Community Operations and I
I was always the girl in school with highlighters, checklists, and an ornate planner filled with every detail of my day, homework assignment, and project due (color coded, of course). I was the person who “begrudgingly” (but secretly loved) raising her hand to be the team leader for group assignments. I’m a stickler for being on time, always know exactly where everything is, and freakin’ love the satisfaction of checking a little box to mark it as done. Even though I use Trello for my to-do list, I still write my to-do’s in a notebook, just for that satisfaction of checking the box. And I’ve always loved the extra credit, learning new things, diving a bit deeper into the subject than is required, and being a teacher’s pet. Thinking back on it, I have no idea how I had any friends. I was totally a Hermoine.
As nerdy as they were, I think a lot of these things about me as a child led to a successful career in Community Operations. A huge part of it is the project management — staying organized, on time, corralling your teammates, and checking off those boxes. If you’re also the Hermoine type and interested in community, you may want to consider a job in Community Operations.
**Note: This blog will not all be about me. I want to get into the nitty gritty of Community Operations, and we’ll get there(!), but I wanted to share a bit about my experience so you know my story. After all, if you’re looking to learn from me, you should probably know a little bit about my experience and ‘credentials’ first.
Program Management
I started out as a program manager at Google, working for Google Maps. I managed a team that was far too large for a 22 year old grad student (it was 30 people), and I was responsible for a new division of Street View, where you could actually “walk” into businesses directly from Street View. We started in five cities across the USA, and I managed the group of people who would reach out to businesses to see if they were interested in participating in the program, and also the photographers out in the field.
From a day-to-day standpoint, my responsibilities were to:
- Establish the script and talk track for our callers to reach out to businesses
- Create a scheduling process for businesses that wanted to participate in the program
- Manage our CRM to track status of businesses we’ve reached out to, couldn’t get a hold of, and signed
- Manage photographer routes — making sure they had minimal travel between shoots, sufficient time to complete the previous shoot and commute to the next location, and instant notifications for any additional shoots or schedule changes
- Manage the process of receiving photos from the field and tagging them to the appropriate business
- Manage the QA of photos to ensure the panoramic “fish-eye” photos were not blurry and taken correctly
- Working cross-functionally with the developers to deliver the photos so they could set them up within the maps interface
- Create reporting to track program KPIs and dashboards that were distributed to management
From these responsibilities, here are experiences I gained that helped me in my Community Operations journey:
- Establishing automated processes
- Documentation
- Training and enablement
- Workflows
- People management
- Cross-functional collaboration and teamwork
- Reports and dashboards
Customer Success
After I left Google to focus on completing my MBA, I decided to go into consulting and worked for a supply chain consulting company that did SAP implementations. My focus was on pre-sales, gathering all of their requirements, understanding their pain points, scoping out their current processes and architecture, then working with the consulting team to generate a project plan and create the proposal.
Though a pre-sales consultant role isn’t what you’d traditionally classify as customer success, it was an entry point for me to understand listening to the customer, getting their feedback, and building off of it or incorporating it into the plan. Having to understand the customer’s pain points and incorporate it into the project plan is very similar to conducting feedback from community members and ensuring their requests are considered in the community roadmap.
After a few years of consulting, I decided to move into the startup life and worked at a few startups, most notably was a company called Plastiq, a fintech payment processing company that allowed businesses to accept credit cards at no fee to them and for consumers to use their credit card for businesses and merchants who don’t accept cards. As one does at startups, I wore a ridiculous number of hats, and my responsibilities included:
- Merchant onboarding — introducing them to the platform, training them, setting them up for success
- Merchant relationship management and engagement — functioning as a CSM for all merchants on the platform, creating campaigns and initiatives to spark engagement
- Merchant offboarding — handling a merchant leaving the platform
- Merchant support — managing support cases from merchants needing assistance
- Product feedback and enhancement requests — working with the merchants to understand their business requirements, passing feedback to the product team for product requests
- Bug management and tracking — logging bugs flagged by merchants and working with the product team to resolve the bug and communicate back to the merchants
- Merchant reports and dashboards — creating, managing, and distributing merchant reports to the company, spotting trends and insights
- Tech stack — implemented a CRM to track merchant activity, status, and relationship, and implemented a support center to handle support cases. These were then both also used for tracking payer activities (from the consumer side of the business)
- Community 1.0 — though it wasn’t classified as community, it was a start. Working on a knowledge base, forums, and hosting events to bring our merchants together to share best practices and network with one another.
I hope it’s clear from this list what I still use today in Community Operations, but to summarize:
- Process and workflows
- Automation and scalability
- Tech stack
- Vendor management
- Reports and dashboards
- Feedback cycles
- Product enhancements and bug tracking
- Community management
- Customer Support
Customer Support
I touched on Customer Support a bit above so I won’t dive too deeply into details of the story, but there are a lot of components relating to customer support that are used every day in Community Operations.
Aside from the core responsibilities, there is an incredible value in having experience of being in that “front of the house” role, speaking and interacting with customers on a regular basis. Be able to listen to the customers’ needs, bring that feedback back, and take care to go the extra mile to make sure they are taken care of. It follows you into Community Operations when you’re listening to issues and feedback from community members on programs, processes, and tools that you implement, and making sure their issues and bugs are resolved in a proper and timely manner.
