Using Communities to Build Better Products w/ Georgina Cannie, Community Lead at Pragmatic Institute

Hey everybody, this is Mike Belsito, co-founder of Product Collective, and we're back for another industry interview. Brand new setting for this industry interview. Actually, back in the day, several dozen, you know, industry interviews ago, this was the setting. So we're, we're, we're back in my basement for an industry interview now, but I hope wherever you are, hopefully in your home, you're safe and safe and healthy and, and are doing okay. Obviously crazy, crazy times right now, but this next half hour we're going to get into product and I'm actually excited about this particular session because we're talking about communities and how to leverage them and, and that's what Product Collective is. Product Collective is a community for product people. So this is something that we're really passionate about and I should start before we get into the session just what these industry interviews are all about. So for some of you, it might be your first time. This is a part of Product Collective. These industry interviews are live video chats with product leaders from really all around the world. We've had all different, again, we've done dozens of sessions at this point. We do them on the first and third Wednesday of every month at 1:00 PM Eastern and focus on a different topic every single time. So if this is your first time, I hope you enjoy it. And the cool thing about this is I have a lot of questions for our guests and I'm gonna get into our guests and the topic and all that in a bit, but you'll have an opportunity to ask questions. In fact, at the very bottom, you can probably already see a Q&A section. There's also a chat. The chat is really just for introducing yourself, sharing where you're from, what product you're working on. It's always fun to see where people are tuning in from. Usually it's from all over the world. And in fact, just to give me some reassurance that you can see and hear me okay, if you want to put in the chat, maybe who you are and, you know, what company you're with or what product you're working on and where you're from. That'll be cool to see. And then, you know, the Q&A section, that is for you to ask questions for our guests. So I'll be monitoring that throughout. I do have questions of my own, but the reality is your questions are always better than mine anyway. So usually, if you are filling that up with questions, I'll be taking them throughout. I don't necessarily wait to the end. So Even now, if you had a question that was on your mind, you could start to fill up the Q&A section there. So definitely do that. But yeah, we'll go right to 1:30 PM Eastern. And then afterwards, I'll be sending a recording of this session to everybody too via email. But with Product Collective, you know, there's other things aside from these industry interviews. We have a very active Slack group, about 10,000 people that are a part of that Slack group that, you know, some are there every day trading ideas and best practices, and some, you know, you just pop in when you need to. Which is kind of how I always was with Slack groups. But there's also our newsletter. We send a newsletter out every Friday, and there's 30,000 people that get that newsletter, different topic every week. Of course, we have our industry conference, which is every fall in the US, and we will keep our fingers crossed that, that we will be in a place where we could put on this conference for sure. And then just about a week ago, we launched industry virtual workshops. So At our conference, we put on workshops the day before the conference gets started. We now have brought those to you, to your home office. So I'll share more info on that in the email as well. In fact, I'll maybe throw in a little discount code. There's some workshops that are coming up in the next couple weeks that only have a couple slots left. So those definitely be good to check out as well. But these industry interviews, this is where we get to have good conversations and I'm excited to have Georgina Canny with me from Pragmatic Institute. And Georgina, thanks a lot for joining us today.

Yeah, you got it. Glad to be here.

Now, the whole topic for this session is about communities and how we as product people can leverage communities. Pragmatic Institute's been a company that we've worked with for some time. And, you know, I mentioned workshops like this is where when I talk to product people and they're saying like, hey, I got my I got my training or I got my education on product and I asked them where they got it from. So many people point to Pragmatic Institute, but more than the certification programs and the deep training that Pragmatic Institute offers, there is a robust community too. And that's, that's where you come in, right?

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. So I have worked in community for many years. I kind of work in a way that felt very different from the product world. But as soon as I came in and started building a product for product managers, I realized that community management is so incredibly similar and really shares a lot of the same best practices and principles as product management does. So I think there's really good synergies with the conversation, and I'm happy to share more information for how product professionals can bring community management approaches and hard-won lessons from the community management folks into their own work.

That's awesome. And yeah, I mean, given especially that community has been a big part of your career, even before Pragmatic Institute, maybe we could just start off with the basics of like, what, what to you, like, what is a community, particularly an online community? And, you know, when we think about how companies might be able to leverage communities, like what, what does that look like? Maybe we could start there.

