Product X Community Thinking
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Product X Community Thinking
Continuous Community Clue #040
A big part of Continuous Community is about being more product focused with how we build community. This is mostly how I’ve ended up writing a lot about Community Discovery, MVCs, and Community Flywheels.
So, forgive me if I get a little bit excited when others speak the same lingo…
This one comes from the Stackoverflow blog, via Mike Donovan, the SVP of Product at Sauce Labs.
Finding the right community product based on four key risk factors
Mike Donvan maps out four key risk factors:
Value - Will customers find enough value in my solution to choose it?
Usable - How easy is it to use my product?
Viable - Can I afford to build the product?
Feasible - Do I possess the skills and technology to build it?
He goes on to suggest other questions to explore…
Value
What is your ideal customer profile and persona?
Who is the decision maker (it might not be the developer)?
What problem do you solve?
Who is the competition? How do you differentiate yourself?
Usable
How easy is it to onboard? What is the time-to-value for your project?
What friction points exist in the workflow of your product? Do you know?
How do you get feedback from users?
Viable
At a product company, you are only viable if you can afford to pay people to build your product. The equivalent is building a community in OSS.
How do you plan to build the community? Is what you are building interesting enough to build a community around? Will your personas find it interesting to contribute to?
Are you planning on building your community from the employees of a company?
This is where a business model becomes essential, and many companies choose between models such as the Red Hat model or open source managed services.
Feasible
Related to the community, do the skills of your target persona match those who need to contribute to your tool?
For example, we've observed instances of GenAI projects that don't align properly, where the tool is created by data scientists but for developers.
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