On March 24th, 2014, a rocket started off in Munich. We had our first ProductTank Munich event only 3 months after Yann Milin, Michael Ludwig and myself, Anna Creitz met.
As a product manager in Munich, I’ve always had a hard time finding other product managers to talk about our jobs and the challenges we are facing. There was simply nowhere around to meet them all in a bunch! So when a colleague sent me a link to ProductTank, I knew I had to look into it.
This is how it started
Only 2 weeks after connecting with Martin, I met Yann and Michael, who had already had the same idea of bringing ProductTank to our city. Michael, Yann and I are product managers in the online business. So we met for burgers, and just an hour later, we had a date, a topic and a location for our first event. That was easy!
We decided that since it was our first ProductTank, we’d start off with a more general topic: The role of a product manager in different companies.
With a little creativity and a few intros, we managed to get three amazing speakers lined up by the end of February. Christine Prechsl from mybestbrands, Christoph Seitz from Spontacts and Tobias Hassmann from Microsoft would be letting us all take a peek into their jobs as product managers. Around this same time, we set up our ProductTank group on Xing, and within 2 weeks, we hit the 100 member mark. Turns out a lot of Munich product managers wanted to see this sort of community happen!
ProductTank Munich #1 – it is on!
On the last Tuesday of that month, we kicked off at 18:30 as our first guests started to arrive at the AutoScout24 offices, who was also our kind sponsor for the first ProductTank Munich. After digging into some pizza and beer, the talks began. After a short introduction by Johannes Bernhard – VP Product Management at AutoScout24 – Christine started off with a very interesting and fun talk about her job and challenges as a product manager at the fashion startup MYBESTBRANDS. After all the questions were answered our second speaker Christoph took over. Christoph is a founder and a product manager at Spontacts, a spare-time community app.
Last but not least, Tobias took the stage. Tobias is program manager at Microsoft, responsible for search development. He showed us some more about his work improving the Bing search results. It was interesting to learn that at a huge company like Microsoft, the job of a product manager is actually separated into smaller parts, as compared to a product manager at a small company, where they typically need to take on several jobs.
After the three very insightful talks, the entire room – about 55 product managers in total – came together for some networking and beers! We heard lots of great feedback from our guests, and it seemed that everyone was really happy to finally have a chance to talk to other product managers. It looks like this ProductTank will go on!
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