The Importance of Community
Photo of Samuel Mensah-Bonsu at Flip Fest in New Orleans.
Editorial note: This article is part of an ongoing series of essays on my experience building products. It contains thoughts on design, innovation, and technology; lessons on culture, principles and community; and ideas to improve strategies, processes, and wellbeing. It’s written with an entrepreneurial spirit, an ethos of openness, and a willingness and desire to drive and make social impact. Hard lessons make easy stories, and these are some of my personal accounts.
Product Series — 003
I think an important distinction requires articulation in today’s product-making landscape: Products aren’t always built for communities, they can be actively built with communities.
In many respects, the old adage of Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” has been usurped by more robust, community-driven approaches.
Our tools for engagement have become much more sophisticated, and, on the consumer side of things, our expectations of products have become so much higher.
A new model has emerged in which product-making begins with the community.
Everyone who builds products talks about achieving product-market fit, working to foster customer obsessions to develop key insights that directly inform the product roadmap, through quantitative and qualitative measures.
Community is absolutely integral to these processes, and there are techniques, examples, and approaches that highlight these efforts.
There are hundreds of stories of entrepreneurs, founders, and individual members, often constructed as team-building or organizational exercises, immersing themselves into the consciousness of their communities:
the founder of a food delivery service makes personal runs to understand the entire end-to-end product experience and make recommendations
an educational entrepreneur immerses themselves at the back of the room at a conference to talk with teachers and truly listen to their pain points
a healthcare start-up hosts a working session to discover complications from physicians and patients in the relevant problem space
While this process assumes many forms, and just as many names — as every audience is different, as are their respective needs — at its core, the mission is always the same: to actively listen to the community, and develop product solutions that address those needs, providing real and lasting value.
Building products requires building product consciousness. This necessarily requires involvement from the community (and, a team mindset). Sometimes it’s just as important to listen, to have your community know that you are taking their feedback seriously, as it is to respond, and build a new set of feature requests.
Communities can become modes of prioritization.
One example of building product consciousness for product-makers that has always resonated so deeply with me is the idea of establishing internal mechanisms to generate awareness through community feedback. These examples don’t always have to be active — they can also be passive ways to highlight and develop a broader understanding and develop empathy for the community.
Here are a few examples:
Start a communications channel where community feedback is collected
Empower cross-functional teams to spend time talking with customers
Have multi-disciplinary teams field support tickets on a regular basis
Kickstart each product meeting with a single piece of community feedback
Dedicate an all-hands to listing community feedback
Over time, these types of practices can help to shore up a community-driven approach to thinking about product-making. While these methods can feel a bit mystical, or perhaps even irrelevant to the current work at hand, it’s a process that can be refined and improved, which doesn’t need to discount the magic.
Communities are magical.
In talking with a community leader in the product-making space, I was captivated by the idea she articulated of a user journey. She described, in remarkable detail, how she envisions her role as taking a concerned user, someone who submits a support ticket, and pro-actively turning them into an advocate for the product.
By listening to the needs of the individual, addressing their concerns, she empowers them with an opportunity to become a spokesperson for the product, sometimes even by sharing their story back to the community.
Finding a way to empathize with the individual amplifies the power of the product.
I think it’s important to note that a single piece of feedback from the community has the power to change everything, and this should never be discounted, only ever amplified.
Amplifying the community creates the conditions in which every voice can be heard, and recognizes that diverse perspectives lead to better product-making.
Another example, perhaps as an extension of the above, is to consider incorporating community advocates into your process, whether by hiring individuals as part of your team, listening to the community, or establishing regular meetings with members of the community. Finding a way to keep your pulse on the needs of the community builds product empathy.
Here are six thoughts to consider regarding the importance of community:
Listen to the community and incorporate feedback in a way that makes sense for your organization.
Transparency in product-making can lead to greater product clarity, storytelling, and support from the community.
Community can serve as a mode of product prioritization, with the right type of procedures.
Amplify and advocate for the community, by listening, understanding, and ultimately working to solve their problems with them.
Never underestimated the power of a single user; that single user can move mountains.
It’s important to be flexible and adaptable, but also principled; approach community with empathy and empowerment.
One of my absolute favorite examples comes from Herman Miller, perhaps one of the first design driven organizations, in which the founder listed the “twelve evils” that were preventing growth in the furniture industry.
No 10: “No contact with users of the product.”
These are a few of my considerations on the importance of community in the product-making space. I’d love to hear from you.
