Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.
—James Cash (J. C.) Penney
Life doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You can train hard and never kick a ball, run a race, or compete in a competition. You can plan to lose weight and never get on the treadmill. In other words, plans don’t mean squat if we can’t put them into action.
Throughout this book we have built a robust foundation and strategy for our community. We have approached it from the right perspective, to build value for you and your members, and we have designed it so that every piece of detail maps to our broader strategic goals. But here’s the deal: you need to integrate it into your organization, hire the right people to deliver it, and most importantly, build organizational capabilities.
Building organizational muscle is about becoming self-sufficient. Our strategic development gets us a plan to execute, but what builds organizational capabilities is how you integrate that strategy into your organization, execute, and then learn from the experience. This chapter covers how to do this. Let’s begin by exploring how we hire the right people, and then we will cover integrating our strategy into the organization.
HIRING COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT STAFF
Hiring solid community management staff is essential to the overall success of your initiative. Unfortunately, this can introduce wrinkles into our plan. As a general rule, I have found most people who work professionally in a community fall into one of three buckets:
1. Community Director. These are the most senior people who work in the industry. They should be able to operate at the level we are discussing in this book and be able to understand business requirements, produce a value proposition for the community, and build a strategy that delivers it. They should be sophisticated communicators and have experience working with other teams and stakeholders to deliver their strategy. They should also be able to engage with the community directly, build relationships, and be excellent communicators in both written and spoken form.
Sadly these people are few and far between. The majority are already working in well-compensated positions and will only switch companies if (a) the opportunity is interesting, (b) they are well compensated, and (c) they would have influence in your organization. They are a godsend when you can find them.
2. Community Manager. These people will be less experienced and senior, but they should be good solid workhorses. They are usually less strategic and more tactical in nature but should have good project management skills. They should be execution focused, cranking through work, responding to members, and balancing many relationships concurrently in your community. Some are very technical in nature, often previously working as engineers. Members of your community will build strong relationships with community managers, who have more bandwidth to dedicate to them.
3. Community Evangelist. These folks are usually focused on delivering information and knowledge to your community and beyond. They are typically engaging and dynamic personalities, and natural show people. They should be excellent writers and speakers, and typically travel extensively getting out to speak to, meet, and build relationships with your community.
Many evangelists are less strategic in nature, as their work is focused specifically on outreach and awareness. As such, be careful: I have known companies to hire an evangelist presuming they had the strategic chops, only to find that their expertise and value was quite different.
To be clear, there are many who blend these different levels of expertise together, so don’t take this delineation too literally. There are also variations on these roles such as Developer Relations, Community Specialist, and Community Associate, but those are mostly different mixtures of the above three buckets (some with specialization included).
As a general rule, if you are starting a new community, you should focus on getting a solid Community Director or Community Manager first. You may need to supplement them with strategic support and mentoring depending on their experience (this is the work I often do with clients). Hire an evangelist when you feel comfortable strategically and are focusing on building growth and engagement.
What to Look For
Let me be clear about something: hiring community leadership staff is a pain in the butt. Unlike other professions (such as software engineers), which have a strong focus on a single discipline (e.g., engineering), community leadership staff need to be able to straddle multiple disciplines such as workflow, engagement, and technology.
Whether you are looking for a Community Director, Community Manager, or Community Evangelist, here are three dimensions to judge them on:
• Domain Expertise. Does this person have expertise in your specific domain, be it your products/services, market, or something else? If you need someone to work with a technical community, do they understand the technology? More importantly, do they understand the needs of the people who build that technology?
• People Person. Is this person motivated and excited to work with people? Do they thrive on building relationships, engaging with contributors, and providing surprise and delight at a human, interpersonal level? It is very difficult to train someone to be a people person, so they need to have an instinctive interest in it. Just because someone is affable in an interview doesn’t mean they are intrinsically a people person. Get to the heart of what motivates them about their work: Are human experiences at the center of it?
• Willingness to Grow. Finally, are they humble in their expertise, comfortable in failing forward, and willing to grow? Community strategy and leadership is a rapidly changing art and science that is heavily dependent on the specific context and operations of that individual community and organization. Great leaders don’t have all the answers, no matter what level they ascend to. You need someone who can think creatively, be able to always push forward to refine and improve, and never assume they have all the answers. Humility and a willingness to grow are key requirements.
