The 60/40 Rule
Why the Best Community Strategy Is Only Partly Finished
I know everything about the community I’m about to launch (today actually; today is soft launch day). Well. Sixty percent of everything.
But this isn’t some sort of false modesty or admission of failure. Instead it’s my strategy. Somewhere around my second community build I figured out that the launch decks everyone loves, you know the ones with the fully mapped member journey and the six month content calendar and the engagement tiers with cute on-brand little badge names are mostly theater. Impressive theater, nonetheless. Great for a slide. But still, theater.
The second real members show up, I can guarantee with alarming certainty they’re going to do something with your community you didn’t plan for. Not because you’re bad at your job, but because you are structurally one person (or one small team) guessing at the behavior of a crowd you haven’t met yet in its entirety. If your deck already has an answer for everything, your guess has limited their reality before they’ve even walked in the door.
So, 60/40. Sixty percent locked: the purpose, the guardrails, the non-negotiables, the stuff people can actually lean on. Forty percent left deliriously squishy on purpose, so the community gets a vote in what it becomes.
Speaking from a lot of experience, the 40% never stops feeling like a professional liability. We - the community professionals - are supposed to have the answers; that’s kind of the whole job description. Except the version of me with all the answers never gets asked the question that actually mattered, because nobody in my conference room thought to ask it. Only my members would’ve thought to ask it and there is generally no overlap between those two groups.
The best community strategies are the ones still capable of being surprised.
The 60% is real structure though, not a suggestion. I’ve made the mistake of thinking “we’ll figure it out” was a plan instead of a shrug, and vague is not the same thing as flexible. Your purpose, your moderation floor, your core value exchange - lock those in. People build trust on that part. The squishy part only works because it’s squishy inside something solid, not squishy all the way down to the studs.
Your stakeholders will read your unfinished 40% as a gap every single freaking time, no matter how you frame it. Defending the parts you left undone on purpose, to someone who needs a finished slide for their own boss by Thursday, is its own quiet skill. “We’re leaving room to learn” sounds suspiciously like “we don’t know yet” if you’re not the one who built the thing.
My favorite part though: when a member starts using the community in some way you never planned for… that’s a gift, not scope creep. They’re doing your strategic thinking for you, unpaid, in real time, and all you have to do is notice instead of herding them back to the roadmap.
The ratio moves too, and it should. Month one’s 40% is not month twelve’s 40%. Good chaos eventually teaches you what deserves to become permanent, and the structure grows to match what you’ve actually learned instead of what you guessed at back in the conference room.
The hardest part of all this was never the math though. Not really. It’s sitting across from someone who wants certainty and telling them, straight faced, that a big ol’ chunk of the plan doesn’t exist yet on purpose. And that doesn’t feel like confidence unfortunately. It feels like showing up slightly underdressed to your own launch.
The communities I’ve watched fail the hardest weren’t the ones that left room for surprise. They were the ones so fully mapped on day one that no member ever got to leave a fingerprint on the place or members bucked so hard against the rigidity they broke the foundation. You can build something beautiful and airtight and still end up with a building nobody wanted to move into.
Leave the 40% empty. Somebody’s going to want to fill it in for you.