Role(s)
Head of Community Platforms, Staff Community Manager
Vercel Community
Summary
Scope
Community platform surfaces, community engagement, community ops, team management, and product feedback loops.
Team
Led the Community team with 4 DX engineers.
Timeline
Joined as an IC in June 2024, then became lead within 6 months for a team spread across America, Canada, India, and Europe.
Responsibilities
My team's mission was to create a generation of Vercel experts.
- Led Vercel Community Platform as part of the end-to-end community experience.
- Managed a team of DX engineers looking after community infrastructure, operations, moderation, and developer education.
- Worked closely with Engineering so feedback could reach product teams faster.
- Managed Vercel’s public community presence across Community, Reddit, and X support.
- Worked closely with GTM to support top-of-funnel awareness, education, activation, and customer engagement.
What I Shipped
Community Operations
The systems that made the community easier to join, understand, and contribute to.
- Vercel Community platform: Built from the ground up as a home for Vercel developers, gaining millions of organic views and becoming a one-to-many communication channel.
Community Engagement
- Live Session: Set up a programme of live sessions that became part of Vercel’s launch strategy across the company.
- Community Programs support and integration: Helped bring programs into the community platform, gamifying contributions and connecting community efforts in one place.
In-person Community
Meet-up support for building localised community hubs beyond the online platform.
- Londonmaxxing: Supported in-person connections in the UK by partnering with local tech companies and creating space for developers to gather around Vercel.
Community-led Content
Videos, blog posts, and guides that helped developers learn, debug, and contribute.
- How to use GitHub with v0: Created practical video content helping developers connect v0 work to GitHub and ship with a clearer workflow.
- Keeping community human while scaling with agents: Wrote about the Community Guardian, c0, and how agents helped the team scale support without removing the human layer.
- How to contribute to the Community: Wrote the guide that helps developers get started, set up a profile, and understand how to earn recognition.
- Debugging 404 errors: Created a reusable community guide for one of the most common deployment issues developers run into on Vercel.
- Resolving IP blocking issues: Created troubleshooting guidance for developers who could not access Vercel-hosted sites from specific networks.
AI infrastructure
- AI-powered community support: Led the integration of agentic workflows so AI could support knowledge retrieval while the team focused on high-value conversations.
Feedback loops
- Community -> Product: Built an automated route for community feedback to reach product engineers so posts, questions, and conversations became signals for developer experience improvements.
Community Engagement
I built the live session infrastructure that allows us to bring the builders, leaders, and partners in the Vercel ecosystem on stage with us. Topics ranged from AI tooling and product launches to community-led show-and-tells and technical deep-dives.
CEO AMA with Guillermo Rauch
On anti-fragility, building Vercel, and what’s next for the web.
Reflection
When the community is healthy, developers feel heard. I'm proud that the community spaces we built became places where people could learn together, ask better questions, and shape the product in public.
The return on human connection is hard to measure, but impossible to ignore.