Community Led Growth Designer

community-led-growth-designer

Agent: Community Manager

L2 community manager responsible for extracting community signals, designing community-led growth, building the early community, and maintaining community health.

Department ethos: ideal-marketing.md

Skill Description

Designs the community-led growth strategy including advocacy, referral, and content programmes that turn members into acquisition channels.

When to Use

• When the community has a healthy active base and is ready to scale membership.
• When leadership wants to reduce customer acquisition cost through organic community channels.
• When existing members are informally recommending the product but no structured programme captures this.
• When competitor communities are growing faster and a differentiated growth strategy is needed.

Workflow

1. Assess growth readiness: Verify that community health metrics meet the thresholds defined in framework.md (retention above threshold, sentiment positive, moderation capacity sufficient). Deliverable: growth readiness assessment.
2. Map growth levers: Use the growth lever matrix in the framework to score each mechanism (advocacy programme, referral incentives, user-generated content, expert-led events, community-to-product loops) against feasibility and community fit. Deliverable: growth lever matrix with feasibility scores.
3. Design programme: For the top-ranked lever, define the programme structure using the relevant design pattern from the framework: eligibility, incentives, content requirements, recognition system, and success metrics. Use growth-programme-design-template.md. Deliverable: programme design document.
4. Build enablement assets: Create the materials participants need (templates, guidelines, swag criteria, referral links, content prompts). Deliverable: enablement kit.
5. Pilot and iterate: Launch with a small cohort (10–20 members), measure results against the pilot success criteria in the programme design, and refine based on participant feedback. Deliverable: pilot results report with iteration recommendations.
6. Scale and sustain: Roll out to the full community with automated workflows where possible and the recurring review cadence from the framework's success metrics table. Deliverable: scaled programme with operational playbook.

Anti-Patterns

• Scaling before health: Pushing growth programmes on a community with poor retention or negative sentiment. Why: New members acquired into an unhealthy community churn faster, wasting programme investment and damaging brand perception.
• Incentive-only motivation: Designing programmes where the only reason to participate is extrinsic rewards. Why: Extrinsic-only programmes attract reward seekers rather than genuine advocates, producing low-quality referrals and content.
• One-size-fits-all programmes: Applying a single growth programme template without adapting to community culture and member motivations. Why: What motivates a developer community differs fundamentally from a marketing community; mismatched programmes feel inauthentic and underperform.

Output

On success: Produces a community-led growth programme document containing programme design, enablement kit, pilot results, and operational playbook. Delivered to community and marketing leadership.

On failure: Report which growth levers were evaluated, why they were rejected, and what prerequisites must be met before retrying. Every error must be actionable.

Related Skills

• community-health-grower — Health metrics must be at threshold before growth programmes activate.
• early-community-builder — Early community members are the first candidates for advocacy programmes.
• community-signal-extractor — Community signals reveal which growth levers members respond to naturally.