Breadth–Depth Community Design
Grow across personas while building meaningful engagement within each one.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 98%
Community growth has a horizontal breadth problem and a vertical depth problem. Breadth means acquiring enough relevant personas for the community to become a meaningful marketing and ecosystem lever. Depth means helping each persona engage sufficiently to learn, contribute, connect, and remain active. Product communities can often emphasize depth because customers arrive around the same product and goal. Communities of practice are harder: they may need beginners, experts, managers, practitioners, partners, and creators, each with different needs. The framework maps those personas horizontally and builds a tailored engagement journey vertically for each one. Success requires simultaneous reach across the practice and meaningful participation within every priority segment.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain during Kieran Flanagan’s comparison of product communities with communities of practice.
Core principles
- 01Breadth determines whether community can become a substantial growth lever.
- 02Depth determines whether membership produces meaningful engagement.
- 03Product communities can often prioritize depth within a narrower customer group.
- 04Communities of practice must serve multiple personas without becoming generic.
- 05Each persona requires a distinct vertical engagement path.
How to run it
- 1
Define the shared practice
State the field, activity, or capability that gives different personas a legitimate reason to gather.
Pro tip Make the practice narrower than a broad industry label.
Watch out Excessive breadth can leave members with no shared work or language.
- 2
Map horizontal breadth
Identify the personas whose participation increases reach, learning, exchange, or commercial relevance.
Pro tip Prioritize personas that create reciprocal value for one another.
Watch out Acquiring unrelated personas for raw member count weakens cohesion.
- 3
Define vertical outcomes
For each persona, specify the progress, relationships, and achievements that justify continued participation.
Pro tip Interview members from each segment rather than assuming identical motivations.
Watch out A single generic engagement program will underserve most personas.
- 4
Build persona journeys
Create onboarding, content, events, peer groups, contribution roles, and recognition suited to each persona’s desired depth.
Pro tip Offer bridges that let members advance into new roles over time.
Watch out Too many disconnected tracks can fragment the community.
- 5
Balance and measure
Track acquisition and active participation by persona, then adjust investment where breadth or depth is weak.
Pro tip Use a matrix showing persona reach against meaningful engagement.
Watch out Aggregate member totals can conceal shallow or uneven participation.
In the wild
A community recruits practitioners, team leaders, analysts, and agency specialists to achieve breadth. It then creates persona-specific onboarding, peer groups, project challenges, and expert sessions while running cross-persona case reviews that preserve a shared practice.
→ The community expands its market reach without reducing every member to the same generic experience.
Common mistakes
Optimizing only for member count
Breadth without depth creates a large but inactive audience rather than a functioning community.
Optimizing only for a small core
Depth without sufficient breadth may prevent the community from becoming a meaningful growth lever.
Giving every persona one journey
Different roles and experience levels usually need distinct reasons and mechanisms for engagement.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for organizations building large professional, educational, or practice-based communities across several personas.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal for narrowly bounded product-support communities that intentionally serve one homogeneous customer group.
From the transcript
“I think of two problems you have to solve, which is your horizontal and vertical problem, your depth and breadth problem.”
“community of practice means you have to care about breath as well as depth.”
“And then community only works if you nail the depth part. So now you have to actually try to figure out how to build a…”
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