Product Circle is a community-led meetup where professionals in the same role can share the daily challenges they are facing, trade tips and find a community of liked-minded professionals that will support them and help them achieve their goals.

Project

Product Circle is a community-led meetup where product managers can share challenges they are facing, trade tips and find a community that will support them and help them achieve their goals.

The inspiration - and initial push to launch the event - came from Toronto where similar events had emerged organically and were held by various companies in the the local tech ecosystem.

Oz Nazilli, director of product of TWG, wanted to expand the formula to Montreal in order to get to know the ecosystem and meet local PMs.

While his involvement has diminished greatly, his concept lives on. More than 10 Product Circle meetups have been held and more the 200 product managers have joined the community!

Challenges

As Product Circle is an offspring of events that were organized organically, it didn’t have a name or a specific format.

The first challenge was to find a name and develop an identity that captured the essence of the event. It was also important to find ways to describe what the goals of the event so that prospective participants could understand what it was about.

As Product Circle is community-led - we don’t have a formal governance structure, or business accounts or sponsors - it was paramount that participants understood were was it that they were going to attend, how they would be expected to contribute and what was the vision for the meetup.

Also, as it would be difficult to recreate the exact conditions as the initial meetups, the second challenge was to find a format that worked and respected the intent of the mission. Setting a clear vision helped, but we also needed to find ways to enable the creation of that space.

As with most anything, this is still a work in progress, but by and large, these two challenges have been solved.

Results

One the first challenge, the result is quite apparent: the event has a name, a description and the beginnings of a style guide so that it can exist and provide a space for participants to find one another.

On the second front, with more than 200 product managers having signed up and a core membership already appearing, the need for such an event has been proven.

Next steps