Your Community is a Product -- Come hear WHY at Pulse 2023

DannyPancratz
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👋 Hi, I’m new here, but I’m very active over on InSpired, the customer community for Insided by Gainsight. 

I’m excited to attend Pulse for the first time this year and honored to present in the community track. 

In my session, I’ll be sharing my POV that B2B and B2C communities are products and that they benefit from leveraging product management principles that strengthen your strategy and scale your community operations. Learn about Jobs-to-be-Done, the Product Canvas, and other techniques I have used to unlock the ability to scale via community, even as a team of one. 

Level up Your Community Strategy and Operations 

with Product Management Principles

11:30 AM-12:15 PM on May 17

About me: More than a decade in community management leadership positions in the tech industry, including communities related to SAP, Google Cloud, and (currently) Unqork. 

 

 

 

14 replies

seth
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Excited for your session, @DannyPancratz ! I feel like more things need to be managed as products not projects, so I’m looking forward to how you applied those thoughts to community.

Director of Community, Gainsight
aiprakash
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@DannyPancratz , your success story at Unqork has genuinely encouraged customers to elevate their community, thus I am excited to hear about your journey at Pulse this year. I appreciate you sharing that with us...CHEERS!!!!!!
​

Aarti Prakash - Client Outcomes Manager
anirbandutta
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I know you’ll be the voice of so many Community-pros out there @DannyPancratz 

Your work at Unqork and inSpired, is a living course in Community Management. Rooting for ya ✊

It's an opportunity for engagement
revathimenon
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+1 to @anirbandutta ‘s thought.

Rooting for this one! 🙌🏽

 

Where focus goes, energy flows.
vishkatti
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After seeing how well you’ve managed the Unqork Community and seeing how you’ve topped the inSpired Community, I’m sure there are lots of going to be lots of valuable insights in this session 🙂

Jagari Das
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This is going to be sooo insightful! 🔥 #superexcited @DannyPancratz 

Jagari | Client Outcomes Manager, Gainsight
Jagari Das
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Hi @DannyPancratz, This session was really enlightening! Would like to know what role AI will play in your community in the future? What areas do you plan to use AI in moving forward?

Jagari | Client Outcomes Manager, Gainsight
DannyPancratz
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Thanks, @Jagari Das. 

TBD on what role AI will play in our community; it’s something we’re actively monitoring and ideating on, but not rushing into anything. 

Our initial and most common use case will be using the community to train and feed AI tools to find answers from our community knowledge base and help users more quickly get answers. That might be through something like the PX knowledge center bot or a solution we develop ourselves. That’s a customer outcome I can see AI helping with. 

Currently, I am glad our community is strongly gated and limited to actual people, as I’ve seen other communities grappling with spam issues from bots and the accelerations in AI. 

I’m sure there will be AI-assisted improvements to community management and administration, but I’m already able to achieve a lot of that with RPA that doesn’t need AI. 

So, long term, I’m probably most interested in how AI can provide prescriptive recommendations on new content, resources, and events based on community activity. 

seth
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@DannyPancratz I’m thinking similarly. Though, I’m optimistic that AI could not only detect information or trends, but synthesize them into summaries. Such as, “Here’s some of the newest topics being talked about on community,” or even per-user: “Based on posts you’ve interacted with, you’re probably most likely to be interested in X and Y.” Maybe AI removes the need to build a dedicated recommendation system, and can describe the recommendations with context and summarization, instead of just providing links.

Director of Community, Gainsight
anirbandutta
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AI for Registered user onboarding is another area that comes to mind, Journey orchestrating users to different areas based on their usage of the Community.

It's an opportunity for engagement
seth
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Or even the AI not recommending content but people. “You two should meet. You have so many interests in common."

Director of Community, Gainsight
revathimenon
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AI to perform content gap analysis on existing content, so as to create more holistic content for the community.

Where focus goes, energy flows.
Revant_Amingad
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@DannyPancratz - Thanks for extending your expertise through this insightful session! Community is a great place for the Product Folks & also to the end users who use it. So, do you have any best tips around How you've been able to move your customers from your product to the community, especially when maintaining the flow?

Revant Amingad | CS, CS Ops Professional | xGainsight
DannyPancratz
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@Revant_Amingad our community “product” strategy is to be the “everything” resource for using our product, so a great second screen (or tab) experience. 

Our Community Hub mission is to “connect our users to the people and resources they need to be successful.” That gives a clear value prop and helps solve a lot of jobs to be done for the end users.

How we do that is a through a focus on an integrated “Hub” UI, making the community a launchpad to everything they need and help them discover things they didn’t know they needed. Gainsight DH’s federated search API is a key differentiator, as it allows us to make the community a true comprehensive search across all resources (even those that live on other platforms: CMS, LMS, our marketplace built on our own platform). 

So, in summary, our community strategy emphasizes a focus on the UX, as well as integrating any resource users might need as they use our product. Then, naturally, this extends to creating new community resources that make the community even stickier (and help our customers even more!).

There are also other tactics that help like embedding the community widget in our platform, onboarding email workflows, nudges from CS, etc. 

But, imo, it really comes down to the jobs to be done framework and product canvas I talk about in my session: If your community truly offers value, users will adopt it and keep coming back. Our focus on the UX is really just trying to help them understand (or prove) that the Community Hub can help them as they use our product, and thus should be their 1B tab to the 1A of our platform. 

(Bonus POV: I don’t know that gamification helps much with the initial adoption, but it can help them once they’re engaged. They need to find value in the community / start actually using it before any gamification systems will resonate with them. Thus, I don’t have an onboarding gamification path. But we have a lot around contributions like posting, marking answers, etc.)

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