Alumni Community

I wasn't in a technical role at Udacity. I was the Alumni Community Manager, a job that existed because I talked them into inventing it. A team of one inside a fast-growing org full of some of the most talented engineers on the planet, working on some of the most interesting problems of the era.

The job came about backwards. In 2014 I was a mining engineer teaching myself to code through one of Udacity's first Nanodegree cohorts, already sure I was done with mining. Graduating was a strange anticlimax. The program had real community right up to the finish line, then the rug came out. No peers, no help navigating what came next, nowhere to land. I wrote to Udacity and asked if they had any plans for an alumni community. They answered with "we'd love to hear what you have in mind," and then with "do you want to do this for us?" I was hired, full-time, to execute my own idea.

I think without knowing it Udacity had created a superpower in their community offering. The education was great, but the community of passionate students was a force multiplier, and I now had to figure out how to shape it. I later learned that community at most companies is a function of marketing. It's simply holding a group of people together so they can be marketed to in the future (e.g. a Slack group as an email list). I came at this a bit differently. Done right, community improves the student experience and gives you more surface not to extract value from students but to add value back to them.

I can't say I was the best community manager ever, not surprising given it was my first time doing it, but I like to think I got a few things really right. Kick-starting a community is hard. People show up for all kinds of reasons. So the first thing to figure out is what people have in common that they'd like to interact about, then segment the community so conversations about those things can happen in appropriate places. A great way to seed that is to provide what I like to call moments of gravity. Hold events, hackathons, seminars. They give everyone a time to be in the same space with something in common to talk about. Another thing I stumbled onto, funny for an asynchronous online education institution, was that people wanted to meet in person, so we started helping alumni host their own in-person events to meet the people around them. A lot of these ideas didn't come straight out of my head. Pretty early on I created an alumni advisory board, a diverse cohort of alumni who provided feedback and ideas for how we could make the community better. That's what's so great about community. I'd love to take credit for a lot of its successes, like the students who started a sort of incubator program for other alumni, but the reality is I just helped make the connections and create the space to let people do what they were passionate about.

By the time I left, the community had grown from dozens of members to over 40,000, the company had achieved unicorn status, and I like to think the alumni community was part of that success. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of students have come through Udacity since, and some form of what I built is still there. The thesis I ran it on is one most companies still get wrong. A community is part of the product, a differentiator, not a reservoir to be extracted from. Udacity had stumbled into getting that right, and I built the foundation on purpose where the company had built it by accident.