I get called in at the point where the org chart runs out.

I’m Sarah Kao. I build communities, audience relationships and the systems that help organisations understand the people they serve.

For more than 15 years, I’ve worked across games and entertainment — from helping players create and share their own experiences in LittleBigPlanet to building community capabilities from scratch for emerging studios.

My work sits between community, product, communications and technology. The most valuable communities aren’t simply audiences. They’re active participants in the products and experiences they love.

Building communities where people don’t just participate — they help shape what comes next.

What I do

I build the relationship between products and the people who love them.

  • Sometimes that means building a community before a product launches.
  • Sometimes it means helping an established audience become more active, creative and connected.
  • And sometimes it means designing the tools, processes and feedback systems that allow a business to learn from its community.
  1. 01

    Building communities from zero

    Establishing community strategy, engagement programmes, operating models and the foundations needed for sustainable growth.

  2. 02

    Making players part of the experience

    Developing creator programmes, user-generated content ecosystems and community initiatives that celebrate participation and creativity.

  3. 03

    Connecting communities to product decisions

    Creating meaningful feedback routes between players, developers, marketing teams and leadership.

  4. 04

    Building systems that scale

    Designing moderation approaches, operational workflows, knowledge systems and technology-enabled processes that make community work sustainable.

Selected work

Four projects, written plainly, without borrowed credit.

All work
How I think

Companies rarely fail because they didn’t communicate enough.

They fail because they misread their customers, misread each other, or never turn insight into a decision.

Customers understand something different to leadership.

Leadership understands something different to engineering.

Engineering understands something different to marketing.

Most companies try to fix this by communicating more.

I think they should start by understanding better.

My whole career has been spent between teams that don’t naturally speak the same language. Sometimes that’s players and developers. Sometimes executives and technical teams. Sometimes marketing, community and product. Closing those three gaps—what customers mean, what colleagues mean, and what to do about it—is the job.

Which is why my work has never really been social media. Community, done properly, is the richest source of intelligence a business has: it tells you where your assumptions are wrong while there is still time to act. My job is to make that intelligence reach the people making decisions, in language they already use.

In practice I build rather than broadcast. A function that didn’t exist before. An operating model that says who owns what. A feedback route that reaches product while the decision is still open. New tools help—they take friction out of the work and speed up how fast a team can learn. They don’t supply the judgement. That part is still human, and it is the part that decides whether any of it was worth doing.

What actually changes

  • Leadership stops guessing about its audience, because someone brings evidence into the room on the day the decision is made.
  • Product, marketing and community describe the audience the same way, so they can disagree about the right things quickly.
  • The way of working is written down, so it survives reorganisations, handovers and my leaving.
  • Other teams borrow it. That’s the measure I trust most—not what I built, but who chose to use it next.

The tools change. The work doesn’t.

Fifteen years, mostly in games

  • Fortis Games
  • King
  • SEGA
  • Bethesda
  • PlayStation
One example, in full

Games studio · pre-launch · function built from zero

I was hired to build a community team. The first three months, I mostly argued about definitions.

There was no team, no tooling and no shared idea of what good looked like. Marketing wanted reach. Product wanted feedback. Leadership wanted reassurance. Each of those is a different function, and hiring against all three would have produced a team that pleased nobody.

So I wrote the operating model before the job descriptions: what community would own, what it would deliberately not own, and how player feedback would reach the people making product decisions while those decisions were still open.

What changed: a capability existed where there had been none, and product and marketing ended up with the same vocabulary for the audience. They could disagree about the right things, quickly, without me in the room. That was the point.

Read the full account
Currently thinking about

Community as intelligence, not a channel

Most companies already have the signal. Very few have anywhere for it to land.

Why companies forget what they already learned

Institutional memory is a design problem, not a documentation problem.

What audiences know before the data does

It shows up in tone months before it shows up in numbers. Newer tools help me read it faster. They don’t decide what it means.

What I’m doing now