When Community Is the Wrong Fix

Community-led growth can create leverage or expose cracks. How to tell if your GTM strategy is actually ready for community.

The conversation usually shows up right around planning season.

A founder is looking at a new year with a mix of ambition and fatigue. Last year didn’t fall apart, but it didn’t quite come together either. Pipeline felt harder to predict. Support volume crept up. Retention held, but only with more effort than expected. Product shipped, but adoption lagged behind the roadmap.

Somewhere between goal-setting decks and headcount spreadsheets, someone floats the idea of building a community.

Not as a campaign. Not as a side project. As a way to change the shape of the business. More engaged customers. Stronger advocacy. Better feedback loops. Maybe even a little lift across the funnel.

This is usually the moment when community starts carrying expectations it was never meant to bear. It’s rarely framed as a fix, but it often functions like one. A way to address a cluster of problems without naming each of them directly.

That’s where expectations start to drift.

Community has real power, but it isn’t corrective by default. It doesn’t resolve underlying tension. It reflects it, at scale.

Why community becomes the answer to everything

Community tends to enter the picture when the edges between teams start to fray.

Marketing is under pressure to drive customer engagement without leaning harder on paid channels. Sales is being asked to do more with warmer leads and longer cycles. Customer success is trying to move from reactive support to proactive retention. Product wants clearer signals about what actually matters to customers, not just who is loud.

Community appears to offer something to each of those groups at once.

And in isolation, each of those expectations is reasonable.

The trouble starts when no one reconciles them.

Community gets positioned as a shared resource without shared accountability. Marketing expects stories. Sales expects proof. Success expects deflection. Product expects insight. Everyone agrees community is strategic, but no one agrees on what tradeoffs it’s meant to absorb. Over time, this ambiguity stalls community and weakens trust in the function itself.

At that point, community doesn’t fail loudly. It fails quietly.

The conversations don’t quite land. Engagement looks fine on the surface, but nothing downstream changes. Teams struggle to point to concrete impact, so they start narrating intent instead. Community becomes busy without being directional.

This is often when leaders conclude that community-led growth is slow, or hard to measure, or not worth the investment.

What’s usually happening is simpler. The company hasn’t decided what it wants amplified.

What community is actually good at supporting

When community works, it tends to work in very specific ways.

It reinforces behaviors that already exist among customers. It accelerates trust where trust is already forming. It makes patterns visible that are already repeating across accounts.

In B2B environments especially, community-led growth shows up less as a spike and more as a drag reduction. Sales conversations move faster because prospects have context. Onboarding gets smoother because customers can see how others navigate complexity. Retention improves because customers feel oriented, not because they feel entertained.

For marketing, community sharpens language. You hear how customers explain value to each other, not how they respond to positioning tests. For customer success, it creates air cover. Fewer tickets about the same issues. More room to focus on moments that actually affect adoption. For product, it reveals where friction compounds across workflows, not just where features are requested.

None of this requires community to persuade customers to care. It assumes they already do.

That assumption matters more than most teams realize.

What community can’t carry for you

Community struggles when it’s asked to compensate for things the business hasn’t resolved.

If customers are unclear on who the product is for, community doesn’t clarify that. It turns into a place where mismatched use cases collide. If sales sets expectations the product can’t consistently meet, community becomes the record of those gaps. If internal teams disagree on what success after purchase looks like, community reflects that disagreement in real time.

These issues don’t show up as a single moment you can fix. They accumulate.

Questions linger without response because ownership is unclear. Power users disengage because they’re tired of translating for everyone else. New members watch more than they participate, picking up on tone before content.

From the outside, it can look like low engagement or poor community management. From the inside, it’s usually a signal that the system around the community isn’t stable enough to support it.

This is where the distinction between a community and a forum becomes less academic. Forums collect activity. Communities expose relationships. If the underlying relationships between teams and customers are strained, community doesn’t hide that. It gives it a microphone.

A few questions worth sitting with this year

If you’re entering a new year thinking about community, these aren’t questions to answer quickly. They’re questions that tend to surface whether you ask them now or later. The difference is whether you engage with them deliberately, or let your community surface them for you.

• Are customers already helping each other in small, informal ways?
  If not, community won’t create that instinct on demand. It will feel manufactured.

• Do teams agree on what happens after the deal closes?
  If retention, adoption, and expansion mean different things internally, community will surface those seams.

• Is there clarity on who acts on what the community reveals?
  When insights pile up without response, customers notice.

• Are you prepared for more visibility into frustration as well as success?
  Community doesn’t filter sentiment. It aggregates it.

• Is there patience for impact that compounds rather than converts?
  Community supports pipeline and advocacy over time, not on a campaign calendar.

If these questions feel uncomfortable, that’s not a reason to avoid community. It’s a reason to understand what it will amplify.

Reframing the decision for the year ahead

At the start of a new year, it’s tempting to ask whether community should be on the roadmap.

A more useful question is what you’re willing to hear more clearly.

Community can make momentum louder. It can also make friction harder to ignore. It doesn’t change the direction of the business. It shows whether that direction holds up once customers start talking to each other.

That’s why this idea shows up early in The Community Code, a book I’m publishing later this spring. Not as a warning or gatekeeping exercise, but as a grounding one. Community-led growth rewards coherence, and it also exposes its absence.

Decoded Takeaways

• Community amplifies existing GTM systems. If those systems are unclear, the amplification makes that visible fast.

• When community feels noisy or unfocused, it often reflects upstream misalignment.

• Scalable community depends more on internal clarity than external engagement.

• Treating community as a fix usually delays harder strategic decisions.

• The real choice is whether you’re ready for visibility, not whether you want engagement.