Q1: How have you seen the role of community evolve from a simple support function to a primary driver of business outcomes?

For a long time, community was positioned as a support function. Often literally inside support, or adjacent to it. Today, it’s rarely housed there, but it’s still generally expected to play a supportive role. That distinction matters.

Even as community has moved into marketing, customer success, or its own team, the expectation hasn’t fundamentally changed. It’s still there to support adoption, customers, campaigns, and retention. At the same time, what’s happening inside communities has become much more consequential.

When communities are working well, customers aren’t just solving problems. They’re sharing how they use the product, shaping how others understand it, and influencing how adoption happens across the customer base. That influence shows up in real business outcomes. But it’s happening from a function that’s still treated as supportive, and often resourced accordingly.

That tension is what led to the rise of “community-led growth.” It was an attempt to recognize the impact. But it also introduced a misconception. That community should operate as its own growth engine, instead of something that changes how the rest of the go-to-market actually works.

Q2: How has the role of a community manager evolved?

The role has shifted from execution to interpretation, but the expectations haven’t fully caught up. It used to be about running programs, keeping things active, responding quickly, and driving participation.

Now the work is much closer to understanding how customers learn from each other and what that means for the business. You’re observing patterns in how customers adopt the product, how they explain it to each other, where they get stuck, and where they create value on their own. Then you’re translating that into something that product, marketing, or customer teams can actually use.

The challenge is that many organizations still evaluate the role based on activity, while expecting it to produce insight and influence. Those are very different jobs.

Q3: What functions work in tandem with communities? Do you see them becoming more interdependent on each other in the future?

For me, the most important factors are Platform Adaptability and Platform Innovation.

• Product pulls feedback and edge cases.
• Marketing pulls language and use cases.
• Customer success uses it for onboarding and support.
• Sales leans on it for credibility.

The issue is structural.

Community is usually owned by one function, but expected to support all of them. It’s accountable for cross-functional impact, while being resourced and measured like a single-function program. Limited headcount, limited budget, and often limited access to the data and systems needed to connect its work to outcomes. I do think these functions become more interdependent over time, but that only works if the community is treated as shared infrastructure rather than something one team “runs” for everyone else.

Q4: What does “structural alignment” actually look like operationally? How are community, product, and revenue teams connected day-to-day?

Most teams think alignment means coordination. More meetings, more updates, more shared documents. That’s not really the problem.

The problem is that the community is expected to influence decisions across teams without having the systems, data access, or operational support to do that consistently. Structural alignment shows up when that changes.

Product is using community-sourced insight as a real input into roadmap decisions, with a clear path for how that input is captured and prioritized. Customer success is building onboarding and expansion paths that assume customers will learn from each other, not just from the company. Marketing is shaping messaging based on how customers already describe the product, not just internal positioning.

And community teams have access to the same data, tools, and operational support as the teams they’re expected to influence. If those things aren’t true, then alignment is mostly conceptual.

Q5: With AI into the mix, how can communities help businesses stay on top of LLM searches?

AI is changing how information is surfaced, but it’s still grounded in what exists. Community is one of the few places where you get high-volume, real customer language. Not polished copy. Actual questions, workflows, and examples of how people use the product. And that “real talk” builds trust.

It also becomes more valuable as LLMs synthesize answers based on patterns across content. The opportunity is to treat the community as a source of that signal and make it usable.
The reality is that most companies don’t. Conversations happen, but they aren’t structured, reused, or connected to anything else. So the same issue shows up again. High-value input, low operational integration.

Q6: What role does a community play in the overall GTM of a business? Is it just limited to providing support?

If it’s limited to support, you’re only seeing the most visible layer. Community influences how customers understand the product, which affects adoption and expansion. It shapes how use cases spread. It creates proof that doesn’t feel like marketing because it isn’t coming from the company.

That influence cuts across marketing, product, and customer experience. This is where the “community-led growth” framing starts to fall apart. It treats the community as its own motion.

What I’ve seen in practice is that growth starts to depend on how a community functions within the system. Product decisions improve because of it. Messaging becomes more grounded because of it.

Customer experience scales differently because of it. I call this community-integrated GTM.
It’s not about community leading growth on its own. It’s about making it part of the system that the rest of the go-to-market relies on. The challenge is that most community teams are still asked to deliver those outcomes while operating with relatively limited resources and authority.

Q7: Where does community-integrated GTM break down or have limits? What kinds of companies or stages is this model NOT right for?

There are real limits.

If you don’t have enough active customers or meaningful usage, there isn’t much for a community to build on. Early-stage companies often try to force it before there’s enough signal.

If the product doesn’t create opportunities for customers to learn from each other, the impact is smaller.

And if the organization isn’t willing to change how decisions are made, then integration doesn’t actually happen. Community produces insight, but nothing changes as a result.

It also takes time. You don’t get the cross-functional impact without building the underlying system, and that’s often where teams lose patience.

Q8: How do you measure the community’s contribution to the pipeline in a way that finance and leadership actually believe?

Direct attribution is where most teams get into trouble. Trying to prove that a specific deal came from a specific community interaction usually leads to models that look precise but don’t reflect how buying decisions actually happen.

There’s also a structural issue. Community teams often don’t have clean access to the data or systems needed to connect their work directly to the pipeline in a way that finance trusts.

What tends to land better is showing how community affects the inputs that drive the pipeline. Faster onboarding, deeper adoption, higher retention, stronger expansion. Those are some metrics leadership already believes in.

Then you can layer in patterns. Customers who engage in community tend to adopt faster or expand more. Not as a claim of direct causation, but as evidence that community changes how customers behave.

If companies want tighter attribution, it’s less about better dashboards and more about better integration between community, data, and revenue systems.