The company
Peerz.pm is a small company that started as a side project. It is a community allowing qualified meetings between Product Managers to accelerate the skills development of each PM and promote learning between peers.
Story
Back in late 2019, I wanted to level up my product management skills but I was facing different difficulties: content is everywhere and abundant but it is time-consuming to analyze and take out the best of every content.
I felt that I was not advancing fast enough and that I was spending a lot of time “consuming” content such as meetups, podcasts, articles, or product conferences. Frustration rose and I challenged myself to make it the project.
At the time, I thought I wanted to have a product mentor to rely on and whom to trust for developing my product skills. After confronting this hypothesis by interviewing many product managers from different experience levels and backgrounds, I concluded that some of us in the community want to exchange more with peers than to get inspired by experts in the very vertical oriented relationship.
Out of that conclusion started Peerz: the 1st community of Product Managers focused on peer learning and what we could call: solidarity knowledge. In its first iterations, Peerz was mainly a way to create interactions by suggesting meetings between members of the community. After a few trials and tests, it started to run on an automated stack using paperform, zapier and airtable to allow the member to subscribe, create their profile, and be matched to a virtual meeting with a qualified suggested peer.
Peerz is now a community of 500 product managers (mostly based in France, Paris) and creating between 50 to 80 meetings every month.
KPIs
- Acquisition of 20-30 new PMs every month to enrich the community
- 8/10 members satisfied with the experience offered with Peerz.pm
- 1.3 average meeting per member: 1 meeting usually leads to another one.
- 10% of members stated to have find a strong and knowledagble relationship with one or more product peers on Peerz.pm
Key takeways and learnings
- Improving your skills can represent a challenge in the face of the multitude of content and the difficulty of situating your level in a profession that is still young.
- Fail fast and learn fast is the best motto you can live by when starting an product opportunity, my biggest learnings gaps came from an action I took to offer value to my users with the minimum development needed.
Peerz was created on quick iterations on 3 months, we followed a simple plan:
When creating the user research campaign, we analyzed personas for the product community:
Product problem's definition 📍
I used the "How might we" method to present problems concluded out the research
Comment pouvons-nous permettre aux PMs en recherche de montée en compétences un moyen de le faire rapidement, sans friction & de manière qualifiée ?
Comment pouvons-nous proposer aux PMs une communauté d'échange de savoirs sans être axée sur une relation ascendante - descendante ?
Comment proposer à chaque PM la bonne personne selon son besoin pour monter en compétences ?
User story mapping 🌠
To answer the problem, the ideation phase brings out a model that is subject to be tested:
- Allow each PM to join a community centered around peer learning
- Offer a matching system according to the needs of the peer
- Offer a distance connection by video to discuss a specific subject
Prove of Concept 🔗
During this funnel phase of our MVP, we will try to do a POC with departing members to refine the response to the product issue *
A testing phase is launched over a few meetings (11 in total) to validate the POC and recover learning 👇🏾
POC feedbacks
Occurrence
Pourcentage
Représentation
Thème
Commentaires
80%
HOT🔥
Avoir un ordre du jour plus ciblé pour rentrer en profondeur (qualifier les besoins en amont, avoir un sujet du moment...)