Create an Incredible Adventure
I am completely in favor of dialogue and engagement. But it must be a true, open dialogue.
—Ma Jian
In 2014, I stepped off the BART train at Montgomery Station and walked into a friend’s company situated nearby. I was popping in on my way to a client to see if I could help. I was taken into a conference room where Rebecca (her name is anonymized) sat in front of a MacBook Pro covered in stickers. She looked rather exacerbated.
“Thanks for coming in, Jono. Here’s the deal. We just ran a community strategy program, hired a community manager to lead it, and invested around $110,000 in building our community. We have had a handful of members sign up and participate, but other than that, we haven’t seen much for our investment. We are frustrated, our community manager is frustrated, and my boss [the CEO] is spitting fire.”
I got out my computer and started looking at their community. The more I dug into it, the more I could see why this was happening. Their community was boring, disorganized, and unclear.
Their target audience was ambiguous. Their website was dull, poorly structured, and didn’t help members get started. The tools required to get involved were unintuitive, complicated to set up, and required new members to jump through hoops to get anything done. Help and documentation were sparse to nonexistent, and there wasn’t a place where members could ask questions. There was also barely any incentivization for helping community members to learn and grow.
Frankly, it was a mess. It was clear that their community manager had done a good job on social media and blogging, but barely any thinking had gone into shaping the overall community experience and how that impacted a community member through their eyes.
Remember that $110,000 that they invested? Just over half of it was spent on promotion and advertising to bring people into the community (to “fill the funnel,” in marketing terms). This was a problem. They spent a lot of money getting people to the front door of their community, but when they got there, there were so many obstacles in their way to participate that the majority of that promotional budget was wasted. I felt bad for Rebecca; she was in a bit of a pickle.
I recommended she fix her problem by zooming out and focusing on an end-to-end community experience. There needed to be a clear place for new community members to start, an understanding of how we keep them engaged and moving forward, and clarity on what they can get out of the experience. This all needed to be tested with real community members, not merely members of the company, to ensure it really did make sense to the target audience.
A START, MIDDLE, AND END
On September 24, 1994, Quentin Tarantino unveiled Pulp Fiction to the world. While the often bloody, at times comedic, masterpiece went on to become a cult hit, at first it turned heads in the way it futzed with how the plot was presented.
Historically, writers, directors, and storytellers grew up feeding on the gruel of “every story has a start, a middle, and an end.” Pulp Fiction changed all that. It showed the context of the ending as the movie opens, which generates curiosity about how the story would evolve, ultimately generating a more satisfying sense of conclusion when it does eventually get there.
This is the crux of great experiences. Great experiences produce an appetite for value, set expectations, and get you there easily with gratifying results. If we don’t design a clear, logical, satisfying journey, we will lose people along the way.
Restaurants are a great example of this because there is a clear start, middle, and end of a meal, and the smooth transition through these phases has an enormous impact on our perception of the experience.
Six months ago, my wife and I went to dinner at a new restaurant in our town. From discovering the restaurant, to booking a table, to getting seated as soon as we arrived, everything ran smoothly. Our waiter was friendly and attentive, brought us water immediately, and gave us enough time to browse the menu while he took our drink orders. He provided good recommendations for their specialties, and the food came out at a reasonable cadence without being too quick or too slow. He kept our glasses full, regularly checked if we needed anything, and didn’t pester us. When we left the restaurant, our opinion of the experience wasn’t just based on the food (which was great!) but on the smoothness of the service, which made the entire experience feel high quality. We are now regulars there.
We see this with how Disney manages the guest experience and flow at their theme parks, and with how great conferences guide you from arrival to registration and then to sessions. We see it in stores, such as how Ikea guides you logically through the store from browsing furniture (and getting design ideas), to a meatball break at the café, on to the smaller items in the marketplace, and then to picking up your hulking boxes at the end before you pay.
This elegance of experience doesn’t just happen in the physical world; it applies to technology too. Apple, Samsung, and Google have perfected setting up and teaching you about your new cell phone; services such as Salesforce and QuickBooks simplify getting your account set up and learning the tools; and video games such as Battlefield, Final Fantasy, and Metal Gear Solid teach the player via carefully crafted first-level tutorials.1
We need to take the same approach to building communities. Don’t treat your community as a loose collection of websites and content. Think of it as a carefully glued-together chronological journey that has a beginning, middle, and end.
