Why Community Teams Lack Decision-Making Power
Community teams are often held accountable for results they have very little authority to influence.
A community leader gets invited into quarterly planning.
The company wants community to improve adoption, help with retention, create more advocacy, generate better customer feedback, and support education. By the time the community leader joins the meeting, the plans behind most of those outcomes are already finished.
Marketing has its campaign calendar. Customer success has set its adoption priorities. Product has committed the roadmap. Education has chosen its content plan. The community leader is asked how the community can help.
I’ve seen this pattern in companies at very different stages. People are usually well intentioned. They like the community team, believe the work is valuable, and genuinely want to collaborate.
The operating model still leaves community responsible for outcomes shaped somewhere else.
How the mismatch develops
Community usually starts inside one function for a sensible reason.
Support creates a forum because customers are already helping each other. Marketing builds an advocacy or events program. Customer success launches a peer network to improve adoption. Product creates a place for feedback and expert users.
The program needs a home, a budget, and an owner. That part makes sense.
As the program grows, the work starts to spread.
Members create educational content, answer product questions, refer new customers, explain use cases, identify bugs, test features, lead events, and help other customers navigate organizational problems. Community begins contributing to the work of several teams even though it still reports into one of them.
That’s where the mismatch appears.
The community team is asked to influence horizontal outcomes with vertical authority. It can recommend, persuade, share evidence, and offer access to customers. It often can’t decide what happens next.
That distinction matters when the desired result depends on choices the community team doesn’t control.
Adoption is a useful example
A company may ask community to improve product adoption.
That’s reasonable. Experienced customers can show newer customers what good use looks like. Community events and discussions can help people discover workflows, learn from peers, and see how others solved similar problems.
Adoption is also shaped by a lot of things outside community:
Whether the product solves the customer’s actual problem
Whether onboarding prepares them to use it
Whether their internal champion has enough influence
Whether education arrives at the right time
Whether customer success understands the real barrier
Whether the product experience reinforces the intended behavior
Community can contribute to all of those areas. It doesn’t own most of them.
When adoption rises, several teams may point to their influence. When it stalls, community can still be asked why engagement didn’t translate into more usage.
Retention creates a similar problem. A strong peer network can deepen a customer’s relationship with the company and help them succeed. It can’t fix a product that no longer meets the need, a pricing change that undermines value, or an implementation problem that began before the customer ever joined.
Community affects the result without controlling the conditions.
What I was trying to resolve in the book
One of the tensions I kept returning to while writing The Community Code was that community creates value across the business while remaining structurally attached to a single team.
I argued that companies should treat community as part of the GTM system. I still believe that. The harder question is what that requires from the organization.
It’s easy to say community should partner with marketing, product, customer success, sales, support, and education. Most experienced community teams already do that. Partnership doesn’t resolve the power imbalance by itself.
A community leader can attend cross-functional meetings and still be invited after the important decisions. They can share strong customer evidence and still lose to the metric another team is measured against. They can be accountable for an outcome without having any authority over the workflows creating it.
This is where the language of collaboration can become misleading. Everyone may be responsive and friendly while the structure leaves community with very little leverage.
When community becomes an internal service desk
Community teams spend a lot of time translating their value for internal audiences.
Product wants usable feedback. Marketing wants stories and advocacy. Customer success wants adoption and retention. Support wants deflection. Sales wants references. Executives want measurable business impact.
None of those requests is unreasonable. The accumulation of them can push community into a service model for the rest of the organization.
The team finds speakers for events, recruits beta testers, sources customers for case studies, fills reference requests, creates peer groups, and produces recurring reports. Much of that work is useful, and some of it is central to a strong program.
The risk appears when internal demand starts determining too much of the member experience.
Customers don’t join because marketing needs a case study or sales needs a reference. They participate because they expect to learn, contribute, connect, or get something they couldn’t access as easily on their own.
Once members begin to feel like a company resource, the program gets weaker. The community team is usually close enough to see that shift. It may not have enough authority to stop it.
Authority can be practical
Giving community more power doesn’t require creating a giant centralized organization or handing every customer decision to the community leader.
Authority can be much narrower.
It may mean bringing community into lifecycle planning before the campaign is finalized. It may mean requiring product teams to respond to recurring member patterns. It may mean giving community a role in customer education planning or allowing the team to decline requests that would damage member trust.
