Product Therapy: Peer Support for Product Professionals
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.”
Working in Product Management has gotten toxic! Psychological safety has been thrown to the wind. Layoffs are happening everywhere. Brian Chesky (Airbnb) is threatening our communal craft.
We are all in need of some communal Product Therapy!
Our product leadership support group has been self-organizing through a WhatsApp group and bi-weekly online meetings to talk through our product and career frustrations with safety and vulnerability to get to the core of what keeps us up at night or how to move forward in our careers. This format applies adult learning principles - discussion/participation based, relevant/impactful topics, self-directed, reflects experience, and problem-centred.
We unpack challenges that we cannot address in a work environment (no mentorship, too small, too political, etc.) and where we need to get direct advice in other ways (courses, coaching/consulting, mentorship, etc).
In this workshop & audience invited round table, we’ll:
Workshop Presentation (first half)
- Present an overview of how we formed and with a few Product Leadership Group stories shared from our group
- We’ll share a framework for how we organize and run our meetings so you can build your peer groups
For the second half, we’ll run a live roundtable session:
- run a sticky session gathering problems from members of the audience that they’d like to talk on
- Vote collectively on 3 big problems to discuss
- Invite those who wrote the top 3 problems to the front to join us for a product therapy roundtable along with some of the presenters