In this chapter we are going to put together the map for this community journey.
ROLLING OUT THE ROADMAP
The map in question is my Community Participation Framework, which I have developed over the last twenty years. It covers my approach for how to factor the right pieces in the right order into the community experience.
Fig. 5.1: Community Participation Framework
This framework can be applied to Consumer, Champion, and Collaborator communities across different industries, geographies, and more. It guides what I do with pretty much every company I work with.
This is the skeleton of your community. It covers the essential, foundational elements we need to include. It is designed to provide a lens we can look through to ensure we ask the right questions and include the right strategic pieces in our plans.
This framework is broken into three key sections:
1. Onboarding: The part to the left of the star is where we take a person who is brand new, who represents one of our target audience personas, and we help them produce something of value—both to them and the community—as quickly and easily as possible. This value is represented by the star.
2. Engagement: When they have produced this first piece of tangible value, they are still very new. We now help them to settle in, and support their transition between three key states: Casual, Regulars, and finally Core. This will help to grow their active participation and sense of belonging.
3. Incentivization: To help grow and maintain participation, we lay a series of incentives and rewards (shown by the little bumps) that help them to stay engaged, develop their experience, produce new skills, and stay motivated.
Importantly, you need to apply the Community Participation Framework to each one of your personas individually.
Different types of contribution involve very different ways of working and cultural norms. If you try to make a designer operate using a workflow intended for engineers, they will get confused and annoyed. The same happens when you make translators follow a marketing workflow. We want to tune our community experience to be as natural as possible for that specific persona, but also be working within a general set of tools and conventions in a shared community.
Let’s now spin through these three sections and explore how they work.
NAIL THE ON-RAMP
Life is filled with journeys that involve a carefully orchestrated set of steps. These can be simple, such as filling your car (drive to the pump, pay, select fuel type, pump it, and drive off) or far more complicated such as flying airplanes, selling companies, producing records, or other endeavors.
When you build any kind of experience, you need to make the onboarding experience of the process silky smooth. The overall process should be simple, each step should be clear and lead logically to the next step, and there should be plenty of help available. This significantly increases the likelihood of a new community member getting positive results and building their confidence to keep participating.
My friend Stephen Walli, a veteran in the technology world, once shared with me that in a few companies he worked at in the ’90s, a key metric for the success of a software product was the “ten-minute rule”: how long it took the user to do something simple with the product from the minute the shrink-wrap was taken off the box. (The goal was, unsurprisingly, within ten minutes.) This metric was fundamentally dependent on the user understanding (a) the value the software could deliver, and (b) how to experience that value as quickly as possible.
This is exactly our goal with onboarding. For every persona you need to flip your brain into private browsing mode, put yourself in their shoes, and think about what steps need to happen to go from zero to delivering something of value for both the individual and the community.
Now, your on-ramps will differ from audience persona to audience persona. This isn’t all that surprising: a Support persona will get involved differently than an Advocate persona, and even more differently than a Developer persona.
There is good news though. For the majority of personas, there are similar types of steps that occur. This is rather conveniently baked into my Community On-Ramp Model:
Fig. 5.2: Community On-Ramp Model
When a new community member wanders up to the start of the on-ramp, they typically progress step-by-step through six stages. Let’s take a look at each.
1. Why Participate? Put yourself in their position. Why should they take their time away from their family, friends, and other interests to participate in your community? What’s in it for them? What value (from your Community Value Statement) can you tempt them with? You need to sell your community to them.
At a minimum you should have a website that explains the value of participating and clear step-by-step instructions for how to get started. Support this with outreach on social media, events, and more. A great example is the Harley Owners Group, who clearly explain the benefits of joining their community, the different membership levels and perks, and more. This important step has led them to attract more than 1 million members.2
2. Setup Tools. When they decide they want to participate, people need to set up the necessary tools to get started contributing something tangible (such as an article, an answer to a question, or a piece of code). You can’t build a table without knowing what a saw and a screwdriver are (despite my best efforts trying). Members need to know which tools they need and how they work, otherwise they will spend more time frustrated at the tools than doing interesting work.
In your community this may require registering an account, familiarizing themselves with a website, installing software on their computer, or other tasks. This should be as simple and pain-free as possible. In one community I saw, it took more than two hours to complete this step. This just isn’t acceptable. It needs to happen as quickly as possible.
