The challenge in building such a community is that PM is a highly sought after job in the tech sector, so any forum or website built around PM discussion is inevitably going to turn into something like Medium, which today is a list of poorly written thought pieces by (mostly) amateurs.
This is where spending some years in a big organization can be really helpful. You can find mentors who have managed major products. You learn from them, but at least as importantly, you have their contact info and these are people who answer their email when you have an interesting problem or question for them.
Doesn't have to be corporate. The high end of government has some really stratospheric talent executing high cost, high stakes projects.
While I agree that good PMs are busy, I'd argue that the bigger problem is that busy PMs aren't incentivized to share their knowledge.
I've been doing my best to try to share my knowledge as a product manager (disclaimer, I write for Product Manager HQ), but that's been a challenge - it takes anywhere from 8-20 hours for me to pull together a thoughtful article, especially because I'm keenly aware of the fact that there's an overwhelming number of low-quality product management articles. I've been lucky to have time on weekends to write, and I know that's not a luxury that every product manager has.
Many of my peers and colleagues are hesitant to jump into writing, specifically because they aren't incentivized to do so. (I'm incentivized by my personal mission "to make other people's lives happier, easier, and better", but personal missions can only incentivize a single person...)
Hackathons are a great way for engineers to share their abilities with others outside of their day-to-day work. I wonder whether there are similar outlets for PMs - maybe some sort of open-mic for best practices, or a company-sponsored "blog day" where every PM sits down for the day and pulls together learnings?
That's an interesting point. I'd be really interested in some advice on how to prevent it. Currently with our project Hot Tips form PMs for PMs https://www.jamlondon.io/tips/ we do manual curation (people submit text, or I reach out to specific experts) and then it goes through approval/editing process. It'd be cool to be able to automate it though.
