it comes to the tangible benefits of community, that depends again on the type of community and what users are expecting to get out of them.

I want to use the example of Duolingo, which does community really well. I’m sure hopefully a lot of people are familiar with Duolingo, an app that helps you learn new languages. But they run this massive community of users who get together on a regular basis in person to practice the language skills that they’ve learned using the app.

These people who sign up for an app with the expectation of learning the language, they get to put that into practice and use it in a real life setting. And so for our communities, some of the tangible benefits that we like to offer is that you know, we’ll often host events where users can come away with templates or resources or some kind of learning that they can bring to their work and then put into practice to make a difference in their productivity or their day to day output.

I think being able to highlight those tangible benefits and really, you know, have something to give to people to show them is so important because these people are going to walk away and they’re going to want to be able to show if you want them to talk about your brand or your product or your community, you’re going to need to give them something that they can then show to others and say, this is what I got, or this is what I learned. That’s what they’re going to lean on in order to really spread the word about your community.

Hannah Clark: In my view too, some of the communities that I’m part of, I just find the relationship building is so critical as well. Like we have such an opportunity in a community, an online community, especially to build relationships with people that we otherwise would only meet at conventions, you know, a couple, maybe handful times a year. So it’s nice to have access to that pipeline of new blood, new people and new opinions all the time.

So Michael, a lot of your recent experience comes from your work with the DPM community or the Digital Project Manager, which is our sister publication. Can you describe a few moments working with that community when you could really see meaningful value in action?

Michael Mordak: It’s funny that you asked that. And I love this question because I quite literally keep a slide deck where I track these moments, I mentioned it earlier. But the DPM community is a place where people who manage digital projects can come together and share knowledge and get support from people who understand the nuances of the role and the work that’s involved with managing teams and timelines and budgets.

And there are so many moments I could share. But one of my recent favorites would be just last month when a member who is, she’s freelancing for a small agency, she wanted to propose a rate increase with her employer. So what she did was she reached out to the community, put a post out there and got connected with a few people who’d been in a similar situation.

And then because of those conversations, she walked into her meeting feeling prepared, confident and concise, which were her words. She ended up asking for more than she was originally planning on asking for.

Hannah Clark: Well, did she say if she was successful?

Michael Mordak: She didn’t say whether she was successful or not, but she did say she was confident.

And to be fair, the tagline for that community is to deliver projects with confidence. So that was the key moment for me. And then we’ve had a few other members who have gotten out of toxic working environments, who have found new jobs, navigated awkward conversations with their teams or leadership.

There’s a million little things like finding memes to laugh at or just improving their kickoff meetings and a lot of things like that.

Hannah Clark: It’s so cool to see that kind of stuff happening in front of you. And especially when you see people who, like you said, like gaining confidence. Even if you’re not successful in what you’re attempting to do, just having the confidence to step out of your comfort zone, kind of backed by a crowd of people, there’s something really powerful about that.

So now we’ve recently just launched the community for The CPO Club. Kudos to you for it was a huge lift to get it off the ground. And now we are finally open. We’ve got members, we’ve got events happening. It’s really exciting. So what sets our community apart from the others?

Michael Mordak: This is going to probably sound cheesy, but the first thing is definitely the people that we have.

We’ve got a bench of six product experts that are willing to share advice and guidance with the members of our community. And these experts are, they’re SaaS founders, they’re senior leaders in their companies that have been working in product for decades. In addition to that, like I mentioned earlier, we vet each applicant who comes into the community.

And so everybody that comes in, we can ensure that they got experience working in and around products. So no matter who answers your question or, you know, who chimes into the discussion, you know that the information you’re receiving is grounded in real world situations and comes from some grounded knowledge.

And then the second part of that would be the niche that we’re focusing on. There are product communities out there, a lot of them, but we are specifically catering to folks who work in growth stage SaaS companies. So by narrowing the audience so specifically, we’re also ensuring that each conversation is going to be valuable to each member.

You can log in on any given day and you don’t need to scroll through blog posts or conversations. Everything that’s being talked about is going to be valuable to the people that are logging in. So those are kind of the two biggest ones.