Provide them with simple instructions on how to get started, how to set up any tools, and the basics of using them. Don’t drown them in text; reassure them with simple step-by-step guidance.
Peloton, which produces exercise equipment with live classes, is a good example. When they deliver your new bike or treadmill, they walk you through how to set it up, get you connected to their service, and show you how to get started. It is simple, clear, and effortless.
3. Build Skills. Now that they have the motivation and tools ready, members need to learn how to participate. This again varies depending on the persona. Provide them with the basics of how to get started in delivering value.
For example, Meetup.com is a service for organizing in-person events. They help their target persona (an event organizer) build skills with step-by-step instructions for organizing an event, and a collection of guidance in their Organizer Guide.3
Try to be focused and concise here: the last thing anyone wants is a raft of verbiage they won’t read. Understand what skills your members need and provide them with clear guidance so they can pick them up quickly and easily.
4. Tangible Engagement. At this point in the Community On-Ramp Model they are ready to do something. Provide them with guidance on what they can specifically help with. Which questions need answering? Which events need organizing? Which features need building? How can they advocate for your community?
Provide simple ways to connect your members with problems that need solving. Don’t desert them; help them figure out what value to add. Many new community members don’t know how to get started.
As an example, many engineering communities—such as Kubernetes, Babel, Nextcloud, and React Native—point new developers at simple bug reports they can start with (often tagged with “good first issue”).4 Some support communities have lists of unanswered questions. How will this work for your community and each persona?
5. Solve Problems. No matter how good your onboarding is, new community members are going to hit bumps in the road while going through this process, and they will have questions and need to solve problems. Always provide a place where they can meet other members, ask questions, and get help.
This could be a discussion forum, Q&A website, or other service. Aside from just providing the resource, reassure them that questions are welcome. Many people new to communities are worried about looking stupid: make asking questions a normal part of the community experience.
In the beginning your team will need to field most of the answers to these questions, but as your community grows, other community members will start to help too.
6. Tangible Validation. Finally, when they have contributed something of value, celebrate it. As you can see, there is a lot involved going through the onboarding process—setting up tools, learning skills, producing value. When they successfully get through it, show your appreciation.
This can be as simple as a personal email from you thanking them, or as complex as a full rewards system and gamification (which we discuss more of in chapter 8).
Now, the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that steps 1 and 6 that bookend the Community On-Ramp Model have a special extra circle wrapped around them. Well spotted.
This is because every on-ramp for every persona should include two specific phases: how new members are sold on the value of participation and rewarding them for their efforts. The first step is a no-brainer. You absolutely need to give people a reason to drag themselves up the on-ramp, step-by-step. Step 6 is essential for building a sense of recognition, personal touch, and belonging.
Again, put yourself in their position. Imagine you make your first contribution to a community and a senior member of the community or company reaches out and pats you on the back. Unless your heart is carved out of ice, this feels good. This will increase the chance you contribute again. Before you know it, participating will seem like second nature.
Before we move on to build an on-ramp, it is important to be mindful of how you validate it. On-ramps shouldn’t just provide an efficient way of onboarding people. They should also allow us to verify that the member’s transition between the different stages is actually working.
GET BUSY WITH YOUR AUDIENCE ON-RAMPS
Now, pull out your audience personas and design each one its own on-ramp. Feel free to base this on my Community On-Ramp Model, but you know your community goals better than I do; don’t be constrained by my model.
As you create each on-ramp, start thinking about what kind of tools, documentation, and resources you might need. Also, reread your Community Value Statement and try to engineer as much of that value as possible while new members traverse up your on-ramps.
Here are a couple of examples:
Support On-Ramp (help for a streaming TV device):
• Why Participate?: A community website showcasing benefits of participation, stories of positive community experiences, social media, and broader outreach.
• Setup Tools: Registering an account on the forum, knowing where to find the list of current questions, and knowing where to find other tools and documentation.
• Build Skills: Learning how to use the forum, how to respond to topics, how to create new topics, where to find questions that need answering, and how to reference external materials.
• Tangible Engagement: Finding and answering support questions in the community forum and ensuring answers are accepted.
• Solve Problems: Mentoring from other community members on how to effectively provide support.
