In the early days of your startup, it’s important that your team is building the right thing for the right people, and that you’re gaining traction fast. This is why it’s so valuable to have a community manager who is involved in the product development process early on. This can be easily accomplished with a community-minded co-founder setting the product vision, such as Scott Belsky at Behance or Zack Klein, formerly at Vimeo. In other scenarios, it’s extremely common for the community manager to have a seat on the product team in the early stages, especially when they’re working on any startup where user-to-user engagement is key, such as Foursquare.
Beyond their usual role of managing Twitter, producing content, answering support tickets, and other retention and engagement activities specific to your startup, there are quite a few advantages to product and community teams working closely together:
1. Tight Product and Community Feedback Loops
As the go-to-person for any support requests, your community manager knows your product better than most of your engineers. He or she intimately knows every single bug, at what point in the user flow (onboarding process, customizations, checkout, etc.) that users get stuck, and the order of priority and urgency of each pain point. A tight product/community feedback loop can quickly improve a product. Furthermore, a product-savvy community manager can preemptively help a product’s user experience. They will also have the best pulse on the most frequently requested features.
2. Better Informed User Stories & Use Cases
Your community manager knows your users best. For your most engaged users, they know their names, the intimate details of their jobs and lives, what they value, what motivates them, and most importantly, why they are using your product. Your community manager can give a quick snapshot of what your average user is like and how the user base as a whole is segmented. As such, community managers are incredibly valuable when developing user stories and use cases for scoping and prioritizing new features and determining product requirements and even product pivots.
3. More Effective Copy
It’s easy to forget that design is still about words. As the voice of your community and brand, your community manager is a great asset in creating directional web copy that is not only on-brand and speaks specifically to your target users, but is also effective in assisting the user in accomplishing their task at hand. Well-targeted and effective copy can increase conversions and reduce support tickets.
4. Clear Product Marketing
When you’re solving a hard technical problem, it’s easy to get caught up in the cool and nerdy details. However, at the end of the day, users only care that your product is solving their problem. During launches, your community manager conveys the product’s value proposition and explains complex technical features in a way that makes sense to users in a language that they understand.
At the end of the day, your community manager is your team’s most valuable asset, in regards to learning about and communicating with your users. Leverage them on your team accordingly.