Alfredo Morresi’s digital harbor
Good managers are made, not born. It makes no difference for a team of community builders, with added complexities such as remote working, high burnout risk, unclear career path, etc. I’ll share my stories covering topics like hiring, setting a vision, building and tracking metrics, managing a remote team, keeping work-life in harmony, scaling, etc – while working in the context of a community team.
(Community Rebellion Conference, June 2023)
Slides, with a lot of speaker’s notes
When a community program grows, it moves from a one-person band role, to a team of people, to a team of teams. And Community Operations is often one of the first teams formed. When to start one, and how to scale it? What are its key responsibilities? It’s just about data, dashboards and automations, or is there something more? In this session, I shared my best learnings in leading a dev community operations team in Google, the most embarrassing failures and “the road head”.
(CMX Summit, Sept 2022)
Here are the slides, with lot of info in the speaker’s notes too.
Manage a community is a complex activity, multitasking and multidisciplinary. A clear understand of what to do, and when to do it, is fundamental to have success, and avoid community burnout.
I presented one of my preferred tools to create a connection that starts with community goals, reaches strategy to realize it, and ends with day-to-day activity planning: the Community Strategic Plan.
(Italian Community Managers Lab #2, May 2021)
Good managers are made, not born. It makes no difference for a team of community builders, with added complexities such as remote working, high burnout risk, unclear career path. I’ll share my story covering topics about hiring, set a vision, metrics, remote management, work-life harmony, etc.
Here my story covering topics about hiring, set a vision, metrics, remote management, work-life harmony, etc.
(CMX Spark EMEA, April 2021 – Slides)
There are common challenges every team of community builders faces. Contribution to company’s goal, team members alignment, long term planning and execution with the next step already in mind, a diverse and rich community landscape to support, etc. Mine is no exception, and we tried to address, or at least mitigate, some of these challenges thanks to the Feverbee’s Community Strategic Plan.
I’m deeply rooted in the importance of the whys, the reasons motivating our actions. In the context of a brand community program, the whys are the goals the company wants to pursue, thanks to the community tool. The complexity every community professional faces is to link those goals with dat-to-day execution. The Community Strategic Plan creates a clear connection between these two extremes. Via interconnected hops, defining the overall community strategy, tactics, expected results, resources allocation and other important elements.
The first time we worked on the plan, we followed all of its canonical key elements. The second time, we deviated slightly from the manual, focusing on the following key elements:
In Google, we use OKRs. For the Community Strategic Plan to be truly adopted and followed, and not to be forgotten after the initial enthusiasm, we had to find a way to insert it into the “existing team flow”. Luckily, it’s wasn’t that difficult, as a mapping between the Community Strategic Plan and the OKR framework is pretty straightforward. From the OKR angle:
So, considering the key elements of the Community Strategic Plan aforementioned:
Bonding the Community Strategy Plan with team OKRs was the way to keep team members focused on the tactics. In general, I strongly encourage to adapt and connect the Community Strategic Plan to the existing team habits. For several teams, adopting the plan is already an important mindset shift, so it should not be weighed down by further changes to team routines.
Honestly, it was quite a complex exercise to work on the Community Strategy Plan in a remote team setup. Because of the many consequent steps, the many “diverge-converge-decide” phases, the non trivial amount of time, focus and effort required to formalize the entire plan.
I started making each team member aware of what is a Community Strategy Plan, and the potential advantages in adopting this new framework in the team. Thanks to previous retrospectives about the work we did together, I had enough material to support the proposal.
Then, with a sub group of experienced community builders, we set goals, objectives and emotions. We iterated twice on them, to be sure we developed quite extensively the company goals, without leaving anything behind. The experience of the sub group allowed to focus on the important elements, to interpret goals considering also “historical context”, and to identify emotions, thanks to their deep knowledge of community members.