Tactically, here is a list of tasks and responsibilities I held in previous roles that helped me on my Community Operations journey
- Establishing the platform to use for support and implementing it
- Configuring the platform to best suit the business needs — workflows, auto-assignment rules, template responses, case labeling, escalations and priorities, etc.
- Team training on how to use the support platform
- Continuous improvement on functions that increase efficiency
- Knowledge base implementation and maintenance
- Managing escalations
- Reporting — creating custom reports based off of the program and team’s needs and priorities
Tech Savviness
Every company I worked for was at a stage where a new platform or tool had to be implemented or maintained. Learning to not only use the tool as an end user, but administer and customize it was essential for my role. Even while at Google, I implemented Salesforce for our CRM and worked with a consultant to assist with the settings and configurations. Later, I’d be the solo admin and implement it again at several other companies, even getting my certification in Salesforce Administration and becoming a multi-star Trailhead Ranger. Aside from Salesforce, I found myself needing to implementing Support Tools (Zendesk, Desk (now Service Cloud), Service Cloud), Community Tools (Community Cloud (now Experience Cloud), inSided), Project Management tools (Trello, Asana, Monday, Wrike), and other supplemental tools and platforms (Airtable, Commsor, Zapier, SAP, Atlassian product suite, Team Gantt, accounts payable tools, and more).
I don’t think you need to be an expert at every platform out there. Especially in the community space, I see new tools and platforms coming out all the time; it’d be nearly impossible to keep up. What I do think is a an absolute must, however, is the openness and ease of learning and adapting to new technologies. Here are a few responsibilities related to Community Operations and tech stack that I’ve taken with me along the way.
- Vendor comparison, sales process, and vendor selection
- Implementations
- Migrations
- Set up and customization (being an admin)
- Training and enablement for end users
- Documentation
- Product enhancement tracking
- Feedback and bug tracking
- Vendor CSM relationship management
- Maintenance and improvement areas
- Automation, processes, workflows
- Integrations
Community Management
Last, but certainly not least, is community management. I grew up in a very community-centric household. My mom was, and still is, very active in her city community; she is a community leader who holds events, brings people together, initiates social change, and now holds an official city role as a city council member and vice mayor. Growing up, she led the city’s disaster preparedness committee, running city-wide drills, educating folks on what to do in case of a natural disaster (in California, it was mostly earthquake and fire safety), and holding group meetings to bring networks and communities of people together. She is also incredibly active in the Asian American community.
From a personal perspective, I was also part of several communities, both growing up and as an adult. I was an active member of the Kiwanis Key Club, doing lots of community service. I volunteered at The Boys and Girls Club of America. I was a part of a hiking community group, was Yelp Elite and attended a bunch of foodie group events, participated in a bunch of wine education and wine tasting groups, and am an active member of the shiba inu club with my dog Yoshi.
From a professional perspective, community management touched so many of my previous roles. Being in the pre-sales role in my consulting gig, I worked on introducing various clients together who were interested in learning from others in the supply chain management industry. At Plastiq, again I brought together vendors who wanted to learn best practices using the product, conducted webinars and events, created a knowledge base, and worked on creating a forum to facilitate discussions with one another. I also joined the Salesforce Trailblazer Community as a member, learning about the platform from other professionals in the ecosystem; it was absolutely instrumental to my success implementing Salesforce the few times I did.
Having the understanding of what community is was a key pre-requisite to starting in Community Operations. I didn’t have any direct or official community management experience before actually joining a community team, but understanding what it was helped me jump start my ability to understand how operational items and improvements benefit a community and community team. You don’t need to be a community manager or previously worked for a community team to be successful in Community Operations, and that’s something I think is very important for both hiring teams and individuals looking to get into Community Operations need to understand.
Officially in Community and into Community Operations
I started my first official role in community in 2017 when I joined Salesforce’s Trailblazer Community Team as a Program Manager. It was honestly fate that I would join the community team for a company that I loved and had so much experience with as an end user, and for a community I was an active member of and had used personally to further my knowledge of the product.
To begin, I was focused on Program Management, running projects and implementing new initiatives. As time continued though, it became more apparent that even in managing programs, there were community management aspects of the program, and there were operational aspects. More and more, in team meetings I’d be mentioned as taking care of the “operational items”, and I started using the term “Community Operations” to capture my role rather than just “program management”.
At Salesforce, I implemented new tech stacks, processes, and programs, streamlined and automated a ton, and left the team and the community in a better place than I found it. They are now able to respond to 900+ support cases a month, onboard 30+ new community leaders a month across 1,300+ worldwide community groups. They are also able to process and review hundreds of Salesforce MVP nominations a year, and they have the tools and platforms to stay organized, continue scaling, and also report on community KPIs.
Now, I’m working to continue pushing the Community Operations initiative forward. I run a monthly meetup called Community OPServations with the brilliant Cassie Mayes from Atlassian, bringing together people to chat about all things Community Operations. I’m part of the Community Club Creator’s Guild, writing content and blogs. I speak in podcasts, I speak in community conferences, I try and chat with as many people as I can about Community Operations. Most recently, I partnered with Community Club’s CSchool and wrote a course on Community Operations. And I’m continuing to learn as much as I can, crafting my skill, and also working to create more content, like this blog.
This was a long post, so if you’ve made it to the end, thanks for sticking with me and reading this. Enjoy this bonus Yoshi picture as a prize. I’m always looking for feedback, topics you want to learn about, and to meet other Community Operations fans. Please feel free to reach out at thecommopsgal@gmail.com.
