Note: This article is part of a series of Walton Insights articles on product management. To learn more about what product management is (and what it’s not), read Part 1 in the series. Part 2 covers the qualifications and career path in product management, and Part 3 covers how the Walton College creates product management opportunities for students.
Marc Thompson moved to Bentonville from the UK in 2019 and was surprised to find the
region had no organized group supporting the professional development of product managers.
It’s one of the fastest-growing professions in the world, and surely, he reasoned,
there would be interest enough to have such a group in Northwest Arkansas. So, Thompson,
the director of product management for Walmart, put out a feeler on LinkedIn to see
if anyone else thought there was a need.
Kurt Haas, who now is a group product manager for Kroger, and Chris Stone, who at the time worked with Emergn, quickly agreed to join him as co-founders of the Northwest Arkansas Product Managers Guild, and they scheduled a kick-off event in February 2020. The meeting drew more than 50 people to Local Lime in Rogers, with another 50 put on a waiting list. And in less than two years, despite the limitations caused by the pandemic, the guild has grown to more than 250 members.
Product management has been around in various forms for almost a century, but it’s morphed in the last few decades into something that impacts almost every layer of business. Project managers provide a holistic approach to shepherding innovations into a successful, sustainable existence. They are typically the hub that connects all the different departments within a company launching a new product – a traditional physical product, a software, a technology – or an iterative improvement of something already on the market. (I wrote a Walton Insights article that describes modern product management, so you can check that out if you are unfamiliar with the profession.)
Northwest Arkansas, home to major corporate players such as Walmart, J.B. Hunt Transport, Tyson Foods, hundreds of vendors, and hundreds of entrepreneurial ventures, is a region where quality product management is in high demand. And the NWA Product Managers Guild was created to help highlight and support every level of the growing discipline – newbies who are still in college, academics who research and teach on the topic, professionals looking to change roles within a company, entrepreneurs, and veterans at the highest leadership levels of global corporations.
The guild provides training and mentoring to develop and promote what it calls “vendor-neutral product management approaches” and industry best practices. It now has a steering committee with 14 members who organize quarterly meetings that include guest speakers and breakout sessions, but the group is active in several other ways. They have a public LinkedIn account to help spread the word about their events, as well as a private LinkedIn group and a private Slack channel that are exclusive to members.
They also are working with the University of Arkansas to provide mentors and support for the McMillon Innovation Studio's student teams and to co-create and help deliver executive education that provides certification in product management.
While the guild has expanded quickly, Thompson points out that it is tapping into a mere fraction of the people who work or want to work in product management. He did a filtered search on LinkedIn and found that around 10,000 people in Northwest Arkansas have a title that indicates they work in some level of product management. Some of those live in other parts of the country and have a connection to Northwest Arkansas, but more than 70 percent of them list this region as their home. Most work in the retail or computer software industries, but they also are common in higher education, consulting, banking, supply chain, IT, and nonprofit organizations.
Given the profession’s emphasis on connecting with others to generate shared success, it’s no surprise that product managers are joining forces to support each other. And that bodes well for anyone in the region who is part of this professional community.
