Community best practices with HubSpot and Common Room: Manage your user journey

We hosted a webinar with HubSpot on February 9, 2023. If you missed it, don’t worry! Read on for the highlights or watch the recording above.

In this webinar, Head of Education at Common Room Kyle Pitochelli sits down with Chris Riley, Senior Manager of Developer Relations at HubSpot, and SJ Morris, Senior Manager of Developer Community at HubSpot, to talk about community best practices and how HubSpot uses Common Room to communicate team impact, manage community members, and identify growth areas in their community strategy.

Conversation with HubSpot

After some brief intros, Kyle, Chris, and SJ open the conversation by talking about how they think about DevRel and how they manage their developer community at HubSpot. Then, they discuss how HubSpot uses Common Room to measure the impact of their community and map their community user journey.

“Common Room has unlocked the conversation of what’s possible to measure, which makes it a lot easier to decide what we can measure and what’s going to be most important for us as the HubSpot developer community folks.”
— SJ Morris, Senior Manager of Developer Community at HubSpot

Read below for a snippet of Kyle, Chris, and SJ’s conversation.

While discussing the value of impact points and how HubSpot uses them to segment members based on their level of engagement, SJ and Chris mention the importance of slowly moving folks up in levels of engagement, rather than trying to make every member look like their top 0.1% of hyper-engaged champions in their community.

Kyle: “Why do you feel it’s so important that you are vigilant about not necessarily driving everyone into that upper domain of community?”

Chris: “If you optimize for your outliers, you’re probably optimizing for the wrong thing. So it can get really dangerous to say, 'We want everyone to be xyz community member.' We might optimize for the incorrect thing and not support the masses, which is shooting ourselves in the foot, besides just maybe being an unrealistic expectation to give to the organization. Also, they’re not just outliers in our community; this type of personality is an outlier in every community. So it’s not reasonable to say that our typical developer is going to be there. Everyone has probably worked in an organization where you find the biggest number and you report on that number, but if it doesn’t add value to the organization or help the company grow better, then you shouldn’t be doing it.”

SJ: “Our product team relies on our community pretty heavily for feedback. To add to Chris’ point, if we’re constantly getting feedback from the same 0.1%, that’s maybe directionally wrong and it’s not reflecting our customer needs. And then to extend on that, it’s so important to us to have a broad and diverse community from every aspect—from demographic to skill level. That’s just gonna make our product better for our customers at the end of the day. So if we’re able to identify folks who are at different levels of activation, we have higher odds of attracting and activating different kinds of folks.

Product demo

After the conversation, Kyle walks us through our latest release, automated segments. Segments allow you to collaboratively create and track cohorts of members based on shared attributes, and now, you can set custom filters for automated member management. When members match your filter criteria, they will automatically be added, removed, or updated to a specific status. Here are two ways you can get started with segments today:

• 🌱 Track community user journeys: Segment users by their impact points and automatically progress them as they become more active in your community.
• 🏆 Find product champion candidates: Auto-add members to your segment that have a certain number of posts, responses, or content created and update their status based on their eligibility for your champions program.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can use segments and impact points to map your customer user journey, send us a message—we’d love to chat! You can also join us on Slack to connect with over 1,500 community and DevRel leaders, or get started with Common Room today for free.