• Tangible Validation: Email recognition of their first answer being accepted and a thank-you note from the community leader.
Outer Developer On-Ramp (building applications for a mobile platform):
• Why Participate?: What is the value of building an app for this platform and what are the tools, resources, and support that are available to make it as easy as possible?
• Setup Tools: How to set up the Software Development Kit (SDK) and create a new project.
• Build Skills: Documentation for how to learn the SDK and the Application Programming Interface (API), and how to submit applications to the platform for review.
• Tangible Engagement: Building and delivering an application for review.
• Solve Problems: Where to find documentation and how to ask questions on a community forum.
• Tangible Validation: When an app is accepted for publication, members receive a simple care package in the mail (T-shirt, mug, note) and a thank-you email from the community leader.
As you design your on-ramps, I want you to avoid some common landmines buried in the process. Let’s spin through each.
Don’t assume too much. Don’t assume your audience has the information you have and don’t assume they have much community experience. You should assume impatience. Your community members should expect to get results quickly, so ensure your on-ramps are fast and efficient, with little-to-no bureaucracy.
Start simple and iterate. Sometimes the best tool is a hammer, not an electrical power tool. As you design your on-ramps, always ask the question “can we make this easier for them?” In the majority of cases the answer should be yes. As French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”5
Every step should connect clearly to the next step. The very best journeys and the very best on-ramps make every step and how they connect crystal clear. For example, when someone has learned the skills in step 3, connect them directly to where they can do real work in step 4, such as a task list.
Where possible, every step should be measurable. We want to track down where the problems lie in our onboarding. If lots of people get to step 3 and then drop off, we know there is a problem with the transition between steps 3 and 4. Try to find ways to measure when a user has completed each step. This can help resolve any problems that bubble up to the surface.
Test all your on-ramps objectively. When you have your on-ramp designed, find people who match the target audience persona and have them try it. Ask them for their feedback. Invite blunt criticism. Watch them go through it, then find the bumps in the road and fix them. It is astonishing what you will learn from watching people try your on-ramps.
Amp Up Your Audience Personas
Want to see examples of on-ramps for different audience personas? Head over to https://www.jono bacon.com and select Resources.
ENGAGEMENT
The majority of community members whom I have met benefit from clear guidance and guardrails to be successful. They may be hard workers, smart, motivated, and enthusiastic to succeed, but they generally need someone pointing them in the right direction.
For example, in the corporate world this generally happens when staff have an assigned manager. This person is expected to be your go-to for ensuring you are able to succeed in your role. While not all managers are good at this, there is clear accountability in place.
It works quite differently in communities. Typically, when you join a community there is no manager and no specific person responsible for your success. You, the member, are responsible for your success. As such, your community should be as simple and intuitive as possible from the get-go so members can benefit from it immediately. This should span from your on-ramps all the way to how you engage with them. In a perfect world, every community member would have a mentor to guide them. Since that won’t scale, there are three approaches I recommend to get people up and running:
1. Self-direction provides the right set of choices to your community members, where they can always find new things to do and accomplish, all of their own volition. Video games have new quests and objectives. Fitbit has new fitness challenges.6 Jeep has new Jamboree events to join.7 StackOverflow showcases interesting questions that need answering.8 Think about how your members can always find something interesting to do.
2. Peer support provides ways in which members can support and guide one another. The American Physical Society provides a formal mentoring community.9 Many engineering communities have code peer-reviewed before it is accepted. We used to run Ubuntu Open Week, which provided peer training and Q&A sessions.10 Consider structured ways in which members can provide input on another member’s work.
3. Incentivization is where you provide specific incentives and rewards that keep people moving forward. Again, in video games this often happens when players are rewarded with trophies, ingame equipment, or new features as they complete various challenges. We will cover incentives extensively in chapter 8.
You should integrate all three of these approaches into your community. Bring your team together and start brainstorming ideas within each of these three areas. Now, let’s go back to the Community Participation Framework:
The portion to the right of the star is where we focus on building engagement in the community.
In my framework, we break the overall community experience into three segments: Casual, Regulars, and Core. This break down is not something you generally publicly label in your community (e.g., Jack is Regular, Polly is Core). It is a way in which you and your team internally evaluate where different members are in the journey.
Each of these segments represents three different psychological states that people are in as members and how we can adapt our engagement to them based on their state.