Finally, we shared the pre-work done with the whole team, and leveraged everyone’s contribution for a tactics brainstorming. Fresh-air and alternative points of views, provided by newer team members, were really useful. We then prioritized tactics and picked up the top ones, completing the last element of the Community Strategic Plan.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, strategic thinking and purse team alignment while working with the full spectrum of communities is one of the core reasons we created our Community Strategy Plan. With the plan now in place, I asked every team member to constantly check if the ways they’re spending their time with communities resonate with one or more priority tactics. If yes, 👍. If not, or they may need to refocus their effort, or we may need to improve and adapt the plan, as no tool is the perfect tool, especially over time.
Speaking about time, the more you move closer to execution (from company goals down to tactics), the quicker is the “speed of adaptation“. It means goals are here to stay for the long period (ideally), while tactics may change quickly. When we prioritized tactics, we had to left behind some interesting ones, or others that needed for some pre-condition to be true, in order to become feasible. I’m quite sure, in the future, we’ll include some of those tactics into the official Community Strategic Plan.
Measurement is another area of untapped opportunities: in fact, for some of the priority tactics, we hadn’t a precise idea on how to measure the impact, or even the progress. We had a feeling it should be possible, and that was enough to commit to do it later. It’s not a “postpone-to-forget” attempt, but it could become without the right discipline. So I foresee lot of data-oriented learnings we’ll acquire executing those tactics.
(Credits to Unsplash for the post image)
After a 3 years long tradition of in-person team summits, to retrospect, brainstorm and plan the work of the team, while having fun together, we had to switch to an virtual team summit format. Here the key learnings worthwhile sharing.
Core insight: the experience of a team, may not perfectly apply to another one.
Every team is different. In order to have a successful virtual team summit, it’s important to consider some team characteristics. Like number of people, familiarity of the team members, team culture, etc.
For example, if a team culture doesn’t support a collaborative environment and open discussions within team members, chances are very low a brainstorming activity can be successful. In person, even less online. The same goes for a team with several new members. The less people are familiar with each other, the less they’ll speak in team-wide discussion tables. In this case, smaller group discussions, 1:1, and a final moment of sharing, may work better.
As a reference, my summit targeted a team of 12 people, with a minority of new team members; mostly on the same time zone (within the +/- 2 hours range); already familiar with feedback oriented and collaborative activities (like retrospectives, brainstorming, etc.), but in an in-person setup only.
And this is the agenda we used:
Why this format? Let’s explore the main reasons:
Core insight: several mornings are better than one of two full days.
It could be tempting to run an entire day of virtual team summit, or even more days. From my experience, it works well with in-person summits, but it’s not really the best for a virtual summit. When you work from home, life happens, and you need to leave space for it. Cook the meal, take care of family members, bring out pets, etc.
In addition, online collaboration drains more energy than in-person collaboration, so people need more time to recharge.
My suggestion is to spread the team virtual summit across different mornings, or to the closest possible scenario allowed by time zones. Morning is when, generally, the energy level is higher, and attendees can start the summit with a fresh mind, so more focused.
Alternatively, use the mornings for collaborative activities, and reserve the afternoons for reflective and individual activities. So people have more flexibility to arrange their time and work in the way they prefer.
Core insights: start with a 90 mins block, then 30 mins break, and a final 60 mins block.
After observations, my favorite format is to have two main “working blocks”: 90 mins, followed by another 60 mins, with a break of 30 mins in between.
It’s hard to remain plugged and productive for 90 mins, twice. Plus, a 3.5 hours (90+30+90) block is hard to accommodate in a “morning”, when the attendees cover slightly different time zones.
Blocks of 30 or 45 minutes are generally not optimal for virtual summits, for what was said previously (context switch, ease of getting lost, etc), unless there is a very specific and short activity to run.
Of course, the time slots allocation really depends on the kind of activities to run:
Core insights: 30 mins to detach completely, potentially alone.
Breaks should be 30 mins. It’s enough to move away from the personal working area, have a bio break, detach a little bit. And also prepare something to eat and/or drink, as we don’t have the luxury of catering service.
Create a different Meet/Zoom/Teams appointment, called “[Optional] Social break” for people that wanted to chat and gossip during the break. And make it very clear that it’s optional to attend, that setting separated chat groups is OK too, or even spending the whole time “away from the desk, and alone”. This is a 100% attendees truly reserved time: they should have freedom in choosing what to do with it.