This is where it gets tricky. Few people have all of these ingredients. Prioritize finding a people person who has a willingness to grow. These are intrinsic human instincts that are difficult to teach. I once hired someone who primarily had great domain expertise but just couldn’t engage effectively with people. Sadly, I had to let him go.
If you do hire someone who lacks domain expertise, assess how quickly they can learn it and if they have an interest in it. You need someone with passion for the focus of your community (e.g., your product, service, or focus); this will provide the drive to help them pick it up quickly. It is difficult to train someone who doesn’t give a crap about the topic of the community.
If you are looking to hire a Community Director, there is one more element to stir into the mixing bowl. Find a strategically minded “doer.” They need to be able to build a strategy that maps well with the company’s desired value, broader business and community objectives, and other teams and stakeholders. You need someone who can work across departments, who is collaborative, and who has the bit between their teeth to deliver. They need to be calm in the face of pushback. They are going to face many roadblocks, and you need someone who can navigate them.
Where to Find Them
First put together a job description and run it past other leaders you know who have hired a similar role in other communities. Make sure you emphasize the responsibilities so you can attract the right kind of people. Unfortunately, I don’t have space here to share role descriptions, but you can find templates by heading to https://www.jonobacon.com and selecting Resources.
Promote the role and source candidates as best you can, but be careful with recruiters. They are historically terrible at understanding the nuances of these kinds of roles and pull in lots of unqualified candidates (and annoy the qualified ones). Tap your network, reach out to those connected to good candidates, and seek referrals.
There are two primary ways to find people, one of which costs more but gets results faster. The other way is cheaper but can build lasting commitment.
1. Hire Away. The best candidates already have well-compensated roles in companies they likely enjoy working for. If you want to increase the likelihood of bringing in A-grade talent, try to hire someone out of their existing role. This requires exceeding their compensation package and providing an exciting opportunity where they can continue to grow their career. Most don’t just want more money for more of the same; they want career growth and more meaningful work.
The benefit of this approach is that you can bring in a solid foundation more quickly.
2. Mentor In. The longer, but cheaper approach is to run the standard recruitment process and try finding someone who has the best combination of ingredients we discussed earlier. This can result in some less qualified candidates who are blisteringly enthusiastic, don’t require as high a salary, and are excited about the opportunity to learn and grow. Another option here is to recruit someone who already works for you so they switch jobs to this role.
The critical component of this approach is to have a clear mentoring program in place. When this person joins (or switches roles if they already work for you), you should have clarity on which of the ingredients I outlined earlier (domain expertise, people person, willingness to grow, strategically minded doer) needs the most focus and work.
Ensure that they have a clear set of goals to accomplish in their first six months (this is where the Quarterly Delivery Plan comes in), and provide someone who can mentor and support them through their growth. For example, I commonly provide mentoring to clients.
When you deliver this mentoring well, it can grow a remarkable level of commitment. The new hire will feel that the company invested in them and will often stay committed and focused for many years.
Where They Should Report In
This is a tricky one. I have worked with community managers who have reported into marketing, some who report into engineering, some who report to the CEO/CTO, and some who even report into product.
CEO/Founders. If community is going to be a critical component of your organization with key investment, ideally, they will be a top-level department with their own budget, can join executive team meetings, and their performance will be judged by the CEO or a founder. This is only recommended for Community Directors who have primary strategic focus and recommended for small companies and start-ups.
Marketing. If your community is a Consumer or Champion type, reporting into marketing may be a natural fit. Carefully assess how well your marketing team understands the value of communities and is willing to support this work.
Unfortunately, some marketing leaders are either deeply suspicious that community could be a threat to them, or don’t understand the dynamics. Don’t inadvertently make them a blocker for your hires. To reduce this risk, test your marketing lead. Get them to read this book and see how well they pick up the subject matter!
Engineering. If your community is a Collaborator type or technical in nature, reporting into engineering may make more sense. Many of my clients have staff who report into the CEO/Founder initially and later move to report into the CTO (who may run engineering). It makes a lot of sense for community staff to be in meetings with engineering leads to (a) understand their workflow and needs better (which will impact community members), and (b) build closer relationships with them and their teams.
Product. In some companies, particularly technology firms, the product team is the bridge between customers/users and the product. As such, this can be a logical fit if there is a clear understanding of the audience and the value of a community in supporting it.
Wherever the role(s) report in, you will need to ensure your departments are aligned. This is where the strategy we have built plays a key role in ensuring everyone is on the same page with delivery and how they will collaborate.
