Communities of Product, Practice, and Play
Classify a community by what members expect when they arrive
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 99%
Classify a community by examining why members show up rather than by its platform, size, or owner. A community of play brings people together for recreation, enjoyment, and relationships. A community of practice helps participants improve a skill, profession, or discipline through learning and peer exchange. A community of product helps users become more capable with a particular tool or toolset. Businesses generally emphasize product, practice, or a purposeful blend, although play can enrich either one. Once the dominant expectation is explicit, leaders can design programs, goals, staffing, and measurements that deliver the promised member value instead of operating an ambiguous collection of events and channels.
Origin
Patrick Woods and Orbit created the three-part heuristic to distinguish communities whose formats looked different but whose members shared recognizable expectations. Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain.
Core principles
- 01Define communities from the member’s perspective
- 02Distinguish learning a product from developing a practice
- 03Treat recreation and social connection as a separate expectation
- 04Align programs and goals with the chosen community type
How to run it
- 1
Start with member expectations
Ask what participants believe they will receive or accomplish when they enter the community. Avoid defining it by the software platform or company department.
Pro tip Interview current or prospective members in their own language.
Watch out Do not assume that an owned audience is automatically a community.
- 2
Identify the dominant type
Choose product when members primarily master a tool, practice when they develop a discipline, and play when they primarily gather for enjoyment.
Pro tip Classify the primary expectation before considering secondary benefits.
Watch out Labeling every activity as all three makes the classification useless.
- 3
Define any intentional blend
Document where the community combines types, such as product users exchanging broader productivity practices. Specify which type should dominate each program.
Pro tip Assign a type to each event, channel, or content series.
Watch out An accidental blend can create conflicting member expectations.
- 4
Align programs and goals
Build activities, success measures, and resource allocations around the selected type. Review whether each program creates the value members came to receive.
Pro tip Remove programs that do not support a declared expectation.
Watch out Company-centric goals can overwhelm the member promise.
In the wild
Orbit users initially gather to discuss the API and feature set, making the group a community of product. As experienced community and developer-relations professionals meet one another, they also exchange advice about streaming, events, and online meetups, introducing a community-of-practice layer.
→ A product-centered group naturally expands into professional learning without abandoning its original purpose.
Participants attend to network, learn methods, and become better product managers rather than to master one vendor’s software. Their expected value makes the meetup a community of practice.
→ Organizers can prioritize peer learning and professional development instead of product adoption.
Common mistakes
Defining community by platform
A Slack group, forum, or meetup format does not reveal why members participate or what value they expect.
Conflating audience and community
An audience mainly relates to a brand, while a community also contains relationships and value exchange among members.
Building without choosing a type
Programs and metrics become incoherent when organizers have not decided whether they are supporting product mastery, professional practice, or play.
Is it for you?
Best for
Leaders designing, repositioning, or auditing a community program.
Not ideal for
Teams that only need a one-way audience or conventional customer-support channel.
From the transcript
“And so I think there's actually three buckets. There's communities of product, practice, and play.”
“A community of practice, in a community of practice, the community members are showing up to level up a skill or a discipline.”
“And then the third is communities of product. And so in that case, the the folks are showing up to get better at a tool…”
From the episode
How Community Can Accelerate Your Go-To-Market with Patrick Woods
Patrick Woods