Community as a product

Does your community have a roadmap? A marketing effort? Are you clear on what value people get out of being involved in your community, above and beyond what value they get out of using your project?

I led an unconference session at the Community Leadership Summit about thinking about your community as a product, which is to me the most natural way to think about it. It turns out I’m not the only one, which is cool. Here were some takeaways:

• Indeed, there are community managers who have a very product-oriented approach to their communities, but they are not the majority

• A fair number of people who came do things like have creating a community roadmap and marketing plan but had never thought of the community as a product — and felt like doing so would really help them both plan community initiatives and think about how they run the community

If you are really serious about your community, it’s a good idea to approach it as if it were another product in your product suite (remember, you already have your open source project and at least one commercial offering, so it’s a suite). That means getting fundamentals like understanding the pain points the community solves, who your ideal community member is (which could very well be difference from the ideal user of your OSS project), what value your community is solving for your members, and what your community is ‘competing’ against.

Just as important, though: You should also know what your community is supposed to do for you. Not every company wants the same thing out of its community. If you don’t know what you want from your community, it’s going to be hard to track progress and iterate to improve results.