Vercel Community

From the first Vercel Community meet-up hosted in London at Granola's office. Video produced by Clark Narvas.

Summary

  • Role(s): Head of Community Platforms, Staff Community Manager
  • Scope: Community platforms 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.

Key surfaces

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.

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.

Watch full episode →
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CTO AMA with Malte Ubl

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Vercel for SMEs and Open Source

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How to Create and Publish Skills for Claude Code

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c15t: The Developer-First Cookie Banner

View all sessions →

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.

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