BAKING YOUR STRATEGY INTO YOUR BUSINESS
“Ultimately, community participation is in our DNA. We recognize that open source is an ecosystem, so we understand the importance of giving back.” This is what Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, said to me when I asked him about lessons learned balancing the needs of a company and community.1
Red Hat contributes to dozens of open-source communities in areas where we don’t have commercial products. We do this because these are areas important to the open-source communities in which we are active, and the work needs to be done. We understand that there is value in contributing whether or not there is a direct quid pro quo. It’s part of what’s made us successful.
Jim has a clear vision of where community fits in his organization, the expectations of his team, and where the line is drawn between the company and community. This isn’t always clear, particularly in companies who are new to building communities. As such, there are five key ways of bringing this clarity and reducing the risk of your strategy falling apart.
1. Community Is Everyone’s Priority
Mårten Mickos summarized it best when he enthusiastically stated that, “Everyone needs to know a hacker.” He saw the importance of everyone, not just community leadership staff, having a relationship with, understanding the needs of, and engaging with their community. Good leadership trickles down, and if your leadership demonstrates good community habits, your staff will too.
Ideally your leadership team should be regularly participating in your community platforms, even if only two or three times a week. They should ask and expect their teams to participate too. Provide training to help them get started and make it a daily habit. Celebrate and reward cases where your staff demonstrates quality community engagement; this will encourage others to follow suit.
It may sound aggressive, but your departmental leads should ideally have their performance review incorporate some form of community engagement. Clear performance requirements (and accountability) should be well understood. You assess their performance on product and business dimensions, so why not community dimensions too?
Similarly, you need to inject the focus and importance of the community everywhere you can. Your company values should embody it. Your strategic planning should embody it. Your marketing should embody it. My most successful clients regularly ask “How can this add value to our community?” in product meetings.
This all takes work, but an integral cultural understanding of the community’s importance in your organization will significantly increase your chances of success.
2. Get Departmental Alignment
People often presume they are aligned and solving the same problems when they actually have subtly different interpretations. It took me a long time to realize this.
Departments are usually on board in the early ideation phase of a community strategy, but things often break down when they need to execute. This is why we created our Big Rocks earlier and our more detailed Quarterly Delivery Plan. These two documents crisply define what we are going to do, which results we want to see, and who ultimately has responsibility for delivery.
Ensure that all departments are clearly aligned in what role they play in delivering community strategy. Make this an explicit discussion. Can each department commit the time and resources to deliver their responsibilities for each of the Big Rocks? If not, either expand your resources or be more conservative in your objectives. Either way, there needs to be (a) commitment to delivery, and (b) an understanding that not delivering is not an option.
The companies I see that fail at community strategy (and other areas too) operate in a culture in which not delivering agreed-upon goals is OK. Let’s fix that now: not delivering is not OK. Reevaluating goals, paring down work, and otherwise adjusting based on the realities of running a business and community is fine, but rolling out excuse after excuse for not hitting the target is not.
3. Operate on a Cadence Cycle
Back in chapter 6, I presented my Cadence-Based Community Cycle:
As we discussed back then, there is enormous value to building a strategic cycle that repeats; it bakes in organizational skills and optimization. It also presents a chance to pull different people and stakeholders in at the right time to ensure your strategy is on the right track. I have seen these cycles work with multiple clients and in communities such as Pop!_OS, Fedora, and Ubuntu.
It works like this:
Item |
Who Should Be There? |
Focus |
Cycle Planning |
Key stakeholders, departmental leads, key community members |
Finalize key areas of work, get input from community members, get approval from stakeholders, and ensure departmental ownership and delivery is clear. This sets the stage for the next two quarters. |
Weekly Syncs |
Owners of items in the quarterly plan, execution staff, and required community members |
Weekly review of the Quarterly Delivery Plan with a focus on unblocking problems, clarifying points of collaboration between departments/community teams, and resolving any other issues. |
Quarterly Review |
Departmental leads |
After each quarter, all departmental leads should review overall delivery so far and identify any issues and blockers and how to resolve them. Small adjustments to KPIs may be made based on work in-flight. |
Cycle Review |
Key stakeholders, departmental leads, and relevant staff and community members |
At the end of the cycle, bring together key stakeholders, departmental leads, and others to review (a) the value of the work delivered, (b) how well the team delivered it, and (c) areas of optimization and improvement that can be put in place for the next cycle. |
Integrate this cadence into your schedules and planning. Get these meetings scheduled now (so people don’t book over them with trips and vacations).