Yeah, absolutely. There is one thing that I'm acutely aware of is that when I say the word community, I actually mean a very specific discipline, a particular practice, but the industry has adopted a really broad term for that practice. So I think it's really good to clarify. When I say community, I do mean specifically online communities, and those are dedicated online destinations that are populated by a group of people with a shared mission or a shared purpose, right? They're all there to kind of do something together. Typically, those online community spaces are hosted and supported by an organization, and the heart of the community is always peer-to-peer discussion. It's about being able to connect in kind of a multifaceted and dynamic way. Most communities also have resource libraries, events, member directories, those kinds of things as well. And so, because they tend to be pretty robust resources, there's all sorts of different ways that businesses, both small for-profit and not-for-profit are using them, right? So I would say that in my experience, the most common use of an online community is a customer support community, right? And so that's a place that is bringing value to the organization in case deflection and increased customer satisfaction, those kinds of things. You also see internal communities. So if you work at a company that has 50,000 employees across many countries, how do you get all those people in the same place to boost your productivity, to help transfer some tacit knowledge inside the organization. Sometimes internal communities are used for that. You also have a type of community called a community of practice, and generally that's, that's all people that do the same job, but do it for different people. So, you know, you have dentists from across the country, they all come to this community to share their best practices and their lessons learned to accelerate everybody's knowledge and improve everybody's work together. You also sometimes have ideation communities, and I think that this one's probably the most interesting for product professionals. That adds a huge amount of value when you are connecting to the voice of the customer and getting really, really deep into market research.

That's great. That— and that's— so that's a lot of ways that communities exist for product professionals specifically. Do you see any of those sort of ways that communities are used, like, more common than others? Like, what, what is it like for product people in particular?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that, I think that most product professionals, and folks listening might have even participated in these kinds of environments before, they tap into the community approach in an ideation use case. So this is an approach where a community is used to provide insights and ideas and feedback and requests to a particular product. I would say that most of the time I see ideation communities and ideation work inside communities happening within a larger community dedicated to customer support. So it's, it's less common for me to see an ideation community that's only focused on ideas. Generally, it's a really big part of a community that's also supporting customers who have already purchased a product.

Got it. So, and I'm likening this to sort of my own personal experiences. For the podcast that I co-host Rocketship, I use Audacity. And I know there's a lot of times I'll have a question and I'll go to look it up online. And it's not even anybody from the Audacity team that's answered the question in this like, you know, message board basically, but it's somebody else, like just another user. Is that an example of sort of that customer, customer support community? Like, might that be a part of a customer support community? I just didn't realize it, but that's sort of what that was. That's what that was.

Yes, 100%. Um, you know, one that I'm sure everybody has probably bumped into at one time or another is the Apple support forums. Um, that's a customer support online community, right? And there's a huge amount of value there for both the company because every time a customer answers a question for another customer, that's one less sales rep or customer service rep on the phone. But for me as a user, I prefer that information because I, I know I'm getting an answer from someone who hasn't been just trained in how to respond to me, but another real human being who's had the same issue, who understands what I'm going through and has already workshopped it, right? So I feel more connected to that information. So absolutely, that's an example.

That's great, thank you. And by the way, there's some questions coming in. I think I might go to some of these now, 'cause some of these are sort of relevant in the moment. Keep these questions coming in too, 'cause these are great. So please submit it to the Q&A section. This question is, how much content do you usually expect to, or hope to come from members versus the community owners? And this, this was one that we struggled with the Product Collective. Like we, you know, we have our— this would be a form of content, right? These industry interviews, there's blog posts, but we also leverage our community and some of the members are contributing as well. How do you sort of find that balance?

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. And it is a balance. It is a ratio. There isn't a golden ratio. It depends on what kind of community you're building. Right. And so, you know, some communities have more of a focus towards consumption. My goal is for my members to come in to receive some content, to get the knowledge they need, and then hightail it out of there after they say, "Hey, thanks." Some other communities, the purpose is really more dynamic, and so you are building it with more of an intention of dynamic engagement. So it depends on what your needs are. In general, I would say that in the early days of a community, usually for about the first 12 months of a community, it is going to be more of the content and conversation is going to come from the organization. You've got to be that person that starts the party, before things start to roll. The ratio I like to see at about the 12-month mark is about 60% contributions from the members and 40% from the organization. And then I like to see that shift even further towards member engagement and member content creation from there.

