Facilitate Excitement: How Culture Was Born In Our Community

As community organizers, we designed 8 events in the first year of the Product Management Community in the Philippines. Whenever we successfully organized the event, a lot of attendees were filled with a smile. Then, a lot of them didn’t stop talking to each other until late.

After we got many passionate members and supporters, I noticed it’s not because we successfully achieved the objective. It’s because we created a lot of excitement. And I saw it helped the community culture eventually born. On this post, I’ll review how it happened as my personal thought.

Initial Objective and Key Results

As an organizer, I initially defined the objective for events: “Let each attendee brew own idea”. Because I expected our core target is mid-senior management in tech industry. In order to achieve the objective, I defined some key results.

KR1. Acquire enough product management professionals

This is a success matric to gather enough right audience as a baby community.

KR2. Provide key concept as a learning

This is why we had a talk session for most of the events, such as Product-Life-Cycle, Lean Startup, team management, etc.

KR3. Create good ambience to urge conversation
KR4. Let attendees share own experience
KR5. Let attendees generate own idea
KR6. Provide opportunity to exchange idea with more people

All of those four come from the concept of active-learning facilitation. I applied it because it’s my most favorite format.

KR7. Acquire enough quality feedback

Since Product PH was very young, we didn’t know who are product management professionals in the Philippines and what they want. So that I made a lot of survey and interview to improve product-market-fit as a community (=Community-Maket-Fit). This metric is part of them.

As you can see, some of the key results are actually hard to check as quantitative data. I checked it in qualitative way.

Experiment for Community-Maket-Fit

Each of our events was organized in the different formats such as talk & discussion, workshop, and lean coffee. So that we could learn what makes product management professionals satisfied with, in addition to knowledge about event management itself.

The key take-away from it is the simple fact: “Passionate product management professionals are very eager to hear experience from each other in order to solve daily struggle”. And I could also see the activity to share ideas with each other itself made a big impact to the satisfaction rate.

As a result, we've been improving the facilitation in each event.

Our Event Facilitation

1. Create good space, physically and emotionally

When we have comfortable space, it helps us focus things. When we feel comfortable from instinct, it supports us to do something actively.
Ex)
- Layout of chairs, table for aligned purpose
- Nicely designed space
- Stay away from hunger (=prepare food)
- Play fun music (on the background of networking)
- Smile from organizers

2. Create connection with attendees

Warm welcome from organizers is the first step for attendees to connect with someone else. Then, connect attendees to other attendee who has shared interest. This activity also helps to improve facilitation in further program.

3. Create take-away together with attendees

When attendees joined to the process to create take-away, they feel ownership.
- Small group work
- Small group discussion such as lean coffee
- Certain grouping based on the profession and experience of attendees

4. Grow take-away together with attendees

When attendees feel ownership about take-away, we can grow it by connecting them.
- Share take-away between small groups.
- Get feedback from all the audience
- Further networking
- Share what happened after event

What Happened

Whenever we successfully facilitated the event, we could see attendees were excited so much, which made positive attitude to involve the event. When the event was filled with positive attendees, they created further value themselves, such as friendly-networking, additional idea, and future collaboration, in addition to the value which we initially planned.

Final Thought

When we maximize attendees’ excitement, it creates wider and deeper value, which organizers cannot create. This fact is common from the viewpoint of facilitation technique. The point in our case is the excitement with consistency eventually let members recognize “Discussion is our community culture”. In conclusion, I think this can be a great tool when we create a culture in a community.

In the end, let me share the post which one of my friends/community members made after our event.

“This was really the only picture that I got and now’s the only time that I was able to post because of how I’m so focused on all of the insights that were constantly coming in. Seriously, Product PH — Product Management Community is my favorite community so far because of how engaged the people are to share their insights.”