The eagle eyed among you may have spotted that these different segments are proportional in size. As a general rule, for every one hundred community members, seventy will be Casual, thirty will be Regulars, and one will be Core. You can rustle up your own math to see how these proportions may map to the size of your target community. Remember, your broader audience is also out there, including those who may lurk, watch, and observe until the inspiration strikes them to contribute (and thus wander up the on-ramp).
Our ultimate goal is to wire together the right mixture of self-direction, peer review, and incentivization to keep them progressing from Casual to Regular, and then from Regular to Core. Not everyone will want to ultimately get to Core, but you should build an environment that supports this transition if they choose to make it. Let’s take a look at each of these different segments.
Casual
When a community member has progressed up their on-ramp and generated something of value for themselves and for the community, they become a Casual member.
Casual members are fragile creatures. They may have had a single success going up the on-ramp, but they generally don’t know most people in the community, they are unfamiliar with most of the tools and processes, and they often won’t get the in-jokes. They have a long road to travel, but that first success has given them the energy to keep going.
If you remember the SCARF model back in chapter 4, we humans are not exactly fans of uncertainty. Many casual members feel socially awkward, don’t feel comfortable speaking up, and often suffer from imposter syndrome (where you feel you are inferior and you will get “found out” by your peers).
The major goal with casual contributors is to help them acclimatize and settle in. Help them solve their problems. Build their confidence. Provide them with mentoring and guidance. Help them discover simple-to-follow ways of participating and getting involved. Help them to get to know other members, build relationships, and develop friendships.
Casual members have variable levels of participation (hence being casual). While they may participate somewhat randomly, they will often be watching what others are doing very regularly. It is common for people to lurk before they participate.
To get them to be a Regular, help them build a habit. It takes around sixty-six days to form a habit, and your goal is to get them participating throughout that sixty-six-day period.11 When we build habits, things that were once complicated and that we needed significant mental energy to accomplish become easier and more natural. We see this in our daily lives with eating well, exercising regularly, mindfulness, and other areas.
Regulars
When a new member has participated for a significant and sustained period of time, they can be considered a regular. Now, it is up to you to determine what “significant and sustained” is within the context of your community.
Regulars are the bread and butter of your community. If you treat them well, they can provide years of dedicated participation and service.
The key goal here is to ensure they are informed, equipped, and can participate without too much red tape. One of the problems a lot of companies face is that, as they grow, they introduce more checks, balances, and approvals into the general community workflow. Unless this is carefully monitored, this can drive your members nuts.
Your Regulars will also be developing a lot of experience in your community, developing respect from other members, and getting to know you and your team more. For many, their appetite to be involved will be growing. They will want to be more involved and will appreciate when you provide the opportunity to include them.
Find ways to incorporate your Regulars more and more into the broader structure and strategy of the community. Invite some of them to meetings and get their feedback on how to make improvements. Invite them to events. Ask them for guidance. Ask them to help with specific projects. Run your strategic plans past them. Ask them to help mentor other members, and more. This all continues to seal that critical sense of belonging which will continue to build long-term participation and retention.
Core
Core members are your major leaguers. They provide a foundation to your community. You know them by name, and you have enormous respect for the sheer amount of time and devotion they provide to the community. You and others think of them as rock stars and worry from time to time what would happen if they left.
How do you know who these people are? Simple. You pick them by hand. These are the people who you immediately think of as being your most committed and dependable community members. They come in all shapes and colors. In one community I worked with, one of their Core members was seventeen years old. His age didn’t make a difference; he did amazing work.
Every community has a handful of these Core members. Not all of them agree with you, and some will be critical and hold you accountable. This is a good thing. Don’t surround yourselves with sycophants; that’s not how you grow and learn. These people work hard, keep you honest, and add enormous value.
The major goal with Core contributors is to make them feel part of the leadership of the community. When we trust people, we lean on them more and trust their judgement more. When possible, include your Core contributors in strategic meetings. They have enormous insight, and they will see your community from a different and deeply valuable angle. You are too close to the flame, and you need their mentoring and guidance.
Give them the white glove treatment. Treat them with the respect they deserve. Build a personal relationship with them. Send them gifts on their birthday. Offer to help where you can with their career and wider goals. Take them out to dinner, buy the expensive liquor, and always treat them with sheer dignity and respect.
