Threado Community AMA series is exclusively built for the tight-knit slack community we are building at Threado. We gathered and brought together community leaders from Notion, Mixpanel On Deck, Glide, Startup Grind, and many more fast-growing startups.

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For this episode, we had Corina Gheonea, Director, Global UiPath Community joining us to answer all questions in the community. The session was filled with many amazing insights on community building. Here are the top highlights from the session 👇

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Q: Which community North Star metric are you chasing right now?
A: The main metric that global UIPath is focused on right now is ensuring high engagement in community. ( people to get value as fast as possible in format they prefer). This ensures that people are successful in their automation journeys faster.

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Q: How have community initiatives evolved atUiPath before and after you joined? As a community builder what are the three things indispensable to you?
A: Four years ago when Corina started UIPath had an active forum, a free accessible academy and a free version of the product. After she joined she put together a strategy to develop programs, to know how to engage users to grow advocacy programs, to host hackathons.
There are concepts that are indispensable to Corina, such as that the community is a sounding board for people to trust them and be as authentic as possible. Making sure that there is a relationship between members of communities. Third aspect is making sure that there is a bigger purpose to everything.

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Q: Which are the tools you use for community operations?
A: UIPath uses a clusters of tools with data collected through analytics and tools like tableau, and data studio these provide various insights into the information and stakeholders. The take things through marketo.

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Q: Can you share some insights which have helped the team at UiPath create a great community and scale it globally?
A: The first thing to keep in mind is the members no validate them and keep them in mind. Another thing is to make it relevant to the end user. There needs to be a meaning in your initiatives and not do it because it’s the rend or be a it’s fashionable. They have a freedom in their community to define products and try them and see if it works, if it works well they can scale it.

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Q: Why did you start the UiPaths student developer champion program?
A: The student developer champion program was created to tap into new audiences that will start their careers in the automation field, be it business or technical and also for students to consider careers in automation from early on. They have academic alliances through which they add courses to the curriculum and provides bottom up engagement. They get insights into how students learn, which are the most effective ways they learn. The students start creating use-cases relevant to them, so this brings a new territory of use cases for them and new ways to use the automation platform.

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Q: What according to you is the most important aspect of building community? What did you enjoy most while building a community?
A: Most important aspect is that you can breach relationships to create value. You get the satisfaction that what you have created can fulfil someone’s needs. The role of the community manager is identifying who is there with a need and who can fulfil that need and has the expertise and sees value in fulfilling it without expecting anything in return.
This is the part that Corina has enjoyed the most, the value she can provide to the community and being the core of the community and getting the result of fulfilment. She also enjoying working with her team and coming up with multiple ways to put things into motion for the community.

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Q: What programs do you run as of now and what lies in store for the future of UiPath community?
A: They have dedicated chapters where people get to meet locally and virtually, they have series which help people grow their skill sets. They have various hackathons to innovate and get exposure to the leaders.  They also have mentoring programs where they can match with  people with more skills in their chosen fields. They also have advocacy programs, student champion programs, MVP programs etc.
They have a blog where the community creates the content and the author gets recognition and community can get the information. They have use-case repository, crowdsourcing use cases, snippets of codes etc.
Something fresh they are starting is an entire virtual event dedicated to educators, trainers, to people who help others grow.

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Q: How do you differentiate value proposition, Slack and discord communities? Core reason behind starting either of the communities? Is a slack community more advantageous if yes in what way?
A: Discord is the primary community where they started to get engagement, they started Slack because there was a huge hype around it in 2018, they were hoping to make it for collaborations but they realised that it was just a duplicate as people were asking questions already answered. In case of UIPath it was important for them to keep all developments on discord to put all knowledge in one place to create a director of knowledge and solve various queries.  Slack is advantageous and has many functionalities that can help grow communities, but it’s not making Corina say she will move to Slack because for technical communities it is better to have a forum format.

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Q: How has the community help drive business outcomes? How do the different teams leverage the communities?
A: UiPath community was always supported and considered a strategic advantage. The entire organisation recognises how the community contributes. The main point is to not put something just because it’s nice, they put up stuff that is meaningful and will help the community. The first hackathon was launched with business expectations in mind and things that help them grow with the entire field. They make sure that they customers with their practices.
With products, they make sure that the community feedbacks are heard and taken into notice no matter how honest or brutal.

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Q: How do you identify MVPs in your community? Is there a goal based tracking for them? What are these goals?
A: MVPs are identified in the large communities by participation and contribution and having a leadership role regarding automation. They go on all possible channels and recognise MVPs through speakers, YouTubers, product feedback etc. They let them know that once they open their forms, they can apply to be an MVP or can be nominated by someone.
UiPath expects them to continually contribute and in return them get exposure and can talk and interact with various leaders and get invites to events. The goals differ from one person to another depending on what they are good at.

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Q: What are some initiatives that are unique to the UiPath community and relevant to developers?
A: UiPath is a technical community something that is useful for not just developers but also businesses and analysts. They run different meet up series and events dedicated to developers, hackathons with specific products integrations. They also invite developers to various challenges. They also invite them to create various content to help others build their UiPath journey.

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Q: How do you define and measure a successful initiative?
A: They try to articulate as fast as possible an initiative based on a need they identify or an innovative idea they want to test in consideration with a stakeholder someone from the community or something related to the UiPath platform and with that they can start putting it in action. They start by ensuring it has quality and has a story for someone and this way provides support to scaling it.

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