Hannah Clark: So that’s very exciting. So what kind of programming can members expect from the community?

Michael Mordak: Well, we’ve got our forum, which happens in Slack. So members can come in and join the discussion there. Through that forum is where they’ll have a lot of interactions with the experts on a daily basis. But then we’ve also got some events that we’re running as well. So we’re doing monthly AMAs. And the guests here will be either they could be our product experts that we’ve got within the community.

They could also be members of our editorial advisory board that contributes to a lot of the ideas and topics that end up on The CPO Club website. And we also have some guests come in and provide these sessions as well. We’re also doing heads down working sessions. So these are calls that people can join, that members can join from the community to keep each other accountable for getting their work done.

It’s allows you to block out an hour of your day so that you can get on this call and share the work that you’re doing and then actually have time to keep yourself heads down and get it done. We’re also hosting these product teardown sessions. So these are really interesting. We’re providing a safe space where people can bring their product or feature to the table, put it in front of a group of experienced PMs, and then get feedback on it in real time that they can then bring back to their organization and make improvements on.

We have a monthly recurring session on AI solutioning. So in these ones what we do is members will come on to the call, bring up any challenges that they’re facing in their role, and then we’re going to see if we can use AI to solve some of these challenges. And I know that’s a little bit contradictory to what I was mentioning earlier about the human connection. But it’s humans and AI together in this one.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. We have to start living with the robots. It’s inevitable.

Michael Mordak: We have to accept it and keep moving forward. But talking about the human connection there, actually, we’ve also got two exciting ways that people can really get into groups with peers, which are through mastermind groups.

So these are about eight members of the community that will get together around a specific topic or theme, and they work on a monthly basis to overcome challenges that they’re facing. And these will be facilitator led. So there’s somebody who’s kind of guiding the discussion and helping everybody through the challenges and problems to make sure that we’re finding actionable solutions to these.

Last but not least is that we’ve got one to one networking sessions. So our members on a monthly basis will get matched up randomly with somebody else from the community and get to just meet these people, learn more about them, and again, make that human connection so that there’s just strong relationships within the community.

The last, but maybe the most exciting event. I’ve got to give credit where credit is due with your idea, Hannah and that is our pajama parties we’re planning on hosting.

Hannah Clark: I’m so excited for them.

Michael Mordak: I’ll let you explain that because they were your idea.

Hannah Clark: Full disclosure. I was kind of behind this because I can’t not inject more fun into anything.

And basically we are planning on hosting some pajama parties. They’re basically going to be very casual networking sessions where people will be invited to wear their true work from home gear. So whether that’s pajamas or hoodies or whatever, then the point will be to just network with folks on a human level.

So it’ll be very little work discussion and really more focused on just activities that we can use to get to know each other, have some fun, have some laughs. And yeah, just enjoy being people in the same room together virtually.

Michael Mordak: I’ve got this super fluffy sweater that I was actually wearing today too. Probably planning on wearing this one. It’s what I wear when I’m sick or I just need to like totally de-stress and I just get all cozy up in there. So that’s what I’ll be wearing.

Hannah Clark: I’m going to be definitely donning my best athleisure for the pajama party because that’s, it’s basically as close to pajamas as I really get. But yeah, I’m really excited for it. I think that just the energy is going to be great.

Thank you so much for telling us a little bit about our community, but also kind of putting into context why community is so important in general and giving us some kind of more color around why community can be such a beneficial thing for brands and product led organizations to look at too.

So Michael, where can listeners learn more and apply to join our community?

Michael Mordak: They can head to the website. So that’s theproductmanager.com/membership. And from there they can read about all the things we talked about today and more. And then they can apply there to get their application in. It gets reviewed and then from there we move on to the next steps.

Hannah Clark: Awesome. Well, I’m so excited to meet more folks. I hope that there’s some folks here listening that will join the community and hang out with us very soon. I’ll see you, Michael and you listeners later.

Michael Mordak: Yeah. I’m looking forward to it.

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The CPO Club, wherever you get your podcasts.