Starting a New Business Unit is Product Management

Andres Glusman, Head of Meetups at WeWork and former Chief Strategy Officer at Meetup, and Michael Curtes, Product Director at Meetup, discuss how Meetup validated its initial business model, how the company will integrate with WeWork after being acquired, and their approach to experimentation.

Since its founding over 15 years ago, Meetup has become one of New York’s top startups and a community builder across the globe. The company now facilitates over 15,000 in-person Meetups each day in over 100 countries !

A few months ago, WeWork, the $20 billion coworking space company, acquired Meetup.

Most Meetups take place on weeknights and weekends, and WeWork’s 10 million square feet of office space is primarily occupied on weekdays, so the acquisition is an opportunity to solve Meetup hosts’ most pressing challenge: finding great space.

Andres and Michael created a new business unit to enable Meetup hosts to take advantage of WeWork’s beautiful spaces and, ultimately, to help people realize their potential by getting together with like-minded people.

Without historical data to help them make decisions about how to build the product, they practice customer development and experimentation to create a great user experience and realize their vision.

Andres shares how he created a system for getting feedback from users almost any day of the week:

“Our goal was to shorten the amount of time between anybody in the company wondering ‘how would somebody react to this new product feature?’ to actually watching them use it.”

It was exciting to learn more about how Meetup started, its approach to product management, and the story behind the acquisition. You’ll learn a lot from this episode about team building, experimentation, and concept testing.

Here are the highlights:

• Andres shares the product management strategies that contributed to the company’s growth (6:50)
• The strategy behind starting a new business unit to host Meetups at WeWork (11:05)
• How Andres and Michael run product experiments (17:20)
• The long-term vision for the Meetup/WeWork integration (27:35)