15 product management slack communities you should follow
Product Management Slack Communities
Slack is where work happens for over 10 million people across the globe. The app helps small and large teams improve their productivity by providing a single hub for communication, reports, and files. Companies like Oracle, Lyft, Target, and LinkedIn use Slack as a collaboration hub to make communication more transparent and improve their workflow.
Apart from being a go-to tool for team collaboration, public Slack communities have become a medium for like-minded professionals to engage and participate in meaningful conversations. Public Slack communities are team workspaces that are open for everyone to join.
How to find public Slack communities?
Unfortunately, Slack doesn’t provide a centralized directory of all public workspaces. However, there are many fan-created directories and posts out there, such as:
If you’re a busy product manager, you probably don’t want to spend your day sifting through hundreds of Slack workspaces. That’s why we decided to do the hard work for you. Below are the 15 best Slack communities that you need to follow if you’re a product manager. Some of these communities, like Mind The Product, are specially built by product managers for product managers. Others are more focused on UX, development, or marketing.
Mind the Product
How to join: Get an invite
Members as of Oct 2019: 28,256
Channels: 277
Price: Free
Mind the Product is the largest international community of product managers. Today, Mind the Product has over 150,000 members and hosts meetups in 175+ cities around the globe.
The Mind the Product Slack community was created in 2015 as another medium for PMs to engage with each other. The workspace now boasts almost 30,000 members, and is one of the most active Slack communities out there for product managers. With 277 channels, there’s a place to talk about pretty much everything related to product management, including finding a job in the space.
Product School
How to join: Get an invite
Members as of Oct 2019: 30,000+
Channels: 44 (26 local channels to connect with PMs in your area)
Price: Free
The Product School Slack community has a whooping 30,000 members, and the admins host weekly AMA sessions where you get the chance to pick the brains of PM thought leaders from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and more. It is one of the highlights of this particular Slack Community.
Join the Product School Slack community if you are an aspiring product manager, or if you are simply interested in the evolving product management industry.
Product Manager HQ
How to join: Purchase lifetime access
Members as of Oct 2019: 7763
Channels: 40
Price: Free
Whether you’re an inspiring product manager or experienced veteran, Product HQ is the perfect community for you to follow and participate in. Product Manager HQ is one of the leading resources for learning how to break into product management and excel on the job. The team has provided a treasure trove of resources available for free, as well as a premium PM course that you can enroll in.
For a one time fee of $25, you get access to 7000 members and 40 active channels in the Product Manager HQ Slack community.
Rands Leadership Slack
How to join: Send an email to michael@lopp.com (Read more information about joining)
Members as of Oct 2019: 9,000
Channels: 400
The community leader of this Slack workspace is Michael Lopp — the current VP of engineering at Slack. As Lopp puts it, “The Rands Leadership Slack exists to help longtime, new, and aspiring leaders to learn through conversation and sharing of ideas.”
The reason we included this Slack community so high on this list is that being a successful product manager goes beyond building great products. The most seasoned product managers manage and lead people, too. We highly encourage you to join this community if you want to level up your people management skills and meet senior management professionals.
Product Coalition
How to join: http://productcoalitionslack.herokuapp.com/
Members as of Oct 2019: 5304
Price: Free
The Product Coalition is the most read product management publication on Medium. Almost half a million product managers, designers, developers, and entrepreneurs have read an article on The Product Coalition.
Apart from its popular Medium publication, the team behind the Product Coalition runs a Slack community that now has over 5,000 members. When we first stumbled on this Slack community back in 2016, it had only 300 members. It’s no surprise this workspace has grown so fast considering the abundance of great PMs that actively participate in it, like Amrit Pal (PM at Square), Diane Chang (PM at AMC networks), and many more.
Startup Chat
How to join: Join at https://www.startup.chat/
Channels: 235
Price: $29
Startup Chat is a global startup community of entrepreneurs on Slack. The workspace is packed with founders, investors, press, and product managers.
The one-time contribution of $29 gives you access to 235 channels. As a product manager, you might be interested in joining #-development, #-design, #-lean_startup, or #guineapigs, where people are willing to test your product for free! You can even form a braintrust with like-minded individuals.
Product-Led Growth (PLG)
How to join: Join at https://productled.com/
Price: Free
Product-led growth (PLG) is a business methodology in which user acquisition, conversion, and retention are all driven primarily by the product itself.
This relatively new Slack workspace is the official community of the Product-Led Institute — an organization dedicated to promoting product-led growth. The PLG Slack community is the place to be if you’re a product manager in a SaaS business with a free trial or a freemium model or planning to go down that path. The community was created just a few months ago but is already very active. It is worth joining if you’d like to engage with professionals in the SaaS field.
