You have been stuck on something for weeks. Your customers ignore the feature that took you three months to ship. Your team delivers too slowly and you no longer know where to cut. You have to choose between two directions, and nobody around you has any distance on the question.
On the fourth Thursday of every month, in Strasbourg, a whole room spends two hours on your problem. It is free, and it is the whole point of Product Meetup SXB, which I run with Alsace Digitale.
What you come for
Most professional gatherings work like a conference. Someone presents, the room listens, we clap, we have a drink. You learn things, but you rarely leave with an answer to whatever was blocking you.
Here, the evening belongs to your subject.
You get one minute to lay out your problem: the context, what exactly is stuck, the consequences for your customers or your team, what you have already tried. The room then splits into small groups, each takes on one subject, and the evening ends with every table reporting back what it found.
You leave with concrete leads, sometimes with a plan, often with two or three people to follow up with.
What you bring without knowing it
No problem to submit this month? Come anyway.
These evenings rest on one thing: nobody is here as an expert, everybody is here as a practitioner. The developer listening to a positioning question sees what the marketer no longer sees. The founder who botched three hires has an interview guide that will serve someone else. The designer who has never worked in your industry asks the naive question nobody on your team dares to voice.
That crossing of trades is what makes the evening worth it. More than three hundred and thirty people have joined the group since 2024, and the reviews put these meetups at 4.8 out of 5.
What changes in September, because you asked for it
One piece of feedback kept coming back across editions: the workshops would gain from resting on shared ground. Many of you said you wanted solid concepts, ready to apply the next morning, before moving into the pitching and problem solving.
Season 3 answers that.
From Thursday 24 September, every evening opens with an hour of training, from 6.30 to 7.30 pm. One concept, explained so it can be put to work, drawn from what I call the impact factory: how an organisation builds value rather than deliverables. The problem solving workshops follow, from 7.30 to 10 pm.
You walk into the workshops with shared vocabulary and one more tool in hand. And if you can only stay an hour, that hour is worth the trip on its own.
Running a table
Some of you already lead your group naturally during the workshops. If that appeals to you, there is a place for you, on one condition.
Running a table calls for experience as a product manager or product designer. It is a matter of reflexes more than of job title. Knowing how to ask a question without smuggling the answer into it. Holding the group on the problem while everyone is itching to talk solutions. Telling, when an idea comes up, whether it stands up or merely sounds good.
Those three reflexes separate a table that produces a plan from a table that produces a pleasant conversation.
In practice, the role means guiding three or four people through the workshop, making sure the group converges on something actionable, and reporting back in two minutes. One evening a month.
If that speaks to you, tell me at the next edition.
Who these evenings are for
These meetups bring together the people who take part in building a product: developers, product owners, product managers, product designers, CPOs, CTOs, founders.
What they share is not a job title, it is the lived experience. You deal daily with the questions that building a product raises: making trade-offs, understanding a usage, deciding on incomplete information, carrying a team along. That is what lets you bring something to other people’s subjects, rather than merely attending.
If you do not live those questions from the inside, these evenings will do little for you, and you will do little for the table that hosts you.
Coming along
The meetups take place on the fourth Thursday of the month, except August and December, in Strasbourg. Entry is free.
The programme and registration are on the group’s Meetup page. The next edition is on 24 September.