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14 Comments

How to build and grow a community for Product Managers

Hi All,
I am a Product Manager (PM) and working on creating a platform that solves the need of helping aspiring/junior PMs practice for product management interviews.

For now, I picked a no-code solution (word press theme). I am still in stealth and have not publicly announced the launch yet. But, have asked peers, friends, to start using the platform and contribute to the content

It took me about 5 days to get the website (http://justanotherpm.com/) up and running.

I am having a hard time creating a step by step plan on getting initial traction:

What are the best ways to get traction on the platform?
Should I spend money on SEM? Other platforms?
What are the best ways to drive and maintain engagement?
Any other tips to help me get started?

Also, any feedback on the site is welcome.

  1. 3

    Former PM here. Have you tried posting in some of the PM Slack Communities? Mind the Product (https://www.mindtheproduct.com/product-management-slack-community/), and Product School (https://productschool.com/slack-community/) are good ones. I posted there when I was writing about Product and was able to generate some traffic.

    1. 1

      You say "former PM". What are you doing now?

      I haven't met a lot of PMs who move out of product management.

      1. 2

        I ventured off to try my own thing for a while. I still do PM on the daily... but not formally within an organization.

        1. 1

          Ya, that makes more sense. PM turned entrepreneur :)

    2. 1

      Thanks @Drbasa. That is a great idea.

  2. 2

    To get this really up and running, you need someone to focus on solving the problems to the answers that product managers care about. For example if you did 2-3 solutions for Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter, then shared those as post to social.

    I know I've tried to find solutions from other PM's for these questions.

    You could get someone to solve them, doesn't have to be perfect but it should be a highly searched question.

    For example the Twitter post could be "Twitter Interview Solved: What other features would you add to the twitter app?" by PM Name.

    1. 1

      That is a great suggestion. Also, like the sample headline you shared. Makes for a great entry point as a social post. Such headlines should also bolster SEO ranking.

  3. 2

    Hey! I really think with the right SEO tactics this can really takeoff seriously! We lack so many resources for Product Managers. Get those backlinks going and reach out to tech blogs.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the words of encouragement.

      Yep, SEO makes a lot of sense. Already working on identifying the right keywords. Alot of the content is user generated, so struggling how to optimize that for the right keywords.

      Any specific guides / suggestions on how to get some good backlinks going? Have not been able to make any progress in that direction

  4. 2

    I think you can choose and focus on one key metric, and then fan out from there.

    For example, if you choose to maximise engagement, then you need to provide channels that facilitate it. Provide avenues to increase number of comments/email summaries/newsletter then is important.

    If however you choose "DAU/MAU", then it's all about always having quality content. I see you chose to crowd source content, which is a proven approach, but then you may have to consider doing some form of curation. If you publish your own content, then obviously on-theme Content creation is a key pillar to your strategy. SEO can be a side pillar.

    The list can goes on but I think you get the drift. My 2 cents opinion is not to chase after everything; growing on one single dimension in the early stages is already very good!

    Good luck!

    1. 1

      You make a good point, focusing on one metric allows me to dedicate all effort in the same direction. For now, that metric is engagement.

      I am going to give that a shot, try some growthhacks to make it really easy for the users to add content.

      Since it is all, UGC content curation / moderation will also be required. I am not worried about it yet, since the scale is small enough for me to manually delete comments / questions which are not good enough

      Once there is more scale, I could think of putting in some checks or have more content moderators.

      Thanks a lot for the tips.

  5. 1

    NoobieHacker, what WordPress plug-in did you use to create your forum?

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