That's great. Got it. There, you know, one of the questions I have, but it actually relates to a question that another audience member asked, was what are the best ideas to get started even? You know, I imagine like some product people, they want to engage with their customers, whether it be for ideation, whether it be for, you know, customer support. But what are those first steps? The question that came in was just like, how do you solve the empty room problem when you're first launching? Like, there's nobody here quite yet. So it's kind of related. I'm just curious your take on that.

Yes, so I will give you, I mean, the real hard and true answer is hire a community manager. That's the best way that you can do it is to, you know, there's a lot of— so my background is in consulting, and I did a lot of consulting work because companies would call me and say, you know, we thought that one of our marketing people could do this in addition to his regular responsibilities, and it turns out this is actually a lot more robust than we had anticipated. I'm a big advocate for reminding people that community management is an independent discipline, and it's a full-time role. So that's my first recommendation. However, I know that there are spaces in between. So the first thing I would say is see if your organization has a community already. There's a chance that someone else in your space or on a different team is already running something similar to this, right? In which case you should partner with that person. If they don't, you can look for preexisting communities to tap into. So Reddit and Quora and LinkedIn and Facebook and sometimes even professional associations are kind of umbrella platforms that have many, many little communities inside of them. And if there is a void of community for your product, for your organization, chances are people are going to find somewhere to talk about it with one another. And so they might have created an organic community themselves that is just kind of bubbling up. And so if you can find a space that's happening like that and tap into it, that's another really good way to kind of move into it. If you are thinking about starting a community, Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good. It doesn't have to be a huge initiative. It doesn't have to be super expensive software. I mean, you can spend $300,000 on community software if you really wanted to, but there's tons of free tools out there. The most important part is just being really transparent and authentic with your members, and kind of starting small, just rolling with it organically. There's a lot of different options for you.

Yeah. And I'll say for Product Collective, like we, there are now multiple things that we use, but I mean, we started with Slack. Like even though Slack was not necessarily designed for communities, it's more designed, you know, internal communications, but it was a way for us to at least get started. And truthfully, like we, again, we still use Slack, but now, you know, there's other components to it as well. But, but to your point, like it, if we were to say, well, it has to be perfect before we're gonna, you know, try some things, then, then we would have never done it in the first place. So yeah, that was at least one way to get started, I suppose.

Yeah, there's, there's a lot of different tools that you can use. You can use anything from a free Slack instance. You don't even have to have the paid plan for Slack, right? And then you can range all the way up to kind of enterprise software. Salesforce Community Cloud is, is one of the really big players in the space, right? And so, you know, you can get really big and really customized, or you can keep it streamlined. In terms of tooling, one tool that I think is really good is Mighty Networks. It is founded by a woman who has a ton of experience with community platforms. There are free instances of it. It is a pretty lightweight tool. But if you want to get started and get going, you can sign up for free. You can turn it on today. And if you, separate from the tooling, if you want to just know how do I get started, I think that the North Star for you is to look for creative opportunities to connect your customers with one another. Start building those kind of threads between your network, right? The, the worst thing is to keep everything hub and spoke and keep those customers separate from one another. Even if you just say, hey, it was really great to meet you. Thank you very much for doing this win-loss interview with me. I have another person I spoke to a couple of weeks ago that I think you'd get along with great. Would you like me to set up an introduction for you? Simple as that. You can kind of start there.

I love that. Yeah. Start basically adding value to your members and maybe they be— I shouldn't even say members, but really customers at that point. And maybe that helps encourage them to get involved in the future, too. So I like— yeah, somebody did ask, you know, hey, for my— and this is probably the case for a lot of people— but they're like, you know, my particular customers are, they're really busy. So how do we encourage them to participate if they're already being like pulled in all these different directions? And yeah, when I think, I can't think of any customer that I've worked with that wasn't in that case, right? So everybody's, everybody's busy. How do you encourage, especially in the early days, participation?

