Senior community leadership for companies not yet ready to hire one.
How to build community and ecosystem functions that actually move product decisions and lower support costs. For technical companies that treat community as infrastructure.
I've built community at Spryker (130+ enterprise clients, with about 25% of product roadmap traceable to community signal), Dutchento / Meet Magento (600+ annual attendees), and CRO.CAFE (200+ episodes across four languages). 200+ talks in 26 countries, plus the Community Builder Award from eBay/Magento and the Experimentation Culture Award.
Twenty years building communities that the business actually cares about.
I'm Guido X Jansen. I've built community functions from zero multiple times: as a volunteer founder (Dutchento / Meet Magento), as a creator (CRO.CAFE), and in B2B Enterprise leading the function (Spryker).
My background is cognitive psychology, conversion optimisation and community/DevRel. Where psychology mostly taught me you can't reliably predict what people do, CRO taught me how to implement measurement and experimentation to reliably improve your business. So I think about community design as an experimentation programme: build a small thing, see what people actually do with it, and adjust.
At Spryker I built the enterprise community function from scratch, serving 130+ enterprise clients. About 25% of product roadmap decisions traced back to community signal. We built a Customer Advisory Board, an MIT-licensed module ecosystem, and contribution programmes. All still in use today.
Tangible artifacts you keep.
Advisory work fails when there's nothing concrete to show at the end of it. So at month six, this is what's on the table.
Artifacts you keep
- A community and ecosystem architecture: who your community is for, how participation is designed, and where signal flows back into the business. Yours to keep, evolve, and hand to a new hire.
- A hiring scorecard for community / DevRel / ecosystem roles, calibrated to your stage and product. Useful at month six and again at year two.
- A signal-to-roadmap process: the actual mechanism that translates community input into product, sales, and strategic decisions. Lightweight enough that someone will actually run it.
- A measurement framework: what to track, what to ignore, and what would falsify your community thesis. Borrowed from the CRO and experimentation playbook.
Decisions made together
- Whether to hire a senior community / DevRel lead, when, and with what scorecard.
- What existing community spend or activity to stop.
- The one or two community bets worth doubling down on for the next twelve months.
- The governance structure that fits your stage: advisory board, contributor programme, or ambassador track.
Caveat: this isn't a guarantee of community size, signups, or traffic. The advisory designs the system. Your team executes.
01. Core offering
Senior thinking partner. So your team gets to actually execute.
Most companies at Series A–C don't yet need (or can't yet justify) a full-time VP of Community or Head of DevRel. They have a junior or mid-level person wearing community as 30% of their job, or a Head of Product trying to figure it out alongside the rest of the roadmap.
That's where I come in: as a senior thinking partner for whoever is currently doing the work, covering the patterns they haven't seen yet (what to invest in, what to stop, what to ignore).
In practice: the person already doing this work gets 3× more leverage, and the roadmap stops drifting.
02. Framework
Three pillars: Psychology, Pattern, Proof.
Psychology
Built for how technical users actually behave.
Most community work is designed for the community manager's idea of community. Which usually has very little to do with how developers actually behave in the wild. My cognitive psychology background mostly taught me one thing: you can't reliably predict what people will do. So everything I recommend is built to be tested. Who stays, who contributes, what flips a lurker into a contributor. You find that out by running the thing, not by guessing.
Pattern
Three zero-to-community builds. Ready for the age of AI.
Three very different contexts, one underlying pattern. AI is changing what counts as signal in a community, who shows up, and how trust gets built. The advisory is the shortcut: the moves that work, and the AI-flavored plays that look exciting but waste three months.
Proof
Community work that survives the budget review.
Community work that can't be tied to business outcomes is the first thing cut at budget review. I came up through CRO and experimentation, so what we build together is set up to be measured. At Spryker, about 25% of product roadmap decisions traced back to community signal. That's what makes community a real line item: defensible at every budget review, not a soft cost-center waiting to get cut.
“Guido is a thought leader in community building and developer relations. Any company serious about building an ecosystem should talk to him.”
Boris Lokschin
Co-Founder & CEO, Spryker
“He delivered results that mattered: developer feedback shaped our product roadmap, engineering teams connected directly with external developers.”
Chris Rauch
Chief Customer Officer, Supermetrics
“Guido doesn't just build communities, he architects ecosystems that thrive under change and constant evolution.”
Svitlana Kulynych
Senior Manager for L&D Business Engagement, PwC Luxembourg
03. How the engagement runs
A structured six months. Rolling thereafter.
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Week 1: Onboarding and ecosystem baseline
A 90–120 minute kickoff call, plus a written baseline of where your community stands, what's worth building first, and what to stop spending on. The point of week one is to make sure none of your investment gets wasted on the wrong direction.
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Every two weeks: a standing strategy call
Twelve sessions of sixty minutes each, across the first six months. The one place on the calendar where community strategy gets senior attention without fighting for it against everything else on your team's plate.
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Every month: a one-page written brief
The next things to act on, the things to stop, and what to keep an eye on. Written so it can be forwarded to your CEO or board without translation.