Remember, we are building organizational muscle here. Just like building muscle on your body, routine is what makes us tick. Regular workouts, predictable mealtimes, consistent bedtimes . . . they all build rigor and predictability that results in consistent habits and tangible results. Do the same with this cadence cycle. Every time you run the cycle, you will learn how to optimize and make it more efficient every time.
4. Train and Mentor
One major lesson I have learned from consulting with so many companies is that communities are just weird for many people, and they often struggle in getting started and participating. Their employees are often initially reluctant to participate, fearful of making missteps (particularly with a public community), and sometimes confused about what exactly they should be doing. The solution here is education and mentoring.
Make it clear why this work is important. Don’t just tell them to do the work. Help them to understand the value of it. In meetings, company-wide memos and posts, and all-hands sessions, always focus on how the community enriches your organization, the work you do, and future potential. How does it make their job more interesting, fulfilling, and valuable? Sell them on it and get them excited about playing a role in it.
This vision and inspiration need to be backed up with a practical way they can engage. Make it clear what you expect from them. Get specific. What exactly do you want your team to do?
On one hand this should be simple: you can point them to your Quarterly Delivery Plan. On the other hand, how do you want them to participate in the community? Which tools should they use? Which problems should they solve? How long should they spend each day (I recommend a minimum of fifteen minutes a day)? How do you want them to engage with your community members (e.g., providing encouragement, solving problems, etc.)? Be clear in what you expect and give them very specific goals to accomplish.
For example, one tool I often use to build communities, Discourse, has a “trust model” through which I can easily track if people are participating effectively.2 A member’s trust level increases the more they proactively participate, not just in reading content but also writing, filling out their profile, having their content liked, and more. Give your employees goals (e.g., achieving a specific trust level) and set expectations on daily participation and time required so they can build a habit.
Be honest with people: they are going to screw up. Make it clear how failures can be handled (e.g., removing accidental disclosures or confidential content), and that the organization expects mistakes to be made. Make it clear that there will be no dragging over the coals while people learn how to do this.
Always have a way in which staff can reach out and get help. Provide documentation they can read to answer common questions. Most people naturally don’t ask for help, so schedule regular check-ins to see how they are doing and regularly tap them on the shoulder privately to see how they are doing personally and if you can help.
It is recommended you put in place at least three to six training sessions to cover these areas, including clear goals and next steps for employees to follow. Set daily expectations of participating in the community, even if that participation is just fifteen minutes a day. Ask them to schedule it in their calendars. Remember, it takes sixty-six days to build a habit, and we need them to build the habit of participating in the community every day.
Also put in place clear mentoring programs (typically with your Community Director/Manager) to provide guidance after the training completes. You need the right balance of setting expectations that lack of participation is not an option but also that they have ample support and guidance to get involved and be successful.
5. Execute, Review, Repeat
Start delivering work and have the meetings outlined earlier in the cadence cycle. Watch how well things go. Don’t just judge if your team delivers. Judge how they deliver and any problems they face. Look for dents in your armor and holes in the road so you can better support your team and avoid further issues.
In each Quarterly Review and Cycle Review discuss these dents and bumps openly with your team. Have an unemotional conversation about how to rectify them in the future. What was successfully delivered? What wasn’t, and why? Were there process or team issues we should smooth out? How can the leadership team better support staff? See every problem as an opportunity for future improvement, get agreement on how you will implement those changes, and then review again at the next Quarterly Review or Cycle Review.
Importantly, don’t just focus on the flaws. Celebrate the successes. Celebrate the work that is delivered, the skills that are developed, and the successes your team and your community enjoy.
PERFECTION IS NOT REQUIRED, BUT FOCUS IS
If any of you reading this have run a business before, you know that not everything goes according to plan. Decisions have to be made quicker than expected, we have fewer resources than we would like, problems hunt together in packs, and opportunity can sometimes be tricky to find in our more challenging moments.
The problem with a lot of business books is that they often provide recommendations for how to do something that adds value, all while rather conveniently ignoring the reality of the world around us. I want to kick that habit.
You don’t have to have a perfect strategy. You don’t have to have it perfectly integrated into your business. You do, though, need a few key skills: to put together a plan, execute it, and improve it with experience. Learn by doing, and do by learning. Treat every problem as a teachable moment and every success as a validation of your approach. Look at your work unemotionally as a set of logical connections in which you are always finding ways to optimize the logic. This is how we truly bake these skills into your organization.