Talk to other product managers
do-it-yourself product management therapy 2026-10-20 #product
As a product manager, you work in an isolated role and need therapy. Or maybe I just exaggerated, for the dark-humour. Either way, product managers should talk to each other more. And so should everyone else on the team, of course.
Talking to other product managers requires more effort than talking to the rest of the team, because other product managers work on other teams and for other companies.
Attending meet-ups
Local meet-ups can introduce you to lots of people with shared interests, who you wouldn’t meet at work. A good local community even gives you an opportunity to build a local network that lasts longer than any particular job.
This takes time, because most product managers feel too busy to regularly attend a meet-up. And without regular attendees, you can have introductory conversations, but you might not get to know people over a longer period.
ProductTank and other meet-ups
You might start with ProductTank, which has chapters in 200+ cities, world-wide, that organise free events. Each chapter operates independently, so each location’s events have a different flavour. For example, when someone publishes a new product management book, the most popular and well-funded chapters feature on the book tour.
While ProductTank has the best reach, big cities often have other product meet-ups. Some of them even have much cooler names, such as Dead Product Society and Now Next Product. You might even find meet-ups that target other groups of product people, such as designers or marketing people.
Working in a small company
In my first product management roles, I worked for medium-sized companies with several project managers, who I could compare notes with. This changed when I moved to a much smaller product company, as the only product manager among less than twenty employees. This has both pros and cons.
In a small company, you don’t have any other product managers to talk to, but that also means that you don’t compete with them for your stakeholders’ time. You still only have one CEO, but you don’t share them with five other product managers. At this point I would have joined a local meet-up, if my city had had one.
Start a local meet-up
If you don’t have a local meet-up to join, I have bad news for you: you should start your own meet-up. In my case, I started ProductTank Rotterdam events so I wouldn’t have to go to 020 (which Rotterdammers call it so they don’t have to say its name).
As in many countries, the two largest cities in the Netherlands feature the kind of cultural differences that manifest in all kinds of rivalries and value judgements. In the case of ProductTank Rotterdam, my co-organiser and I took the opportunity to organise a different kind of event to the standard book-tour style events.
The hallway track
If a ProductTank Amsterdam event resembles a conference presentation, ProductTank Rotterdam runs the hallway track. Every month, we have a small group of people, around a table, drinking coffee and seeing where the conversation takes us.
I think that product people should talk to each other more, so we don’t have famous authors or presentations. Instead ProductTank Rotterdam has a manifesto.
