Introducing Common Room, the intelligent community growth platform

Today, we're announcing general availability of Common Room, the intelligent community growth platform that helps you deepen relationships, build better products, and drive business impact. You can get started for free 🎉

I’ve built a lot of products that have scaled to millions because they had a community that loved them. Along the way, I’ve helped build some of the world’s largest developer communities—from taking a non-existent programming language called C# to number 6 on the IEEE list to creating open-source projects like Jetpack Compose for millions of Android developers across 3 billion devices.

These aren’t small communities, but they all started out that way. I’ve spent thousands of hours trying to understand what my community is doing, manually reviewing nominations to create an inaugural champion program, combing through tweets to understand the impact of a product in market, responding to support questions in forums (held to a 48-hour SLA!), creating samples to help developers build apps, and ultimately, trying to connect people to each other to create a self-sustaining community that people find value in coming back to.

Building a community is hard. Proving the impact of that community is even harder. The shift to community-led adoption and growth has already happened, and tools just haven’t caught up. We see companies that are community-first, with users that love their product, set a new standard for how to build and innovate. Communities of product users and advocates are becoming increasingly critical to an organization’s success, and they’re operating on their own terms, interacting across new open and owned digital channels like GitHub, Slack, Discord, Discourse, Twitter, Stack Overflow, and more. This omnichannel, always-on engagement model can make it difficult for organizations to get a holistic view of what matters most to their community and meet their needs.

Common Room solves these challenges by bringing together community engagement, product usage, and customer data into a single place and uses intelligence to surface actionable insights to help companies discover what’s most important, nurture key personas, measure program impact, and collaborate across the organization. In short, we're a community growth platform, and we take it one step further by layering intelligence on top of it.

An intelligent community growth platform

Common Room empowers you to focus on what's most important and to better serve your members by providing greater visibility into their wants and needs. A community growth platform:

1. Provides a unified view of each member, across every channel: Unifies information, such as members and activity, from various community sources, plus product and customer data.
2. Surfaces insights and trends: Offers a way to understand essential community health indicators—what people are saying, how they're feeling, and how they're engaging.
3. Facilitates action in response to community activity: Enables taking action, like automating a welcome message, or setting an alert for all negative sentiment for a new product in the market.

With these pieces, you have the core of a community growth platform in place. And then we supercharge it, giving your ability to engage with your community with built-in intelligence.

Supercharge taking action with intelligence

With Common Room, you can now pipe all of your community data into a single place, rather than having to check each of your sources individually. We started with 3 foundational principles:

• 🔌 Natively-built, fully-managed integrations. With over 20 integrations available out of the box, these integrations connect all of an organization’s disparate community sources—chat, social media, forums, code repositories, virtual events, and support—as well as company product usage and revenue data to enable end-to-end community attribution.
• 🔒Enterprise readiness. Communities are built on trust, and we are, too. We offer enterprise-grade security (SOC2 certified, GDPR and CCPA compliant, SAML-based SSO, RBAC), reliability (offer a 99% uptime SLA), and scalability (support communities of 1M+ members) to ensure both your company’s and your community’s information are protected.
• 🌎Unified identity across sources. A 360-view of each member that aggregates their activity across all community sources, including their teammates and organizations, and how they’re engaging with the community. Our differentiated identity matching helps provide a single view of your community.

And then, we built intelligent actions into Common Room to help you make sense of all the data being provided by your community and to be able to act on it. We’ve highlighted 5 categories of intelligent actions below:

🧠 Built-in activity intelligence. We help you understand who your members are, what they’re saying, and how they feel about your product or company by automatically surfacing important activities to focus on. This intelligence is surfaced by:

• Conversations. To surface trending conversations your teams should join in on (or monitor as a hot topic), we combine related community activity from the same source into threaded conversations so you can understand the full context.
• Sentiment. To help your teams get a pulse on how community members are feeling, we surface sentiment from activity. Major spikes or changes in sentiment within your community are often a signal for your teams to focus on a particular area.
• Auto-categorization. So you know exactly which teammates are best suited to reply, we automatically group together and surface categories of activity based on what a community member is saying, sharing, or feeling.
• Organizations. To better connect your community members to your customers, discover early signals from potential customers, and surface pain points in existing top accounts from their community activity, we help you understand where your community members are employed.

🔍 Powerful filters. We allow you to identify the exact members you want to reach out to, informed by the very attributes that make your community members unique—for example, their programming language expertise, location, the number of posts or pull requests they’ve made, or the plan type they’re on—you can filter by any kind of information you integrate into Common Room.

🔔 Configurable workflows. To reduce manual work, get insights faster, and enable one-click to action, we’ve built automations and Segments.

• Automations allow you to set up custom welcome messages to interact with your community members as they join your Slack communities.
• Segments allow you to create member cohorts to manage programs and track updates across your community. Segments are primarily used when you plan to take action with a group of members that meet some predefined criteria.

📊 Pre-built and customizable reporting templates. Our reports automatically generate different data modules focused on community health, like community responsiveness, with the ability to create custom dashboards that you can share and export.

🤝 Cross-team collaboration. To ensure system-of-record continuity with your community, you can set up team alerts and notifications.

• Team alerts send a Slack message when community activity occurs, like when product feedback, bugs, or issues are posted, that your team wants to immediately know about.
• Notifications update you on specific members, organizations, and segments you want to follow.

Get started with Common Room

Today, in partnership with our incredible community—and some amazing community-first organizations like Temporal, dbt Labs, Figma, Moov, Asana, and Atlassian that we are humbled to call customers—we're proud to announce the general availability of Common Room! Get started for free.

See how our customers use Common Room to power thriving communities:

• Temporal Technologies is relentlessly focused on developer experience, empowering their community to create highly reliable and scalable applications. We’re proud that Common Room is the platform that empowers Temporal to deepen its relationships with those developers.
• dbt Labs uses Common Room to better understand and support their community of 24K+ data practitioners.
• Common Room helps Figma get more visibility into their global community and unlock important insights to quantify the impact of the community-led model that powers their product and growth.
• Moov grows its open source community 190% with Common Room, gaining visibility into its community of developers who are actively maintaining and contributing to the open source projects, and tailoring relevant content and experiences based on members’ specific roles and interests.

Want an inside look at our platform? Join us on April 12th for a webinar with Webflow to hear how they’re using Common Room to power their community. And be sure to check out our Common Room user guides and Uncommon, our community of product users and community leaders.

We’re excited to partner with you on your community journey. Let’s begin.