Building a community function from scratch

The task wasn't creating social channels or planning launch campaigns. It was building a function that could grow with the studio.

One product teams trusted. One marketing relied on. One leadership treated as a partner in decisions rather than a service desk.

How do you build a community function before you've launched your first game?

How do you write a process that doesn't exist yet?

How do you make audience understanding part of product thinking instead of something added at the end?

Rather than starting with content, I started with ownership.

I wrote the operating model first: what community would own, what it deliberately would not, and how player feedback would reach product while decisions were still open. Then planning processes, launch frameworks, feedback routes, shared documentation.

The goal wasn't to make social better. It was to make collaboration easier.

A capability existed where there had been none, with the model written down rather than held in my head.

Community became part of launch planning instead of launch execution, and player feedback started influencing product decisions before they were made.

Processes designed for one team were picked up by others, so the work became repeatable rather than dependent on individuals.

That's usually how I measure success. Not by what I build. By who else chooses to use it.

Writing the model is only half the job.

Helping people trust it is the other half. I'd spend less time drafting and more time sitting in other teams' meetings, earlier.