When formal channels fail, community fills the gap. I've been in situations where org charts, executive sponsors, and formal project proposals couldn't get teams to collaborate - but building genuine relationships and shared purpose could. The pattern has repeated enough times in my career that I now believe community building is one of the most underrated skills in product leadership.
The Platform Team Nobody Respected
I once worked on a platform team positioned uncomfortably between engineering infrastructure and our customer-facing brand teams. As a product manager focused on backend systems and data services, I struggled to get respect or attention from the front-end teams who were laser-focused on optimizing their individual sites for conversion rates and user engagement.
Each brand team operated independently with their own roadmaps and success metrics. When I approached them with ideas for platform improvements or cross-brand opportunities, they saw me as just another person asking for their time without offering obvious immediate value.
After beating my head against the wall trying to push improvements through formal channels, I changed tactics. I stopped trying to convince people through presentations and started building relationships. I brought representatives together across brands to connect. I set up mechanisms to share ideas and work on proposals. I built cross-team working groups to tackle systemic challenges we all had in common. I consulted with these stakeholders regularly, reviewing our roadmaps and offering them a chance to weigh in on our direction.
Through these efforts, we formed a platform-centric view from the ground up across the organization. We became a community with a collective interest in building a better solution for all brands. From that work I was able to deliver a more flexible solution that unlocked more tests and inspired new collaborations that no one had conceived before.
When an Acquisition Became an Opportunity
The same approach paid off in a very different context. I was working with a team struggling with persistent data validation challenges - fake, false, or conflicting data coming through five different channels. The underlying issue was our legacy architecture: a giant flat file structure with minimal relationships between data elements.
When our company announced a major acquisition requiring system integration, the integration team's primary goal was completing the merger as quickly and cheaply as possible by modifying one of the existing legacy systems. The easy path was clear, and it would have cemented our data problems for years.
Instead of accepting the fastest technical solution, I worked with both teams to recognize the value of building a new system that could accommodate both datasets with proper relational data structure. While this seemed slower and more expensive, it enabled both teams to collaborate on creating something better than either organization had before. The project became an opportunity for teams that had been strangers to co-create solutions and build working relationships from scratch.
Community as Strategy
In both cases, the formal organizational structure wasn't going to solve the problem. The brand teams had no incentive to care about my platform. The integration team had no incentive to slow down for data quality. What changed the outcome wasn't authority or process - it was community. People who trust each other and see shared purpose will build things together that no org chart or project plan could mandate. That's why I think of community building not as a nice-to-have but as a core product leadership strategy.