Using Engagement Signals to Shape Strategic Focus

# Theme: GTM Strategy & Trends

# Format: Case Studies

# Challenge: Cross-Functional Alignment

How real-world community insights influence GTM decisions before programs scale.

February 3, 2026

Joshua Zerkel

Community signals tend to show up long before GTM teams are ready to name them as strategy inputs. They surface in forum questions, event Q&A, peer conversations, and recurring themes that don’t neatly map to dashboards. For teams paying attention, those signals often influence planning decisions quietly, well before programs reach scale.

Across different companies and stages, a similar pattern appears. Community isn’t treated as a reporting channel. It’s treated as a place where context accumulates. Over time, that context shapes how teams prioritize, message, and sequence their work.

The examples below reflect how this shows up in practice.

Learning where customers get stuck

At companies like Atlassian and Notion, community forums have long functioned as places where customers articulate friction in their own words. Product and GTM teams monitor recurring questions and themes to understand where users struggle, especially during onboarding and early adoption.

What matters here isn’t the volume of posts. It’s the consistency of certain topics appearing at specific moments in the customer journey. Those patterns inform documentation priorities, onboarding content, and messaging emphasis.

Community becomes a diagnostic layer, not a support backlog.

Noticing intent before pipeline appears

Developer-focused companies such as Twilio and Stripe have historically used community and developer discussions to understand what builders are experimenting with before formal sales engagement. Questions about architecture, integration approaches, or edge cases often signal emerging use cases.

These signals don’t replace traditional demand indicators. They add context. GTM teams can see where interest is forming and which segments are exploring new capabilities.

Planning informed by this kind of signal tends to focus less on broad campaigns and more on targeted enablement.

Using peer language to refine positioning

At Figma, community conversations and events have played a role in how teams understand the language customers use to describe value. Observing how practitioners explain workflows to each other surfaces phrasing that resonates more than polished marketing copy.

That language influences positioning, content strategy, and even sales enablement. Instead of guessing how customers talk about the product, teams can hear it directly.

The impact shows up gradually, through clearer messaging and stronger alignment across teams.

When attentiveness shapes better planning

Across these examples, the common thread isn’t scale or sophistication. It’s attentiveness. Community signals shape GTM planning when teams treat community as a place to listen, not just to activate.

The value comes from patterns over time, shared consistently with the teams making decisions. Community doesn’t need to be framed as a success story to be successful. It needs to be legible and trusted.

Key takeaways

Community signals often appear before formal GTM indicators.

Recurring themes matter more than isolated moments.

Planning improves when insight is shared consistently, not perfectly.

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