Core insights: have fun, together. Contextualized to the attendees group.
Having a dedicated moment for fun is an important part of every summit. It bonds people together, allows for serendipity, helps to recharge batteries, etc. It’s even more necessary now, where we haven’t seen each other in person since a long time.
In addition to some short ice-breakers (5-10 mins max) at the beginning of the other slots, I dedicated an entire hour for a specific fun activity. At the end of the second morning, as a way to celebrate together the achievements of the summit, and to relax the pressure. There are millions of fun activities to run, and it’s important to select something appropriate for the audience.
In a just formed team, having the fun activity at the beginning of the summit could be a better choice. It could help to build the initial “social infrastructure” that will favor collaboration and interactions for the rest of the event. For a longer virtual team summit (3-4 mornings) it could be run in between of the days, to take a break.
Core insight: well defined deliverables, in advance.
I’m a supporter of setting and communicating in advance what should be the desired outcome of a team summit. A tangible set of deliverables, everyone can measure the progress toward. Even more for a virtual team summit.
While in person it’s easier to be agile, and pivot and replan part of the activities in a short time, this is generally more difficult for virtual summits. In person, it’s possible to quickly identify where the team consensus is going, if some attendees got lost, the overall group emotional status, thanks to many non-verbal communication elements. Also “implicit peer pressure” exercises a strong influence (if I perceive that several attendees think this is an important topic to discuss, probably it should be important also for me). In a team virtual summit, because of the lack of many non verbal elements, the same is not always true.
Creating and sharing the agenda in advance, avoids this problem. Through iterations, 1:1s and feedback, it is generally possible to reach a wider team consensus about the goals to achieve, and how, before the summit.
A well known agenda also fosters engagement. It helps attendees to approach the different summit segments with the right expectation, a more appropriate mindset and, generally, come more prepared.
Core insight: less is more, because of focus and energy.
It’s easy to stuff a team summit with many desired goals, we all know. The real difficult, and valuable task, is to trim them down to very few deliverables, and run specific activities to reach them.
Context switch puts an important burden while working from home. At the end, we’re physically alone. So, it’s easier to lose track of where “the rest of the team is”. Or get distracted by “the rest of life” as soon as there is the feeling of not being able to keep up with the speed of the team.
In addition, for a moderator it’s really hard to check if attendees are “present and aware”, or if something else is competing for their attention. Again, a video/audio only interface cuts out a lot of non-verbal communication elements.
Few deliverables help to keep the attendees focused, provide a sense of fulfillment once they’re reached, feeding engagement (we’re all happy to be an active part of something that works).
Core insights: carefully match an activity format with the most appropriate tool to run it.
A Google Doc or a Google Sheet can be the jack-of-all-trades for plenty of collaborative activity formats. But they may not always be the best tools at your disposal. Maslow said: “[…] it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” UX matters, and I personally consider it valuable to spend (a reasonable amount of) time to find, or even create, the right tool for the right activity format. Attendees will benefit from this attention. The more they are, the bigger the benefits.
For example, here my screen setup while running a brainstorming activity:
From left to right: the “virtual whiteboard where we collected our ideas” (a Google Drawing doc, resembling a whiteboard with sticky notes and voting dots); the Meet window, so I always remained in visual contact with the summit attendees; a countdown I used to time bound activities: the doc where the note taker took notes about the discussion. And yes, I really love my ultrawide monitor :)
Core insights: we’re all learners, and we need quality feedback.
Surveying attendees about the “Overall summit satisfaction, on a scale from 1 to 5” is the bare minimum. Asking them why, what was the best part of the summit, the worst, and what they missed (a start/stop/keep doing/best approach), provides good insights. To really learn and improve, ask detailed feedback for each activity.
Include the feedback activity in the summit agenda. Reserve 5 mins, before closing the summit, for the survey. It will be an awkward moment of silence, but the completion rate will skyrocket (up to 90%, even more). Share the feedback with everyone. Attendees will appreciate the point of view from others, and they can always learn something. If it’s not possible, share the core insights obtained from the feedback. And use them to adjust the next virtual team summit activity.