Community in marketplaces is underrated

Community in marketplaces is underrated. It’s also really hard to do well.

Marketplaces want three things¹ : 1) more buyers & sellers, 2) more matches between them, 3) higher quality matches.

Community² can help with all three.

1. More buyers & sellers: For buyers, community content is seen as where the real wisdom lies (which is why appending “Reddit” to google searches is so popular). For sellers, community can act as a volunteer army of customer service reps and business coaches (“does anyone know how to…”). In both cases, created content can draw in new users from search engines (though this will get harder over time as search traffic declines.)

2. More matches between them: Matching is typically the domain of teams working on search & browse, but feeding community content into an LLM-powered knowledge base or using it to augment product search is a great way to expand the number of queries that will have relevant results returned³ .

3. Higher quality matches: Matching gets the buyer to the detail page, but the quality of the match is what leads to a transaction. Communities can help buyers be more confident that this is the thing they are looking for, and can help sellers teach other how to improve the quality of their storefronts (better photos / descriptions / pricing, etc).

The challenge, of course, is getting the community going and keeping it alive and healthy. Having a dedicated community manager (or managers) is necessary. Setting and enforcing rules and norms is a must, as is finding the right balance between “this is your space” vs “you’re in our space”.

But us humans are naturally social animals - we will seek out others when we feel unsure, lonely, confused, anxious, etc. Community, if done right, can be a great boon for your users as well as an asset and moat for your business.

The Workshop

This is a newsletter-only section where I share a half-baked idea in hopes that y’all who are smarter than me can work it out with me.

I’m worried the job market for senior (10+ years of experience) product managers and product leaders is going to get worse and worse.

Here’s my argument, and please let me know if you agree or disagree:

I think the marginal value of a PM or PL increases significantly from 1 yr experience to 5, slows down towards 10, and hits an asymptote around 15. And if we were to look at the PM or PL populations broken into cohorts by years of experience, I bet there’s a lot heading towards or passing the 10 yr mark.

Which makes me suspect that, for those of us with > 15 yrs experience, competition for jobs is going to get worse and worse, with more advantage to being a specialist than a generalist.

I hope I’m wrong. But I find it unlikely that the job market at the VP+ level can grow faster than the size of the 5 yr and 10 yr cohorts as they age.

So what exactly does this mean? Will oversupply depress compensation even more (I think so)? Are there enough adjacent roles like GM and COO to soak up the surplus (I think it’ll help but not enough)?

After so many years of living in a job market where great PMs and PLs were really hard to find, it’s jarring to be faced with a moment where it seems the market has overcorrected and now supply exceeds demand.

1  I’m leaving aside the obvious revenue model factors to focus on product levers, but for completeness: higher take rate and lower customer acquisition costs, too.

2  For sake of definition, when I say “Community”, I’m imagining any medium through which users (buyers only, sellers only, or mixed together) can write freely to each other in a one-to-many model. Usually there is a one-to-one messaging mechanic in place as well, but it’s not required. Old school web-based forums, Discord / Slack communities, WhatsApp / FB groups, Reddit subreddits, etc. are all good examples.

3  This is especially true in cases where buyers tend to be uninformed about domain jargon. For example, if I’m looking to buy a replacement part for my car and I know nothing about cars (which, as everyone who knows me will confirm, I indeed know nothing about cars), and so I don’t know what car part thing to search for, a traditional product catalog search engine will struggle. Ideally, I could submit a query that describes the problem and have a search that is partially trained on community content might have better success in matching the symptoms with a diagnosis.