Community: One JD Doesn’t Fit All.
As an emerging knowledge field, there's an expanding universe of skills, competencies, and knowledge that lead to various community-related roles.
As community grows into a high potential buzzword, defining it is imperative to reinforce its relevance.
The rising awareness that relationships > transactions brings the opportunity to reach understanding and align on what is community and how it drives consistent value to business. But the thing is - there is no ONE way that community can add value to business. There's no ONE job description. I know. Some still see community management as "replying to comments on social media" or throwing parties at a coworking space. Others understand “community work” as neighborhood-based projects. But most of us know that community goes a long way beyond that.
As a role, community is not about one title with different levels of seniority, but about a wide range of roles. While there’s no definite place for community within an org chart, I’ve seen it:
Side-by-side with product development
Hanging with customer relationships and support
Checking out people development (team culture, recruitment, retention)
Hustling under marketing, from the narrative (brand) to growth.
Generally, community = building collective identity and relationships that self-grow while sustaining relevance. In practice, it means engineering trust through interaction design (online and offline). It is about delivering a great experience through every interaction with customers. It starts from establishing a culture that leads your team to build lasting relationships. At the most operational level, community is about designing interactions that grow trust. A community manager is only one (of many) roles one could play and it is not synonymous with social media management or content strategy tactics.
In a nutshell, one JD doesn’t fit all.
We need multi-sized solutions.
I figured how vast the community universe is while interacting with 130+ of the the smartest community people in one room (through the first cohort of On Deck Community Builders Fellowship). And I am aware we are yet to learn it is even larger than it seems.
As professionals, we must learn the foundations of community as a whole, as well as the various perspectives on how it can provide value to business. Its focus also varies depending on company stage (e.g. product-market fit, or scaling), profile (e.g. B2B, B2C), and size (e.g. first 100, first million users). Its responsibilities can float across areas, from customer to product development. It also relates to marketing branding, content strategy, growth hacking). And operations (the act of bringing people together through platform, place or program). As known as: building engagement, optimizing resources by bringing customers to add direct value to each other.
To draw a parallel with a more established career: one goes to Computer Science school and can follow various career paths. Data scientist, software developer, engineer, architect, you name it.
In the Community field, one could specialize in “Community-Driven Product Development”, learning about data-driven decision making, creating consistent feedback loops, or building in public.
You could be a data-scientist applying community building strategies to deliver a better user experience to your users (who are an active part of your product strategy). For instance, Waze’s Head of Community Hila Roth has a Data Science and Engineering background and through that could prove the value of community to product development and customer success.
Another person could focus on “Community Growth Marketing". They'd specialize on on tactics to increase organic growth while achieving higher conversion rates (and promising LTV) by building relationships with the right pools of people (aka partner communities).
You can become a branding genius who knows how to communicate an idea through symbols and words that take over the world and inspire millions of people to build on your trendy steps. Like Duolingo’s campaigns, defined by their user’s perception of their mascot, Duo (the owl), based on its acute notifications: “learn Spanish, or…”. They incorporated the user-created idea of “nothing is certain, but death and Duo”, rolled with it, and strengthened their brand.
You can be an avid, solid connector with the brainpower of a Google datacenter whose “connecting people” skills make serendipity jealous. Kidding, but you get it. Some people have the talent to make meaningful connections in the split of a heartbeat.
One career, one field of knowledge, various JDs.
On one hand, it is an advantage that community building doesn’t (yet) fit in the box of a degree, as understood by the traditional education system. That allows for expanded curiosity, beyond college buildings. The goal is not to fit “community” in a box, following the old educational model that splits knowledge in parts, isolating one from another which gives recent grads a narrow, siloed perspective on their worlds and paths.
Speaking from experience, my path as a community builder was due to the fact I’m a dropout. Having no degree, I was open to finding solutions across multidisciplinary fields to solve real-life challenges ahead of me. I spent time learning by doing and from people around me. Starting companies, juggling jobs, and learning from key ideas sparked by 3 unfinished degrees (law, anthropology, business). Community building was an unthinkable career.
On the other hand, Universities remain a good vehicle to knowledge and give credibility to the topic, helping to consolidate community as a profession. I am not saying we should start a university course on community building, albeit I’m collaborating with the creation of the first courses on community at two prestigious universities in Brazil.
Community is an up-and-coming profession, one that has multiple facets: Niche, scale, ecosystem, online, offline, hybrid, remote, location-based, internal (team), around users, customers, volunteers, nonprofit, profitable, you name it. The skillsets of a community manager for a highly scalable platform differ from those of in-person, highly selected startups within a VC portfolio. Not to mention seniority layers. A community manager’s JD looks different than a Head of Community’s.
There isn’t one thing you should learn or one skill you must master to be defined as a community professional. There’s plenty. As an emerging knowledge field, there's a blooming universe of skills, competencies, and knowledge that are worth not one, but various titles, JDs, and roles within one company.
Community building, development, architecture, management, branding, marketing, growth, infrastructure management, you name it. While there are plenty of existing positions, there’s a lot we still don’t know (or haven't thought of) about it.
The one thing I know is that if your company doesn’t yet have an intentional and well-thought community strategy, it’s time you take a look at what we’ve been working on.
We’re on this journey along with many others to professionalize community as a knowledge and career field. Let’s stay open and curious to welcome all possibilities.