Bringing the Agile Mindset to Community Management
For over a year now I’ve been working in a Development Team as their Scrum Master. When those without a technical background ask me what that is, I say it’s Community Management but for an internal community — a team of staff. A non-technical Scrum Master is quite controversial for some, and it’s been amazing to see hearts change in the face of the emotional intelligence, engagement stragety and relationship building skills that Community Management brings to the Scrum Master role for me. Vice Versa, there are many parts of the Agile Mindset which Community Managers and their wonderful Online Communities can benefit from.
Fail Fast
Mishandling failure itself can cause painful memories, analysis paralysis (not actually starting a project so it can’t fail) or provoke bad management techniques. Harnessing failure though is a super power. It was Disney’s ‘Meet the Robinsons’ that said it best, “If I gave up every time I failed, I would have never invented the meatball cannon.” meaning “from failing you learn. From success…not so much!” By creating an experiment, or a minimum viable project, you can figure out if the direction is a good way to go, if it needs to change, or if it’s best to not go ahead before any major time, resources or money have gone into it. The key is to create an a/b test, or trial, run it for a short period of time, take your members on the journey with you, and act on the results.
Inspect and Adapt
Like parenting, the Community you nurture, won’t be the Community you end up with. One of the most interesting examples of this is a forum which relies on people having issues with a service to generate content and member engagement. After time, as the service improves, members problems are pro-actively solved and new features are added, people stop coming to the forum for that original purpose; help. Without keeping an eye on the changing environment, a Community Manager might fight that a Community needs to evolve to continue, and then slowly watch their forums decline. If you don’t grow with your little one, you’ll miss their teenage years and never be able to relate to them as adults. For more tips on how to welcome change, read ‘4 steps to using data driven strategy for community engagement’. No matter how small, your goal is continuous improvement — Agile teams achieve this partly with a meeting called a ‘Retrospective’. This is a meeting where we look at a previous chunk of time at work, and assess what we want to start, stop and continue doing about the way we did our jobs using various activities and games. For more ideas on retrospectives, check out Corinna Baldauf’s ‘Retromat’ which can definitely be re-purposed for Community Management Teams.
Deliver Bitesize Value
I’ve seen a lot of opportunities to bring value to members lost due to the well meaning but misplaced attempt to package projects up into bigger items to create more value. For example, you need to change one rank as it’s causing problems because it’s accidentally offensive. In looking at the rank, you tell your members you’ll do a rank overhaul as you’ve realised your gamification isn’t up to scratch, it’s been years since they last changed and it’ll be fun for your members to reinvent and take part in this project. Suddenly you have a much bigger project which 1. takes more time so is more likely to be deprioritised or delayed and 2. causes that one rank to remain a problem for as long as the bigger project takes. The thinking behind this is sound — people don’t tend to like change, so doing it in one go could make for a better experience, and why waste resources changing the one rank if they are all going to change anyway. However, by acting faster and delivering bitesize value, you can constantly react to your members needs, prioritising as you go along — no more big projects half finished, and no more frustrated members waiting to see any benefit or change they’ve asked for. The idea is to deliver value to your members as soon as possible.
Work together with your Development Team
This tip is a bit cheeky. The ‘Agile Manifesto’ asks that “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” Community Managers being the ‘Business People’. You might have an internal person who looks after your forum website, a third party taking care of your platform, or your Community might be part of a Company that has a Technology Department. “The best way to get to know someone or a department is to work with them. From learning about what people care about to abbreviations they use, sometimes listening to another department talking in their own natural habitat can feel like they are talking in a whole different language. If you can’t understand the abbreviations and terms, you can’t expect your members to understand either.”(1) Having daily 15 minute stand-ups, which are cross-departmental, will give you the ability to frequently represent your Community where it’s important.
Empower your team and Community
Hands down my favourite facet of Agile, “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”
In Community Management I’d apply this to your team, and your members. In my role as a Servant Leader, it’s not my responsibility to tell my team members if they are doing something right or wrong — it’s my responsibility to facilitate the framework and culture which allows them to fail fast and be introspective, learning and growing for themselves. “When Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer studied diaries from nearly 12,000 work days, they found that the happiest and most productive days were those marked by a sense of progress.”(2) By empowering your team you help them develop professionally and give yourself space to work on what you need to do.
Don’t burn everyone out
Failing fast, welcoming change and delivering a lot of value sounds great in theory but in practise one of the biggest obstacles is burnout. In a past life we had a problem with how to handle duplicate member Ideas, having a visual of total support on any one idea and making sure the right people were appreciated. Within a 2 month slot we tried 4 different methods, and had to settle for the solution that was the least bad of the bunch. In the beginning, it was fun — towards the end, the members and I were frustrated and no one could remember what method we were using anymore. We’d all burnt out. There’s lots of tips in ‘three powerful statements to use in your online community’ and ideas for fun, by taking breaks and not doing too many experiments at once you can help keep the balance.
For further reading I’d highly recommend ‘The Lean Startup’ by Eric Ries and Geoff Watts ‘From Good to Great Servant Leadership’ to bring failing fast, regular introspective team meetings and daily cross departmental stand ups to your Community Management.
