A few years ago, some really fanciful and well-meaning developers built this new plaza near me. It has a few of my favorite stores: Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and REI - amongst other things. And honestly, it really is well designed.
Except for the parking lot and pedestrian ways.
I just don’t know what they were thinking there. The mulch in one section quickly got wore down to bare ground as shoppers cut a corner on foot. And another section with aesthetically pleasing grass got trampled as shoppers took the shortest path to cross the road.
And they kept on fixing it for awhile. Until one day they didn’t… and they haven’t tried since. But they also haven’t embraced it yet either.
So what in the world does Whole Foods and trampled grass have to do with community?
Quite a lot, as it turns out, because most of us built our communities like that plaza. Gorgeous on the site plan, with a front door (the sign-up form), tidy sidewalks (the onboarding flow), and a member count that tells us how many people came in the way we designed. Joined is a fact. Active is a percentage. Everybody else is a rounding error we’d rather not bring up in the QBR.
Now go stand in that parking lot for ten minutes. Nobody is using the sidewalk. Landscape people call those worn strips desire paths: routes nobody planned, nobody voted on, and nobody put on a roadmap, cut by people who just wanted to get to the store. They’re also the most accurate site map of the place you’ll ever find.
And of course, your community has a lawn like this. A security analyst googles an error message, lands on a forum thread, copies the fix, and leaves. A coworker screenshots a Slack answer and forwards it to a team of six. A stranger reads your template library logged out and forks a workflow into their own setup. An AI assistant answers a question using threads your regulars wrote three years ago. That’s four people and zero accounts, and every one of them used the community this week in a meaningful way.
Are they members? Well, maybe not exactly, that word comes with keyring baggage. Instead, I propose we call them ambient members: people who live inside the community’s usefulness and never touch the front door. Each visit wears the grass a little thinner wherever they darn well please.
Which brings me back to those developers, who I have a strange amount of sympathy for. They did what most of us do at first: patched. Fresh mulch, new sod. Then they stopped patching and stopped designing, and the plaza has been stuck in the middle ever since. Half-noticing is its own kind of decision.
The path already exists. The work is paving it.
Start with a grass survey. Look at search queries that land on community pages, docs with strange traffic, support tickets that quote a thread, prospects who mention an answer they found “somewhere online” on a sales call. None of it shows up in a member count, and the denominator problem I keep yelling about applies here too: a member count surveys the sidewalks.
Then pave the darn thing. Paving means the answer at the end of the path stands on its own. No login wall. No “join to see replies.” No accepted solution buried on page three of a debate. A stranger arriving cold has four minutes and zero context, so give them the fix, the version it applies to, and a date. Edit the old answers. Pin the good ones. Walk the path as a stranger sometime, too, because the ugliest thread along that route is the one they’ll carry away with them. Your regulars are the groundskeepers here, by the way, and they’d probably like to know their trimming reaches people they’ll never meet.
Leave a bench at the end. Something small, like a “this helped” button or a low-key “ask here” link that costs nothing and nags nobody. Some of these folks will sit down after the third visit, once they have something to say. Plenty never will, and they got everything they came for, which is what a path is for.
Then show whoever funds you the diagonal. Engagement gets budget, so infrastructure gets described as engagement to get funded. Path traffic gives you an honest way to explain what the docs, templates, and answers are for. Bring a photo of the dead grass and ask what a sidewalk along it would cost.
And needless to say, I’ll certainly be cutting across that mulch and grass my next shopping trip, strictly for research.