I cannot underscore enough the importance of treating your Core members well, but more importantly, really leaning on their expertise and guidance. Listen to them. Learn from them.
Many community managers make the mistake of treating all their community members in a subservient role. Don’t make this mistake with your Core members. Be vulnerable and ask for their help and guidance; you will benefit from it.
INCENTIVIZATION + REWARDS = GROWTH
Let’s take a moment to zone in on the little bumps you see at the bottom of the Community Participation Framework. These are the incentives that you will plumb in throughout the Casual to Regular to Core journey.
These incentives and rewards are designed to keep people interested and motivated to keep participating. They will be a mixture of automated detection as well as specific campaigns, events, and invitations.
The idea here is simple: if you place a regular series of incentives and rewards along the journey from Casual to Regular to Core, and those incentives reward positive contributions and behavior, it naturally keeps people moving forward.
This is similar to how Fitbit awards you badges for reaching daily goals or lifetime achievements, how The Coffee Bean Rewards app gives you free drinks for earning points, and how you earn air miles with United by using one of their credit cards. It all keeps people interested and engaged.
Hold that thought for now as we get into this in detail in chapter 8.
CREATE AND MANAGE A QUARTERLY STRATEGY
As we continue through the book and add pieces to your strategy, you need a way to capture this work. Sure, the Big Rocks cover your broader objectives, but how do you manage the nitty-gritty details wrapped up in the day-to-day delivery of this work?
Welcome to the Quarterly Delivery Plan. It looks like this:
Fig. 5.3: Quarterly Delivery Plan
This can live in a spreadsheet or your chosen project management system.
The idea is simple. You list each of your BIG ROCKS and break them into a set of individual ITEMs that deliver the goals of each Big Rock. For each item, specify a set of KPIs that state clear, measurable deliverables to be completed for that item.
Each of these items is then assessed as to when it can be delivered, and a QUARTER is selected. This gives a clear idea which items for which Big Rocks will be delivered and when.
Accountability is critical. Far too many companies put together a plan and then bicker over who will do what and when. Get this clarity up front through this document, but also ensure that your team knows that they are expected to deliver. Plans mean nothing if people ignore them or are chronically late without good reason.
For each item, have a single OWNER who takes responsibility for delivering that item. This doesn’t mean this person does all the work, but the buck stops with them. If the item is not delivered on time and delivering the metrics in the KPI, the owner should have some explaining to do.
In addition to the owner, the people or teams expected to be INVOLVED in the delivery of the item are added, as well as any people to NOTIFY when the item is complete, delayed, or postponed. This is helpful for ensuring that various team leads and stakeholders are kept up to date without being involved in the nitty-gritty details.
Finally, you can use the Quarterly Delivery Plan to track the current STATUS of these items on a weekly basis. I suggest you have the following set of status options that you select to reflect how far along the item is:
• Not Started: No work has started on the item yet.
• In Progress: The item is currently being worked on.
• Under Review: The item is complete, but it is being reviewed to ensure it meets expectations.
• Complete: The item is complete.
• Delayed: The item is delayed for some reason.
• Blocked: Progress on the item has stopped due to something else being in its way (which needs unblocking).
• Postponed: The item has been postponed and may or may not be rescheduled for a different quarter.
Here are a few examples for items on the Quarterly Delivery Plan:
Quarter |
Q3 |
Big Rock |
Build a Predictable Support Community |
Item |
Deploy Forum |
KPI |
Identify and select forum platform Deploy online (available via desktop and mobile) Allow login via Google, Facebook, and Twitter Configure key categories (General Discussion, Q&A) |
Owner |
Rebecca Bergmann |
Involved |
Stuart Langridge, Tom Draper, Jeremy Garcia |
Notify |
Erica Brescia |
Status |
In Progress |
Quarter |
Q4 |
Big Rock |
Build a Predictable Support Community |
Item |
Produce Core Documentation |
KPI |
Documentation available on the community website for: Getting started guide Support best practices Transitioning material to FAQs guide Mentoring program overview |
Owner |
Lee Reilly |
Involved |
Margot Maley, Tim Carter |
Notify |
Simon Bacon |
Status |
Completed |
This Quarterly Delivery Plan is not the only way to manage communities, but I strongly recommend it. It ensures every item ultimately maps to your broader value, is resourced, is scheduled appropriately, and avoids ambiguity for what should be delivered. It provides a single place for everyone to track progress and keep people accountable. With many of my clients, this plan is designed for the execution staff, but the senior execs like having the ability to view the current status of work if they want to.
