Continuing the discussion from What does "Enterprise-Ready" look like in your view? (Hot takes welcome!):
Most communities aren’t designed for scale. They grow into it, accumulating operational complexity along the way. Without a clear strategy, that complexity becomes harder to manage as the community grows.
The clearest signal that something needs to change is when success creates new work. Early-stage community strategies are usually growth focused, with the goal of pushing the community to reach “critical mass”. This is the point at which the community becomes self-sustaining, with more than 50% of the growth and activity generated by community itself. If the community isn’t ready to scale once this happens, signs of friction will begin to appear.
Some common signals that it’s time to revisit your strategy are:
- an increased moderation load that is difficult to handle reactively (e.g. there are more edge cases that existing guidelines don’t cover or more disagreement about how the rules are enforced)
- breaking taxonomy when topics diversify and knowledge gets harder to find (e.g. the same questions are asked repeatedly, search results get noisy)
- more parts of the business become involved and create more demand due to differing needs
- when internal processes start to break (often because the community depends on institutional memory rather than documented processes)
- rising member expectations (e.g. as a community becomes more valuable, members expect it to be more reliable)
I concede that it’s been a few years since I worked as an Enterprise CM so this is by no means a definitive list. I’m curious to hear what other kinds of signals people get that trigger them to revisit their processes.