5 Years of Building an Awesome Product Management Community

Today marks Mind the Product's 5th anniversary, and what an incredible 5 years it's been.

When we started our meetup ProductTank, we did it because our jobs as product managers in startups were a little lonely. There wasn't anyone to learn from, share lessons with, or frankly, to bitch to. We started Mind the Product a year later to continue the conversations happening at those early meetups online, and our #mtpcon conference the year after that to raise the level of the conversation.

Well 5 years later and product management is certainly a lot less lonely.

ProductTank now brings together over 20,000 passionate product managers in over 55 cities around the world. Our annual conferences in London and San Francisco gather over 1,000 attendees each from all over the world.

Every month we launch ProductTank in 5 more cities. Every month dozens of those cities meet up and have a conversation about product.

And every day our Slack channel has over 1,300 members chatting about all things product.

It's been amazing to see this groundswell of community come together, and it's all thanks to the passion of hundreds of organizers around the world who have taken our idea and run with it. And, of course, above all else it's thanks to all the product people in our community who come together online and in person to learn and to share their own experiences.

These are of course all vanity metrics, but with one undeniable conclusion: Product Management is growing, and we all need each other's help to make sense of this complicated, challenging, frustrating, and amazing job. Together we are building and promoting an ever deeper understanding of the role and it's opportunities (and challenges). As companies start to understand the importance of building a product and user focus into their very cores, we're seeing bigger product teams, with healthier ratios between product and engineering, and we're seeing more and more product people take their seat in the c-suite.

All of this simply underlines the Mind the Product manifesto, and emphasises our reason for starting and building this awesome community: to further the craft of product management by bringing together product people of all stripes.

On that journey, we're just getting started. Join us for the next 5 years (and more!) as we continue to grow and develop this amazing community, as we continue to focus on learning, sharing, and inspiring each other to build better products – products people love.