As we wander through the rest of the book and cover different strategies, they should ultimately end up on the plan. One surefire way to reduce risk in communities is to ensure that your work is carefully managed and tracked.
As you build out your plan, there are eight important principles you should incorporate:
1. Always ensure items have a clear dotted line to a Big Rock. You need to avoid the temptation to throw things on the strategy unless it drives direct value to one of your Big Rocks (remember our Big Rocks have their own dotted line to our Community Value Statement). Sometimes items won’t have a clear, direct connection to a Big Rock, so scrutinize these more carefully. They could be distractions.
2. Ensure your team is accountable. One of the biggest failures with strategic planning is a lack of accountability. I see it daily with some companies. If you want your strategy to succeed, the owners of items need to be on the hook and accountable if there are problems or failures. Similarly, those involved need to plan for their involvement and not wimp out with “Sorry, I just don’t have time due to excuses A, B, and C.” If you are leading this work, it is critical that you bake this accountability (and appropriate resourcing) into the process.
3. Be realistic about delivery. Look at the KPIs required and the available people in your Involved column. Can those people realistically deliver that set of KPIs (while being mindful of their other day-to-day responsibilities) by the end of the target Quarter? If not, scale the work back.
When I see many of the same names listed in the Involved column across multiple tasks, it is a red flag that those people may be overstretched. Can other people replace or help them?
4. Ensure it is a “sacred document.” Plans only work when everyone sticks to them. If they are ignored or changed on a whim, it renders them about as useful as a chocolate coffee pot. This document should be sacred. It should be everybody’s priority, always open in their web browser, and looked at daily. Be careful with making changes once the plan is in place. We will discuss how to do this later.
5. Review progress weekly, resolve problems, and update statuses. One of the flaws with many project plans is that people make the plan and then immediately forget about it. To avoid this, have a regular weekly meeting where you review the plan and current statuses. Look for items that are delayed or blocked and try to resolve those. Ask the team for any problems that are slowing them down or getting in the way. Again, we will discuss this later in the book.
6. Review and update at the end of each quarter. Let’s be realistic: businesses, communities, and people change and adjust. Needs and requirements change, and you need to be reactive to this. At the end of each quarter review the overall plan and make any adjustments.
This commonly involves refining KPIs, retargeting work to different quarters, switching team members in and out, and introducing new pieces of work. Try to avoid making these changes mid-quarter. Otherwise it compromises how sacred the document is (see number 4 above).
7. Create a backlog. There are always more things to do than time and resources available (unless you can conjure up some dragons to do the work for you). This doesn’t mean you can’t track the work for future delivery though.
I strongly encourage that you add items at the end of your Quarterly Delivery Plan that need to be done in the future—just don’t assign them to a Quarter yet. This way you can document the work needed but schedule it when the resources and time open up.
8. Use failure and delays to spot opportunities. Life isn’t a flowchart, and things get in the way. It is not a matter of if some things will be late, it is a matter of when.
When you experience these problems, look for why they happen. As an example, when I ran my team at Canonical, we had a six-month chunk of work, and around 30 percent of the items by one of my team members were late. Instead of raking him over the coals, it was clear to me that he was working hard, but he took too much on. For the next cycle I helped him improve his estimation of work, and he nailed his delivery. Failures are opportunities for improvement if you are willing to look for the signals.
A FIRM FOUNDATION, BUT KEEP THE TROWEL IN YOUR HAND
At this point you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by how much work needs to be done. The Community Participation Framework looks like there are lots of different pieces of work buried inside it, and you are not wrong. There is lots to do, but the good news is that it doesn’t all have to happen at once.
Think of the Community Participation Framework as the schematic for a building we want to build. Just like building a house, we start at the foundations and gradually build up from there. You don’t have to have all the answers—in fact, it is almost impossible that you do have all the answers. As we continue our journey through the book, we will keep building on these foundations until we have a strong base.
Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, once said, “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”12 He is spot on. Don’t wait until you have all the answers before you start building your community. Let your intuition guide you, but ship something. Deliver work that you can evaluate, evolve, and expand. This is how we get better and how we build great communities.