The Rise of the Community Department

With large teams and important business goals to lead, Heads of Community will earn a rightful place on the executive leadership team. Community leaders will no longer be embedded inside other functions — they will be valuable enough to stand alone and to build large, high functioning teams.

While Peloton had no problem growing its community with best-in-class engagement and advocacy, it did experience pain points in managing its community. This came down to a lack of community-specific tools and limitations of existing platforms like Facebook. It was time-consuming and manual to draw important insights, and challenging to manage workf... See more

— Jayvee Nava, VP of Community at Peloton

Fast forward to today and the challenges we faced at Peloton 5 years ago still very much exist.

I need the community version of a CRM — a place where I can see all of the different touchpoints for every member of my community.

Against that backdrop, companies are building new playbooks for growth, monetization, and more around community. Businesses are investing in community, in community initiatives — and importantly, in community teams.

In many ways, products (software or otherwise) are no longer sold by salespeople or by ads, but by community members.