436: Practical tips for creating a product/brand community – with Bri Leever

What a community can do for your product – for product managers

Today we are talking about building a community for a brand or product. Which reminds me that this episode is sponsored by the Product Mastery Now Community—that’s right, we have a community for listeners of this podcast. Do you want to meet the podcast guests and ask them questions? We make that happen because community members are invited to the live recordings, which take place three months before they are published publicly. Want additional expert sessions? We make that happen too. Want to join a mastermind for peer-learning? That’s also part of the community. You can also search all the past episodes (over 400 at this point) to learn insights on any topic. Find out more and apply to be a member at ProductMasteryNow.com/Community.

So this episode is about communities. What can a community do for a brand or product? It can provide growth, help clarify messaging that resonates with your ideal customer, and provide co-creation opportunities. LEGO, Starbucks, Wyze Consumer Electronics, and many more companies have found customer communities essential to their growth.

To help us explore what is involved in creating a community, Bri Leever is with us. She is a community strategist who designs and implements communities for brands. She is also the person who helped me create the Product Mastery Now Community, and she shared many valuable insights with me in the process.  You’ll find her at Ember Consulting, which she founded to help companies build meaningful communities. She and her colleagues also post dissections of public communities on Youtube at her Bri Leever channel.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[3:49] Why should product people care about communities?

I like to frame community work in a product-driven perspective—What’s a problem our customer has, and how can we create a product that can help solve that problem for them? The community-led approach asks, What’s a problem our customer has, and how can we foster a space where that customer can start to solve that problem with other people who are solving a similar problem? When you’re coming from a product perspective, once you’ve solved the problem you lose insight into how that problem continues to evolve for the customer. The community-led approach creates a space where that conversation about the problem is happening. You can stay extremely attuned to the problem you’re trying to solve, whether you have a product that helps solve that problem or just foster the community space.

Product and community work well together because a community gives you the landscape to test new ways to solve that problem and keeps you attuned to how the problem evolves for your target customer.

[6:51] What are some different kinds of communities?

* Ambassador community—community members have sales incentives to sell products.

* Customer support community

* Product community—where you can get input from your top customers

* Customer success community—focused on learning, especially for highly technical products that requires a course to enhance the customer experience

A healthy community is highly cross-functional and hits different objectives across different departments in your organization. Usually the best place to start is to pick one, get some traction, and go from there.

[8:55] What is an example of a public community that does many things well?

The LEGO IDEAS community is a product community where members can propose a CAD design of a new LEGO set, people can vote on it, and it can be brought to production. There was on highly engaged member who had earned a special badge in the community, which they had put in their Instagram profile.