The hidden talents of community managers

I recently wrote this on LinkedIn and it really seemed to resonate with other community practitioners.

If you're not familiar with (online) community management, you may not realize the breadth of the skills we possess.

• We're marketers - we work to market our community externally to gain new members and promote growth; at the same time, we must promote internally to get buy-in, budgets, and grow good will.

• We're product owners - many of us treat our community as a product, which means we manage releases, including grooming backlogs, assessing our burndown rate, prioritizing new features vs. bug fixes, and getting input on all of that.

• We're business owners - we use data to connect what we're doing to business needs. We own the outcomes, and many times we either own or co-own the roadmap. And we manage the program budget.

• We're technical owners - sometimes we even own the technology from within the company (depending on the company and how they manage things), which means we negotiate the vendor/partner agreements for the platform and any technical resources needed for maintenance.

• We're change managers - both internally and externally we're managing change for users, stakeholders, and subject matter experts. Whether it's an upgrade, a new feature release, or a platform migration, we use our communication skills to keep people informed and gather input throughout projects.