The way I see it, our strategy has been somewhat emergent over the years.
In the early days, I think it was primarily aligned with product – we wanted a way to both:
- dogfood the product ourselves and
- get early feedback on features from open source users
In return, the value to users (customers, broadly speaking), was:
- support from the team and the community
- input on product direction
I think those are still at the foundation of this community.
(We use this site also for communication with (paying) customers, but a lot of that happens through private channels (personal messages or private categories). I’m going to set that aside for now (pardon the nested parentheses)).
I think another use case that emerged organically was “retention” and “advocacy”. Again, this was primarily focused initially on serving non-paying customers, but as a side effect, the community does provide that value to paying customers as well.
More recently, we’ve been putting a greater emphasis on how the community can support the viability and growth of the business. Indirectly of course, that also helps the open source community.
But we want to make sure the community serves paying customers well, and prospective customers who are trying to make the best decision about what platform to choose. I’d say that retention and advocacy are the goals most closely aligned with that.
There’s a lot of overlap there in terms of alignment with two parts of the org: Marketing and Customer Success.
On the org chart at the moment, community reports to marketing, but we have people directly involved from customer success, marketing, product, and our exec team.
It’s hard for me to look at what we’re doing and reduce it down to “community falls under marketing”. It is true, but there’s a lot more to it.