Context First: What It Takes for Community to Influence the Business

# Community

# Format: Event Recaps

An evening reflection on how community work becomes more useful to the business when it creates context, builds relationships, and connects across teams.

May 4, 2026

Joshua Zerkel

A few weeks before this event, we kept coming back to a question that felt simple on the surface and much more complicated once you sat with it: what does it actually take for community to influence the business?

That question was the center of the evening at Gradual HQ. We had community leaders, GTM leaders, customer experience folks, operators, partners, customers, and friends in the room. The mix mattered because community work rarely lives cleanly inside one function. It touches product, marketing, customer success, support, sales, education, advocacy, and sometimes several of those at once.

That’s part of what makes the work powerful. It’s also part of what makes it hard to explain.

During the fireside, Steph Hess and I talked through the longer arc of how I’ve thought about community, from my early days building programs at Evernote and Asana to the ideas that eventually became my new book, The Community Code. A lot of the conversation came back to a practical tension I hear from community leaders all the time: the work is visible, people are engaged, and the programs are meaningful, yet influence across the business still takes deliberate effort.

How I found my way into community

Steph started by asking what originally drew me to this work, and my answer was more personal than professional.

I’m naturally introverted, even though I’ve chosen a career that requires a lot of extroverted work. For much of my life, I’ve been trying to find my people. I found that through professional associations, civic groups, and other communities I joined long before I worked in tech.

One of my first real experiences with community came from my time as a professional organizer. I thought I was the only person doing that kind of work until someone introduced me to the National Association of Professional Organizers, which is still one of the more difficult names to say out loud. I went to a meeting and found people who were willing to share what they knew, help each other grow, and make the profession feel less lonely.

That experience stuck with me. Once you see what happens when people come together around something they care about, you start to understand the value of shared context. People compare notes. They tell stories. They help each other avoid mistakes. They make the work feel more possible.

And that’s been a throughline in almost everything I’ve done since.

Where community-led growth helped the field

We spent time talking about community-led growth because it gave a lot of us useful language at a time when the field needed it.

When I was at Evernote and later Asana, community was still fairly early as a formal business function. People understood the idea of bringing customers together, but there was much less shared language around how that work connected to company goals. Community-led growth helped put community on more equal footing with other functions that already had a clear business vocabulary.

Businesses understand growth. That framing helped many community teams explain that their work was connected to something the company already cared about.

The challenge is that community works differently from other growth functions. It depends on relationships, trust, and repeated interaction over time. You can’t rush that in the same way you can push a campaign live or accelerate a sales motion. I said during the conversation that you usually can’t meet another human being and immediately ask them if they’d like to get married. Business sometimes wants growth to work that way. Community doesn’t.

That doesn’t make community less valuable. It means we have to be more precise about what kind of value it creates and how that value moves through the business.

Why my thinking shifted while writing the book

Writing The Community Code forced me to sit with some of my own assumptions.

When I started the book, I thought community-led growth would be the core idea. The more I wrote, the more I struggled with that framing. I don’t think most community teams are trying to lead growth in the way a growth team, sales team, or marketing team might. That sounds exhausting, and in many cases it sets the wrong expectation.

What most community teams want is for the work to matter. They want the business to see what they’re learning, understand why it matters, and use it to make better decisions.

That’s where my thinking moved toward community as something more integrated into the business. Community can influence product insight, adoption, retention, expansion, customer learning, and advocacy. It can touch the entire customer journey, while most teams are responsible for one part of it.

That broader view feels closer to how the work actually behaves in practice. Community is uniquely positioned to build bridges because it’s connected to real customers in real conversations across many moments in their journey.

The translation work that makes community useful

One idea I kept coming back to during the fireside is that a lot of community work is translation.

People in product, marketing, sales, support, and customer success all have different goals. They use different language. They care about different metrics. Community teams are often sitting in the middle, hearing what customers are actually saying and trying to make that useful to each stakeholder.

That translation can sound simple, but it’s where a lot of influence starts.

A product team may see usage data and want to understand why a feature is or isn’t landing. Community can bring forward the real words customers use when they describe what’s happening in their work. A marketing team may be trying to sharpen messaging. Community can show how customers describe the problem without the company’s preferred language layered on top. A customer success team may be trying to understand adoption risk. Community can surface the patterns people share when they’re stuck, confused, or finding unexpected value.

I’ve always found it useful to think about this as helping the business see the actual messy human behind the persona. Personas are tidy. Communities are full of real people who fit some of the bullets, ignore others, and surprise you in ways the persona never could.

That’s the beauty of the work. You learn things about your customers that other functions often don’t.

Why experience has to connect to outcomes

We also talked about one of the easiest places for community teams to get stuck: focusing only on the experience.

Great events matter. Strong engagement matters. Positive feedback matters. People should enjoy being part of the community, because they’re choosing to spend their time there. If the experience isn’t valuable, they can go do something else.

The issue comes when the visible experience becomes the whole story the business sees.