Yeah, you have to make good on your promise. Everybody is busy for things that they are not totally sold on. And everybody makes time for the stuff that they are really interested in and adds value. So if you are telling people that the community is going to be a valuable way for them to spend their time, you've got to hustle to make sure that you are true to your word. So think about how can you save time for your customer? How do you make the community a space that makes their lives easier? Where are their pain points? What are the workflows that are a little bit broken or clunky or take longer than they should? And how do you use the community to help solve those problems for your folks? Right? So maybe, maybe you have tons of resources for your customers or documentation. And they know those resources are there, but they have a hard time sorting through them. They are scrolling forever, and they are searching, and the search terms are kind of clunky, and they are not working. Can you use the community to curate that for them? How do you make it easier for them to get in and get out? How do you save them time? And so the way that I do that is I look for the workflows and information exchanges that could be faster, and I use the community to leverage that for them to improve their experience.

Yeah, that's great. Somebody had asked, hey, this sounds similar to a product evangelist role. What are the— or there might be overlap. How would you sort of differentiate somebody that's a product evangelist, they're charged for, you know, championing the product versus this? I mean, I know there are a lot of differences, like maybe you can outline some of those.

Yeah, absolutely. I would say that an online community is a breeding ground for product evangelists and champions. And it's also an outlet for those people to flex their leadership muscles in the space, right? So it's, it's kind of a germination space. At the same time, it's also the carrot at the end of the stick. So they're very closely related, and it's all kind of an ecosystem within it, I would say. So, you know, for me, if I'm part of a community and I really feel like a company is listening to what I'm telling them, right? I'm much more likely to be an evangelist for that brand, for that product. I feel more connected and bought into it. You know, the community approach is one where you invite your customer to be an active participant. Instead of a passenger. You are not just building something for them, you are building it alongside them. You are doing it together. So anytime I am asked for feedback, or I am asked to do something for a brand, a favor for them, I share my thoughts. I make a post on LinkedIn. And then at best, I see a roadmap published in 6 months, or I get a couple likes. Something like that, right? And it does feel like a favor I'm doing for them, not a dynamic exchange that's happening between us. So when you're in the community, that's the goal, is to develop the us, you know? So especially in an ideation community, right, where I post an idea about a product, I can see updates about how that product is going to be used. I can see how other customers feel about my idea. I can brainstorm new options with them, right? And I, I can see what's happening with all all of my feedback after it leaves my brain. It's not just going into the void. So I feel valued. I feel like my input matters and is heard. That makes me 10 times more likely to be a product evangelist for that organization, right? And, and a million other goodies come along as a result too, right? You have decreased churn and increased customer lifetime value. All of those things are really deeply connected. That's great.

That's awesome. And I, yeah, and those are great suggestions for sure. I'm curious, and this, you could either answer this like at the just getting started stage or even, you know, once you've been at it, but what are mistakes that you see that are commonly made in the community world? Because that might help us, especially if for those of us that haven't launched a community yet, maybe we can avoid these mistakes. Hopefully.

Yeah. So that's, that's a really big question.

We could spend the whole session on that, I'm sure.

We could, we could. I would say kind of the biggest things to just keep an eye out for. The first one specific to ideation communities. So an ideation community where you are specifically soliciting feedback from members to say, how is this product working? Is there a new feature you want? Upvote ideas, right? A community that has that function in it. For that particular kind, I think the biggest mistake is that if you make a commitment to transparency and collaboration, you must keep it, right? Because I've seen communities that solicit ideas, but then they never respond to them, and then they are just kind of out there, and that breaks the promise. You made a promise of collaboration and transparency with your market, and they have contributed in good faith. And then you break the trust by not holding up your end of the bargain, right? And so at that point, it's kind of better not to ask for the feedback at all. So that's definitely something to keep an eye on. The other thing I see is a lack of shared purpose, and, and that I mean a misalignment between the organizational objectives and the member objectives. Those two things need to overlap because Because what happens is a lot of organizations say, we are going to have an online community, because my CEO's niece is part of an online community, and she thinks it's awesome, and so we need one of those too. And let's spin it up, and we are going to get all this data, and people are going to contribute, and it's going to be great, great, great. And they think a lot about the organizational outcomes that they could expect to see, but they don't think about the value that it's going to deliver the member. We're very in tune these days. We know when a brand is using us, right? And so you have to think really carefully about what are the needs that my members have, or my current customers, my future members are going to have, and how does that— where's the middle of the Venn diagram between the organizational outcomes I'd like to see, right? On the other side of that equation, if you build a community specifically for the member needs, without thinking about the high-level organizational strategy of your company, your budget's going to get cut mighty quick, because this is business, right? And these things take investment. And so it, you know, it has to be a balance between those two sets of priorities.

