#01 Make Community the 💜 of your Product Strategy
Organizations that make community the heart of their product strategy are more likely to succeed and most importantly, be LOVED by raving customers, members and consumers.
Before we talk about community-driven orgs let’s first define community:
A community is a group of people with a shared interest or goal that come together in a digital or physical space regularly to learn, share and evolve.
Community-Driven Organizations (CDOs) make community the lifeline of their business. To be a CDO you must make decisions based on the behaviors, emotions and unique challenges of your community.
PSA: Don’t throw this framework away without getting scrappy about what community could mean to you now.
Communities come in all shapes and sizes. If you haven’t built your own custom community forum to learn from like Sephora or bossbabe (shameless plug), that’s OK. You can use reddit, your social media following, Facebook groups, etc.
Make community the heartbeat of your product strategy by answering 4 questions each week:
If you have a big team, this can be a group meeting with roles such as community manager, product manager, designer, researcher, etc. If you’re the badass captain of a solo-ship then it’s a great reflective exercise to add to your Monday routine to prep your week.
What is the emotional sentiment in the community?
What conversations are catching on?
Who are we celebrating or what are the latest community wins?
How are we going the extra mile to serve our community?
Let’s break those down further 💥
What is the emotional sentiment in the community?
In other words— what’s the vibe?
Energy is everything and checking in on the positive, negative and emotional challenges your community is faced with will inspire your messaging and programming.
For example, I worked with a global real-estate franchise that had a Facebook Group with their agents and brokers across the world. The product-marketing team would watch closely for emotional responses to the market and competition that they could address in their weekly marketing strategy trainings.
What conversations are catching on?
Look at the trending posts, conversations and questions from the community to recognize patterns.
Use these patterns to develop new products, features or programs.
For example, during a goal setting call in Q4 for bossbabe we noticed the chat popping off about creating vision boards. We decided to build that into our programming and developed a vision board workshop we’re running this month.
Who are we celebrating or what are the latest community wins?
Give 10x more than you take.
Who is crushing it this week? What can we learn from their wins? How can we celebrate them publicly?
For example, Chenell Basilio recently launched the Growth In Reverse newsletter and it is SO GOOD. Jay shared her newsletter in his community forum allowing members to celebrate her achievement.
How are we going the extra mile to serve our community?
This last question is especially important. ‘Surprise + Delight’ is a phrase often used in the UX world.
Reinvigorate a community by creating moments of surprise with new events, resources, deliveries and extra care to spend time 1:1. This does not go unnoticed.
For example, Chewy is known for surprising their customers who have experienced the very painful loss of their pets by refunding auto-orders and sending flowers with handwritten notes.
If you try this framework in your business I’d love to hear how it goes for you. Send me a note or if you’re subscribed to my newsletter just hit reply 🙂
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