A problem is not solved until it's solved for others.
When you're in community management, chances are (high) you'll face obstacles along your way.
Staying calm and facing the problem head on is what we as, community managers, usually do day-in and day-out.
Problem buckets
While there's no perfect time for when a problem might strike or a perfect solution for every problem, I can speak to my experience - generally - these are major buckets a community problem arises:
Problems related to member dissatisfaction:
This could be a member flagging a spam.
A member finding an obsolete solution in the community, that no longer serves the problem at hand for the member.
A member might find dead links in the community: This is typical when a community is migrated and community managers failing to update links or instruction steps in existing content.
Problems related to industry:
When the problem is something related to the industry, one of the ways to keep yourself up to date is through social listening. Make sure to set up Google alerts or Tweet decks to your industry keywords.
When something goes wrong, you'll get timely notifications.
A personal example: If you're in tech, you might have come across security breaches and notices in your industry. The most recent one being the Log4shell breach that shook the tech world in the last few weeks of 2021, leaving a lot of Security and tech teams deprive of sleep for several nights.
These industry news and threats are unavoidable and that is when the whole company has to come together to leverage the power of community and work towards solving this in best way possible.
In BMC Software, where I currently work, I got the opportunity of working with Security team to keep the security notice up to date.
When community provides a self service opportunity for the internal teams, the reliance on other teams (marketing, etc), is less. This helps in delivering quality information, reducing the turn around time for the information to get out to the customers.
This is exactly what we did when the breach happened during a weekend.
Problems related to platform tech:
Member profile related issues - not able to like a blog, not able to comment, not able to (insert something simple that should work but is not.)
Permission related issues - not able to access a link, not able to join a secret group etc.
Problem solving framework:
Here's a way you could step back and gather your thoughts, possibly find calm while dealing with these:
The framework - IDEA&D
A tweak given to the IDEA concept of problem solving.
I - Identify
D - Develop
E - Execute
A - Assess
&
D - Document
🕵🏼♀️ Identify -
Turn your detective mode on, Sherlock! This step is to know what's causing this issue and get to root of it.
Ask these questions:
What's the root cause of this issue?
Is this something happening for a lot of members?
Is this reproducible?
Try the 5 why's method - the iterative interrogation method that will keep on asking the WHYs till you reached the root cause of this problem.
📝 Develop -
Now that you know the root cause of this problem, it's time to put on your engineering hat to develop your solution plans.
Create the solution plans that's the most feasible for you and your team.
Solution plans could be - a workaround or a fix.
Discuss at lengths with your team about the time and resources that would be needed to apply this workaround or the fix.
Since you're a community manager, communication is also a necessary part of this process.
Communication plan
Create a communication plan and set up a cadence that would help you and your team, and your stakeholders know what's happening, what are you doing to help solve the problem and what's the status of it.
Internal communication plan - for internal champions or internal stakeholders
External communication plan - be mindful of the things you should say and not say out in the public. Decide if the communication has to go in your newsletter or release notes or known errors or issues or a post notifying everyone.
💡 Tip: Keeping a list of community members who notified this error to you would be a useful artifact that you could go back to - to send a thank you note or a surprise gift to them. :)
🛠 Execute -
Weather it's you who's executing or the team who's responsible for the execution of your plan, be on top of the execution process.
If the execution is done by the tech team - know the solution applied to the best of your capacity, even if you're not a tech person. You don't need to know the code, you need to know what it does, and what does it mean if it's not applied to the solution.
👍🏼👎🏼Assess:
Even though the problem is solved, our work doesn't stop there.
In this step, we determine the results of the solutions. While assessing if we find a detail or something amiss, then we must go back to the develop stage and try to look at the problem in a different perspective.
Here are certain ways you could do an assessment:
Periodic reviews: Keep a checkpoint for periodic review of the problem you worked on.
Surveys and heat maps: Survey or ask your members if the solution applied to the problem is optimal for them or not? does the problem re-occurs? Set up heat maps to check if the solution is helping or not.
KPI deflection: If something you worked on has an effect on your KPI, then retropect on the same and see for any deflection or gaps in the same.
📝 Document:
Going back to what I started this blog with -
A problem is not solved until it's solved for others.
Documentation helps lessen the burden on you and everyone else in team if the problem occurs again in the community.
Document each step of the process, in a way that would help anyone in the team understand how was the solution arrived at.
Types of documentation:
How to blog post or article
Guidelines
Release notes
Known errors
Troubleshooting article
Workflow or processes document
Confluence provides some useful templates to start your documentation process. Have at it. :)
And there you go.
This has helped my teams and myself over the course of my career- a cushion to fall back on.
Does this help? What else would you add here?
Comment below.
Citations: The IDEA problem solving YouTube video.
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