Design to Thrive

Foreword

Communities don't happen by accident, although you'd never know it from the haphazard way most companies go about trying to create them.

I've worked for software development tool vendors for more than two decades, and everywhere I've gone, the company has tried to create a community among our customers. For some companies the motivation was a straightforward desire to reduce support costs by getting customers to answer each others’ questions. Others saw it as a low-cost channel to educate and enable users, reasoning that a successful customer was more likely to remain a customer. A select few were sophisticated enough to realize that an active community would help bind customers to their products: if they contemplated switching vendors ...