Yeah, I, you know, we're already almost coming to the end of the session.

I know.

But I was wondering if you could talk more about the community that you're managing today and just maybe if there's, I know that, you know, there's an alumni component of it which you could talk about, but just what, what would people expect from your community? It might give them ideas on if they were to start a community of their own, you know, maybe there's some analogous things that they could sort of put to use too.

Yes, absolutely. So I run the Pragmatic Alumni Community. And so that's a space that's really the go-to resource for our product professionals to turn theory into action. Action. So it's very practical, it's very tactical. It is a community of practice, meaning that it's, you know, all folks that work on the same thing, but they do it in different industries, in different ways, for different companies, different types of products, but they all come together to build a dynamic community that is full of peer examples, so you can see how other people have done it and and check that you're on the right track with your work. You know, there's some battle-tested best practices from folks that have been doing this for years and years and years. We've got some curated resources that we put together for our members, as well as exclusive live events with industry experts, and some, you know, some content and programming, and some dynamic ways to help people get together, right? Because You know, if you think about going to a backyard barbecue, right? This is a metaphor that I like to use. And the host tells you, "Okay, here's a bunch of people. I think you'll really like them. Get talking." You'll probably do it, but it's a little hard, right? But if somebody says to me, "Hey, Georgina, welcome to the barbecue. You know, there's a group over there that's playing a game of cornhole, and they need one more. Meet this person. He's going to be on your team. You're going to love this game. You guys have tons in common. Okay, have fun." right? I've been given an opportunity to engage that is, is really easy and accessible for me. And so that's something that we pay a huge amount of attention to in the Pragmatic Alumni community is those facilitated opportunities, right? We really do that heavy lifting and that hostessing for our members so that they're kind of having that really easy, organic experience with one another without without the awkwardness of, you know, capital N networking. So if folks do want to check it out, I encourage everybody to come take a look, and you can absolutely use the kind of principles and approaches that we're using in the Pragmatic Alumni Community and apply it to ideas that you have for a space. You can go to pragmaticinstitute.com/community to find some more, and I actually am currently accepting early access members. Right now. So you can go take a look. It is open. If you want to be one of the first people through the door, you can go take a look at that, and I'd be happy to see you there.

That's awesome. And I will share that with everybody in the email after this session. So later today, once the video is up on YouTube and everything, I'll link to this, but also link to that as well. So yeah, I appreciate you sharing that, Georgina. Knowing that we're towards the end, what is— if there is one final takeaway, just sort of one thing that you'd want people to to take away from this entire session, or just if they're going to have to, they're going to remember one thing, right? Like, what would that be?

Your organization has a community manager, whether they have that title or not.

I love that. I love that. Well, awesome. Well, I appreciate the time. And I appreciate everybody joining us. This is, this was fun. You all had awesome questions. So thank you for all of those questions. Again, pragmaticinstitute.com/community. I think that was the, that was the URL for that. And then, you know, I had mentioned before, we just launched our industry virtual workshops. Check those out. It's Bitly, bit.ly/industryvirtualworkshop. So I'll link to those as well. And, and yeah, for those of you that are already a part of Product Collective, really appreciate that you're involved in our community. And for those that aren't, we would love to have you with us. So you could check everything that we do out at productcollective.com. So again, thanks for joining us, Georgina. Thank you everybody for joining us as well. And we also have one special work, sort of an add-in industry interview this Friday. So I'm going to include the details on that. It's with Gib Biddle, former VP of product at Netflix, and he'll be giving an intro to product strategy. So that will be an awesome session. And I hope to see you all there. Bye everybody.