Women in Product
How to join: Apply by submitting this Google form
Price: Free
“Almost every woman working in product has a collection of stories like ours. Over the past decade or so that I’ve been working at early-stage startups, I have worked with one other woman in a product management role.
It’s telling that when we talk about women in technology, women in product roles are rarely included. It’s no one’s fault — we haven’t yet formed our own visible communities or begun really publicly talking about the culture of Bro that dominates our role.”
Says Merci Grace, the creator of this Slack community and investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
To join this community, you must fill in a brief form.
Modern Agile
How to join: Learn more at http://modernagile.org/
Price: Free
Modern Agile is a free community for people interested in uncovering better ways of getting awesome results with the Agile methodology. The creators of Modern Agile run a free podcast called the #ModernAgileShow, where they interview agile experts and answer questions about agile and Scrum. Their Slack community is one of the easiest ways to get in touch with other product managers, product owners, and developers that practice agile.
Agile Coaching
How to join: http://p4a.herokuapp.com/
Price: Free
The Agile Coaching Slack workspace is another great community for discussing all things related to Agile. Members have backgrounds that span across a range of Agile roles, including a lot of product managers. Agile Coaching began as a small group of members from The Netherlands, but now has more than a thousand members from all across the world.
Lewis C. Lin PM Interview Practice Community
How to join: Apply on http://pmint.herokuapp.com/
Price: Free
If there’s one person you should follow to master the product management job interview, this should be Lewis C.Lin. Lin is the Amazon best-selling author of “Decode and Conquer: Answers to Product Management Interviews.”
The PM Interview Practice Community is the natural extension of Lin’s book. By joining the community, you get an opportunity to connect with thousands of peers and practice mock interviews with them. You will also get a ton of advice on writing your resume, handling interview questions, salary negotiations, and more.
Product Marketing
How to join: http://pmm-drift-slackin.herokuapp.com/
Price: Free
As a product manager, your job doesn’t end with launching the product. Even the most brilliant product is useless if people don’t use it. To get real-life usage, you must have a good understanding of the market and be able to position your product for accelerated growth.
The Product Marketing Slack community is an excellent place to start learning more about the intersection of product and marketing strategies and improve your knowledge of product growth.
Product Marketing Alliance
How to join: Submit the form at https://productmarketingalliance.com/join-slack/
Price: Free
The Product Marketing Alliance is a collective of passionate product marketing managers from companies like Google, Shopify, Adobe, Mailchimp, and more. Their blog covers a variety of topics related to product marketing like Q&As with leaders in the field, up-to-date reports on the state of product marketing, in-depth guides, and a whole lot more.
The Product Marketing Alliance Slack community is the perfect place to discuss go-to-market strategy, product launch tactics, product marketing resources, and anything related to getting a job as a product marketing manager.
LEANSTACK Community
How to join: Join http://slack.leanstack.com/
Price: Free
Leanstack Community is the official Slack community of Ash Maurya, the author of Running Lean and the creator of the one-page business modeling tool Lean Canvas.
The Leanstack Slack community is focused on the lean methodology for validating and building product ideas. Apart from getting access to a ton of resources to help you with validating product and feature ideas and business modeling, by joining this Slack community, you will get a chance to engage directly with Ash Maurya and the team behind Leanstack.
Online Geniuses
How to join: To join apply at https://onlinegeniuses.com/
Price: Free. $25 for instant access. $499/year for Pro access
Online Geniuses is a free digital marketing community. It’s arguably the largest and most active marketing-related workspace with almost 20,000 industry experts from across the globe and thousands of messages every day. In this community, you will find a lot of VPs, CMOs of popular products, freelancers, consultants, and agency owners from every niche in the marketing ecosystem.
It’s free to join, but the team behind Online Geniuses vets every applicant manually.
Bonus: Product Makers Slack
How to join: To join apply at https://productboard.com/community/
Price: Free
The Product Makers Community is a place where people go to learn product excellence alongside their peers– 8,800+ strong and growing, to be exact. It’s free to join the Slack group for things like:
- Meet others and grow your professional network
- Access exclusive community-only events, programs, and content
- Grow your product knowledge and craft
- Share and find product jobs
- Participate in Productboard betas and learn about new releases
Or maybe you’re interested in speaking at an upcoming Product Makers event? We’re always on the lookout.
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Want more great PM resources? Check out 20 product management blogs worth following and 21 best agile product management resources.
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