If a stakeholder looks at an event and only sees that people had a good time, the business value will be hard to understand. A great gathering is part of the member experience. The community team still has to connect that experience to what happened afterward. Did people adopt a feature? Did they deepen their relationship with the company? Did the team learn something that changed a decision? Did a customer story emerge? Did someone get unstuck?

I said during the conversation that “fun” is a good experience outcome, but it’s difficult to attach a business metric to fun by itself. The work is helping the business understand why that experience happened and what it made possible.

That’s where community leaders need to think like business people as much as people people. The best community professionals care deeply about members. They also understand that the community exists inside a business and has to serve a business purpose.

How AI changes the conversation

AI came up during the Q&A, which makes sense. It’s coming up in nearly every community conversation right now.

My answer is still fairly simple. AI can do many things community teams don’t want to spend time doing. It can help with tedious work, summarization, search, content workflows, and other operational tasks. That can be useful if it gives community builders more time to focus on the work only humans can do.

The relationship layer is still the differentiator.

People don’t usually join a community because they want to talk to a bot. They join because they want trusted spaces, real conversations, useful perspective, and connection with other people who understand what they’re working through. There are places where AI can help someone find an answer faster. There are also places where a human conversation is the entire point.

I don’t think we’ve figured out the full answer here yet. Anyone who says they have probably has more certainty than the situation deserves. The way I’m thinking about it right now is that AI should help community teams spend more time building quality relationships with and for members.

That’s where community still has a very real advantage.

What I would ask every community leader to clarify

One of the questions from the room was about pipeline, and it led to something I say often.

If you’re in a business, you’re usually doing one of two things. You’re helping the company make money, or you’re helping the company save money. Community can do both, although probably not all things equally at the same time.

That’s an important place to start. What is community here to do? Which business goal does it ladder up to? How will the team know if it’s working?

That doesn’t mean every community program needs to be reduced to revenue. It does mean the team should be able to explain its role clearly. If you can’t answer what the work is for and why it matters, that’s a signal to go back to the drawing board.

This is where a lot of teams can make the work more manageable. Start with the goal. Understand what the members or customers actually need. Then design the program where those two things overlap.

It sounds simple because the principle is simple. The execution takes ongoing translation, alignment, and iteration.

What makes community work more likely to succeed

Toward the end, someone asked about the ingredients that make community more likely to reach scale and drive outcomes. I don’t think there’s one universal model, but there are a few conditions that help a lot.

Product-market fit helps because there are already people who care about what the company does. Leadership belief matters because community takes time, and it helps when someone senior has seen this work before or is willing to understand it. Cross-functional buy-in matters because community cannot sit off to the side and still influence the business in a meaningful way.

The community builder also needs a clear vision. If the person leading the work can’t explain what they’re building, why it matters, and what it could become over time, it becomes much harder for everyone else to believe in it.

So that’s the work I’d encourage more teams to do early. Explain the system. Explain the connections. Explain what this is building toward.

People may understand a meetup. They may understand a forum. They may understand an ambassador program. What they often need help understanding is how those pieces add up to something the business should care about.

What stays with me

The part I keep coming back to from the evening is how much of community work is about context.

Community creates spaces where people talk about what they’re doing, what they’re trying to figure out, what’s working, and where they’re stuck. Those conversations create a kind of understanding that’s hard to get from analytics alone.

Context can help the business make better decisions if it gets translated and connected to the right teams.

That’s the opportunity I see for community right now. The work can help organizations understand their customers in a more continuous and human way. It can connect product, GTM, support, success, and leadership around what people are actually experiencing. It can build relationships that make the business smarter over time.

There’s still a lot to figure out, and I don’t think the work becomes easier overnight. The encouraging part is that more people are asking better questions. That’s usually where progress starts.

Key takeaways

Community is most useful to the business when it creates context that helps teams make better decisions across product, GTM, customer success, support, and leadership.

Community-led growth gave the field useful language, and many teams now need a more precise way to describe influence, translation, and integration across the business.

Engagement and experience matter because they create the conditions for trust, participation, and learning. Community teams still need to connect those experiences to outcomes the business understands.

AI can help community teams reduce operational drag, while the relationship layer remains the part of community that is hardest to replicate.

Community leaders can make the work clearer by starting with the business goal, understanding what members need, and designing programs where those two needs overlap.

FAQ

What does it mean for community to influence the business?

Community influences the business when customer relationships, conversations, and insights help shape decisions across product, go-to-market, customer success, support, and leadership.

Why is community impact difficult to explain?

Community impact can be difficult to explain because the work is relational and cross-functional. It often creates value across several teams instead of producing one simple output for one function.

How can community teams connect engagement to business outcomes?

Community teams can connect engagement to outcomes by defining the business goal first, tracking what happens after key programs, and translating customer context into language each stakeholder team can use.

How does AI affect community work?

AI can help with operational tasks such as summarization, search, and workflow support. Community still depends on trust, relationships, and human connection, which remain central to why people participate.

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