Most blog posts about communities of practice cover the first couple of years. I had the unusual chance to lead one for six (the product management profession at the Ministry of Justice).

That gave me a front-row seat to how a community evolves: fragile beginnings, growing pains, and eventually becoming part of something bigger than itself. I’ve framed it using a leadership arc: Explorer → Builder → Architect.

This post is meant as a blueprint for the first five years of any community of practice. It’s a much shorter version of a post I previously shared, feel free to read that if you want more context.

Stage 1: Explorer – Feeling the Terrain

Story

Back in 2016, the product management community was tiny: 10–12 people, mostly contractors, no career pathway, and barely any visible leadership. Meetups were mostly venting sessions: a space to offload, not to grow. People cared deeply about their work, but the profession felt invisible.

I was still hands-on in a product team, juggling a staff-facing product platform. Anxiety over losing “hands-on” skills was real, but I also had a bigger question: what does it take for this community to exist at all?

Model

Explorers lead in uncertainty. They map the terrain, experiment, and make sense of the unknown. Key focus areas:

  • Safety → members must feel able to show up as themselves

  • Identity → defining what it means to be a product manager

  • Visibility → showing value to leadership and peers

Tools

  • Role descriptions & career pathways to clarify what a product manager does

  • A shared handbook capturing tips, frameworks, and learning resources

  • Regular meetups to build trust and a shared identity

Lessons Learned

  • Safety matters most; leaders absorb anxieties to protect the community.

  • Documentation and shared artifacts start small but grow into critical foundations.

  • It’s okay to begin as the single leader: shared leadership comes later.

Stage 2: Builder – Making It Last

Story

As the community grew, I realised one person couldn’t hold everything together. We went from 10–12 to 30–40 people across multiple locations. At first, I shared leadership with Senior Product Managers. Later, I introduced Lead Product Managers in each Digital Portfolio. Each Lead worked with a Head of Digital and led product strategy across that portfolio. I then matrix-managed these Leads alongside the Heads of Digital, creating a structure that balanced local ownership with strategic alignment.

Sharing leadership felt strange at first. I had been running recruitment, onboarding, and meetups myself. But letting go wasn’t just okay, it was better. New leaders improved processes and freed me to think strategically.

We also tested resilience. I took most of 2020 on shared parental leave. The community ran without me. Sure, gaps appeared, but it survived: proof that distributed leadership works when built intentionally.

Model

Builders take an explorer’s insights and make them repeatable, resilient, and scalable. Key focus areas:

  • Distributed Leadership → no single point of failure

  • Contextualisation → local teams adapt frameworks while retaining core principles

  • Sustainability → community survives transitions and absence of a central leader

Tools

  • Embedded product leads within portfolios

  • Geographically segmented meetups, Slack channels, and shared handbooks

  • Cross-government peer networks for learning and support

  • Indicators of community maturity to prioritise focus areas

Lessons Learned

  • Scale requires letting go of control, while keeping principles intact.

  • Hands-on work evolves into enabling others to lead effectively.

  • Trust is fragile; distributed leadership strengthens the community and reduces bottlenecks.

Stage 3: Architect – Connecting Ecosystems

Story

Even a strong product community risks becoming a silo. The next challenge was connecting multiple professions: product, delivery, design, research, and engineering.

Heads of Profession started meeting, sharing practices, and solving problems together. Suddenly, the professions weren’t just stronger internally, we were influencing the wider organisation. We built cross-professional communities of interest and action to make implicit knowledge explicit and reusable.

This also worked cross-sector. I attended Mind the Product and Product Leaders meetups, which helped me benchmark government practice, reduce status anxiety, and even coach commercial product leaders. These connections fed back into our own community, keeping it relevant and alive.

Model

Architects step back and design the ecosystem. They:

  • Connect communities → sharing knowledge across silos

  • Curate → highlight best work so others can build on it

  • Standardise → lightweight frameworks that guide without restricting

  • Solve once → prevent duplication and free up capacity for innovation

Tools

  • Communities of interest (cross-professional learning spaces)

  • Communities of action (spaces to improve practices like knowledge management)

  • Curated handbooks and shared knowledge spaces

  • Lightweight standards and templates for coherence

Lessons Learned

  • Systems thinking allows multiple communities to thrive together.

  • Standards and curation give “so what?” to community efforts.

  • Strong communities impact the organisation beyond their immediate membership.

Epilogue – What I Learned

  1. Culture beats structure. Models help, but trust, intent, and tone matter most.

  2. Leadership evolves. You move from Explorer → Builder → Architect. Skipping stages risks burnout or stagnation.

  3. It’s demanding but worth it. You carry other people’s anxieties, but seeing a profession stand taller than it did before is unmatched.

Where is your community on this arc — and what’s the next stage you need to step into?