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Month 3: mid-engagement review
A hard mid-point audit. Are we still building the right thing, given what we've learned and what changed in your business? We re-baseline if needed.
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Month 6: synthesis and decision point
The artifacts from the previous sections, finalized. Decision point: continue rolling, pause, or close. Either way, you walk away with documents your team keeps using long after I'm out of the calendar.
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Beyond month 6: rolling cadence
Same rhythm, no fixed end. Calls, monthly briefs, async channel: nothing changes about the cadence. Either side gives thirty days' notice when the engagement no longer fits.
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Throughout: a dedicated async channel
Slack, Signal, or whichever tool you already use. For the questions that come up between calls and shouldn't wait two weeks.
04. Scope and fit
Who this works for, who it doesn't.
In scope
- Community / DevRel / ecosystem strategy
- Community ops design: governance, contribution structures, advisory boards
- DevRel function design and metrics
- Translating community signal to product roadmap
- Hiring input for community / DevRel / ecosystem roles
- Coaching the existing person currently holding this responsibility (often a junior IC, or someone wearing it as 30% of their job)
Out of scope
- Implementation or hands-on community management
- Content production for your community
- Hands-on engineering, SDK work, or demo coding
- Pure marketing or social media management
- Sales-quota carrying responsibilities
Good fit
- Series A–C company, technical or developer-led product
- Has product traction but no senior community/ecosystem hire yet, or has a junior person in role who needs guidance
- Leadership treats community as strategic, not as a megaphone
- Organisation can act on architectural and design recommendations
Not a fit
- Need someone to run community ops. This is advisory, not fractional execution.
- Want guaranteed traffic, signups, or community-size growth
- AI-content-at-scale community plays
- Looking primarily for social media marketing rather than community strategy
- Adtech, gambling, fossil fuel, Big Tech (Magnificent 7), or Russian-owned companies
05. Editorial integrity
Advisory clients buy advice. Not influence.
Advisory work and public platforms stay strictly separate. Paying clients don't get conference speaking referrals, priority intros through my community network, or a boost when someone asks me for recommendations in public.
This independence is the only thing that keeps credibility intact. If I mention a company publicly, it's because they earned the mention. Paying for the advisory has nothing to do with it.
06. Continuity commitment
The engagement is delivered. Period.
Advisory engagements run on their schedule regardless of what else I'm doing, including the case where I take an in-house role mid-engagement. The usual outcome is that the engagement continues through its committed period anyway, since senior roles take 3–4 months to start. In the rare case it can't, I deliver every open artifact before stepping back and personally introduce you to a vetted advisor from my network who can take the relationship forward. No engagement gets left mid-air.
Questions worth answering before you apply.
If yours isn't here, the 30-minute scoping call is the right place for it.
How many open seats?
Three concurrent. Waitlist when full. One company per competitive space, the rest queue.
How does this fit alongside your other work?
Advisory, speaking, and selective full-time leadership conversations are separate tracks. The advisory engagement has a defined six-month minimum scope and a written continuity commitment (see above), so it gets delivered regardless of what else is on my calendar.
How long can the engagement run?
The first six months are a fixed commitment, long enough to cover the Week 1 baseline, the Month 3 review, and the Month 6 synthesis. After that the engagement runs month-to-month with thirty days' notice from either side. No forced renewal conversation, no cliff.
What if the engagement isn't delivering value?
A re-baseline conversation at month three is built in. Beyond that, thirty days' notice from either side. The notice period is prorated, and all artifacts get delivered up to the cutoff date.
Is the engagement confidential?
Yes. Company name, strategy, and the existence of the engagement aren't disclosed unless you specifically want them to be.
Can we do weekly calls instead?
The default cadence is one call every two weeks. During specific intensive windows like migrations, launches, or hiring sprints, we can switch to weekly. No additional fee.
Can we talk to a past advisee?
Yes. References on request after the scoping call.
What if our community lead quits in month three?
The advisory continues. Hiring the replacement is a conversation we have together, using the hiring scorecard built during the engagement.
Do you do implementation?
No. The advisory works on the design and the decisions; your team or contractors run the execution. It keeps the offer clean and avoids the conflict of interest where I'd be advising on work I also bill to deliver.
Two ways in.
Pick the path that fits. The pricing range is shared by email after the first contact, regardless of outcome.
A: 30-minute scoping call
Best if you're not yet sure whether the engagement fits. We talk for thirty minutes. You leave with the pricing range, a fit assessment, and either an application invite or a referral elsewhere.
Tell me up front: company name, your role, one sentence on what you're trying to figure out, and one sentence on your current community / ecosystem state.
B: Direct application
Best if you already know you want this. Email the items below. Response within five business days: acceptance, decline with a brief reason, or a scoping invite. Pricing range comes back in the response either way.
- Name + work email
- Company + your role
- Company website
- Stage (Series, ARR range, or "pre-revenue")
- Current community / ecosystem state, in one sentence
- Optional: Six-month outcome you'd want
- Optional: Desired start date
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