Greeting! My name is Olena, I am the leader of one of SM Lab’s internal communities – a community of product managers called PL Lean Coffee. In this post, I want to share with you a way to generate ideas for community development when everything seems to be going great.

I really like the approach to the community as a product. At the start of any product, a mission and vision are formulated.

Mission is the meaning of the product’s existence, what the product is aiming for, and vision tells about what and how this goal will be achieved.

So, the mission of our community was identified: “Raising the level of IT product management expertise.” While working on the vision, I highlighted the following directions:

● Cooperation/Mutual help in the community

● Finding and scaling best practices

● Accumulation of knowledge

● Monitoring and implementation of innovations

For each of the directions, she defined the tasks of the community.

At this stage, I got such a plate

Under the section “Our tasks” I place the section “Our processes”, it is targeted.

First of all, it is important to include the current processes of the community. Thus, we will get an understanding of what we are doing and what goals we are moving towards. And then outline ideas for development. How to do it?

1) Through feedback from community members

For example, due to the issue of the species:

Evaluate the community’s activities in terms of organizing a comfortable environment for cooperation and mutual assistance. If you have an idea for improvement, describe it in the comments.

2) Through silent brainstorming with community members

At the meeting (online or offline), the participants write down ideas for each area independently and independently of each other, and then simultaneously put them in a common place, discuss and vote.

3) Through personal communication with participants

My favorite way 😊

Was it possible to generate new processes? Implement!

Implemented everything you wanted? Take out the tablet from the cell again and ask again:

● What processes can be added to the community to solve the problem?

● What do we do as part of such a process? What else can we do?

Finally, I want to show the current list of processes in our community. I myself really like to spy on what and how someone is arranged, so I am happy to share this opportunity with you 😊

It is no accident that the value for participants is collected in a separate section. The board is available to everyone in the community, while reading it is important to remember that professional communities are created not only for the benefit of the company, but (!) for the benefit of the employees themselves.

I want to tell you how you can organize the space of the community and its members in Confluence (spoiler – it can be done really beautifully and conveniently), would you be interested in it?