Some decisions may belong clearly to the community team:
Which member segments receive access to particular programs
What participation standards protect the quality of the space
How member contributions are recognized and used
Which internal requests fit the purpose of the community
When repeated customer patterns require executive attention
These decisions shape whether the community remains credible. Without authority over them, the team can spend an extraordinary amount of energy negotiating for permission to do work it is already expected to own.
Measurement helps, but it doesn’t settle the argument
Community leaders are often told that stronger measurement will earn them more influence.
Better measurement helps. I’ve used account data, product behavior, business outcomes, qualitative evidence, and program activity to show what community contributes. The assumption that proof automatically changes the operating model is less reliable.
Data enters an organization that already has priorities, incentives, and power structures. A strong result may earn more budget while leaving decision rights unchanged. Another team may accept the evidence and still prioritize the metric it owns.
This doesn’t make measurement pointless. It means the report has to do more than prove value. It has to connect the result to a decision.
A company may learn that community members adopt more features or renew at a higher rate. Everyone congratulates the team, and onboarding continues to be designed without community input. The evidence showed impact. It didn’t alter the workflow.
Being invited isn’t the same as being involved
I’ve been in enough planning processes to know that timing tells you a lot.
A team may ask for community input once the core plan is fixed. At that point, the remaining choices are usually promotional. Can members attend the webinar? Can an ambassador share the launch? Can the community amplify the announcement? Can the team recruit advocates?
The more consequential questions were answered earlier.
Did the product reflect the behaviors the community had been observing? Does the education plan match how customers actually learn? Will the launch create confusion inside an existing program? Are the company’s most credible customers prepared to explain the change?
Late involvement limits community to distribution. Early involvement gives community a chance to affect design.
That difference is one of the clearest signals of whether the company sees community as infrastructure or as an audience.
The part nobody likes to say out loud
Meaningful cross-functional influence usually requires someone else to give up some control.
A product leader may have to change a roadmap based on patterns that didn’t come through the formal research process. Marketing may have to adjust a campaign because the language doesn’t match how customers describe the problem. Customer success may have to change a standardized journey for people participating differently through community.
Cross-functional work sounds great until it changes someone’s plan.
That’s why many community teams remain advisory. The company benefits from their proximity to customers without allowing that proximity to disrupt established ownership.
I don’t think most leaders do this cynically. The existing structure feels easier to manage. Clear functional ownership makes planning, budgeting, and accountability simpler.
The customer’s experience is less interested in the org chart.
A better operating model starts with decisions
The most useful place to begin is with the outcomes community is expected to influence, then trace the decisions behind them.
If community is accountable for adoption, where is it involved in onboarding, education, product discovery, and customer success planning?
If it’s accountable for advocacy, can the team influence the customer experiences that create genuine advocates?
If it’s expected to improve retention, does it participate in conversations about risk, value realization, and product friction?
The gaps become visible quickly. From there, leaders can decide which decisions require community input, which decisions community co-owns, and which decisions belong to the community team.
That level of clarity is more useful than another promise to collaborate.
It also makes accountability more honest. A team should be measured against outcomes it has enough influence to shape.
The argument I’m still working through
I still believe community should be integrated across GTM. And I’m increasingly convinced that integration without authority has a ceiling.
A community team can build strong relationships, gather useful insight, and create value across the customer lifecycle. It can do all of that while remaining peripheral to the company’s most important decisions.
At some point, better partnership stops being enough. The organization has to decide whether community is mainly a source of labor and distribution or whether it participates in how customer-facing work is designed.
You can usually see that choice long before it appears in a strategy deck. It shows up in who is in the room before the plan is finished.
Decoded Takeaways
Community teams often influence adoption, retention, advocacy, education, support, feedback, and growth while controlling very few of the decisions behind those outcomes. That creates an accountability gap that good collaboration alone doesn’t resolve.
The program’s reporting line may still make sense, but its value often spreads well beyond that function. As community becomes more useful across GTM, the company needs clearer rules about where community provides input, where it shares ownership, and what the team can decide directly.
Measurement supports that conversation, but evidence doesn’t automatically change decision rights. Community leaders have to connect results to the workflows that should operate differently. Executives have to decide whether the team’s proximity to customers will influence planning or remain useful mainly for distribution and execution.
The practical test is timing. When community enters after the plan is complete, it’s usually being treated as an audience. When it participates before priorities, experiences, and workflows are fixed, it has a chance to function as infrastructure.