Community Beats Content: Why Circle Aimed AI at the Admins and Left the Members Human
The Meridian Point Podcast
Guest: Rene Rosendahl
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KUMAR: Hi, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with The Meridian Point, and today we're joined by Rene Rosendahl, Head of Product for the Email Hub and CRM at Circle, the all-in-one platform for community-led businesses. Here's what's interesting about Rene and Circle, or Circle and Rene, depending on which order you want to go with: Rene just helped Circle go fully AI-native with a launch called Eclipse, and then he deliberately kept the AI part away from the one thing that matters most in the community, the community members. So we're here to find out why, and how that's working out. He runs a role that fuses product and engineering into a single line of ownership, and Circle has shifted its pace, he says, faster than he's ever seen, without breaking the product. So let's invite Rene onto the show and dive into Circle and how AI has been used to help that product serve its community members better. Hi, Rene, welcome.
RENE: Hey, Kumar, nice to be here.
KUMAR: Yes, I'm thrilled that you're here. I think our history goes back a little ways. We crossed paths peripherally back when it was Agility Insights, which was then called Agile Transformations, I believe. And we've followed each other on LinkedIn and our careers over the years, so it's really great to have you on the show. Rene, you started in ERP systems development, project management, and agile coaching consulting, and then you walked away from all that to build products yourself. Now you're on your fourth startup. What broke for you in the consulting world that made you decide to own the thing rather than advise on it?
RENE: Yeah, that's a good question. I think consulting was a lot of fun, but at the end of the day I felt a little more like a mercenary. I would find myself going from team to team, different areas where I would help, and it was always about teaching others. I felt like I needed a more personal, long-term stake in something, and I really enjoyed the process of shaping a product, working with others, solving a user problem. So I think that ultimately led me into product management. In consulting, we talk a lot about frameworks, methodologies, and processes, but at the end of the day, what people really care about is certain outcomes for their business, for their organization. They don't care as much about how they get there. So that's part of it too. At the end of the day I'm still an Agilist at heart, but fundamentally, for me, it's about the principles much more than the practices. I definitely enjoy shaping a product and working on the same thing long term, just creating value for our users.
KUMAR: Yeah, that really resonates with me, principles and patterns over process and framework. I find myself also feeling that I, too, am in many cases a mercenary. I'm sent in to fix something because the executives who signed the check have determined this to be the biggest constraint. It may or may not be, it's just what they think is the biggest constraint. So I'm sent in to fix something that isn't necessarily broken, and the people working in that area, not that they don't want me there, but... they don't want me there. They're like, "We're good, and I don't know what it is that you're here to fix, but we're okay." So then I have to understand where they are and where they're coming from, and I typically ditch the framework talk and try to get into what the real constraints are.
RENE: Yeah, in a role like mine, because you're embedded in the organization long-term, it's a different kind of working environment. You're building relationships with people, and they know you're going to be around. You're not just a consultant popping in for a few weeks. So it's a different mode, for sure.
KUMAR: Right, you're not the seagull swooping in, pooping on stuff.
RENE: Exactly.
KUMAR: In our call to prep for this podcast, you said that content is getting commoditized by AI, and what people actually want is a transformation they go through with other humans, humans collaborating with other humans. Walk me through what that means for how a community should be built, and why just a course on its own doesn't cut it anymore.
RENE: Yeah, as we all know, content is everywhere now and it's getting cheaper, if not free, in many cases, and a lot of content is now also AI generated, or at least AI influenced. Ultimately, content alone is not sufficient. Imagine you're reading a book and you walk away from it without applying anything. You have the content available to you, but it's not really affecting your life, it's not necessarily making you or your life any better. So really, what I think people are looking for isn't so much content. People are looking for transformation, for themselves, for their lives, for their organizations. And community and human connection are immensely helpful as part of that transformation. If you think of a self-paced course online, it's kind of like reading a book. You go through it and maybe do some exercises, but compare that to a situation where you do this alongside a cohort of other people, where you have folks going through it at the same time as you, people you can interact with, discuss with, and hold each other accountable. You're going through the same journey, the same progression, together. How much more effective is that compared to, "Okay, I read a book, I took a three-hour online course on my own computer, and I'm walking away"? I think it's going to be much more effective. And a community as such is still around content, but the content is a little different. You have content, you have courses, but not all of it is created by the person running the community either. You're getting content from the community leader, but then other people contribute content, discuss, and bring things in. It's a much more interactive platform. And certainly with Circle on top of that, we're adding interactions, discussions, chat, events, either live on the platform or even in-person events, and people forming connections and making friends. I think that really enriches the experience. You're taking it from "I'm just consuming content" to "Here's a journey I'm going through, a transformation with other people, and I'm building real relationships along the way, and I have an accountability system as well." A very different approach, and different results too.
KUMAR: Yeah, I can certainly attest to that. We just introduced a course in a community platform, and parts of it have AI embedded to help people think through some of the problems. It's actually a course in product management, coincidentally. In the first couple of weeks of the cohort, it was telling how the conversation became more community-based. The assignments they posted got feedback not only from me as one of the course instructors, but also from the cohort taking the class, and that's only grown since then. These people are all from the same company, I won't say who, and I think they're starting to see the value of this stretched-out cohort model versus a two, three, or four-day certification program, where you're getting bombarded with a lot of content, the material shoved into your brain over four days, versus spacing it out, getting to experience it, taking some of those experiences back to the workplace, and applying the lessons of what you learned. It's a much richer experience. So I can certainly agree, and I think it also depends on how the platform, the community platform, is designed. Circle is pretty fantastic in how it enriches and connects people to each other in the experiences they're sharing. Care to comment?
RENE: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, that's also my experience. There are different ways to approach courses and learning, but I think the more we get people together and go through something as a group, making it interactive, the higher the success rate is going to be than just passive consumption of video or other content.
KUMAR: Right, right. Circle just went AI-native with Eclipse, but you made a deliberate choice to point the AI at the admin and keep it away from the member experience. Why draw the line there, and what happens to a community if robots start dominating the conversation that humans came for?
RENE: Yeah, great question. I think there's a lot of potential with AI, and that potential is around making the life of the community leader, the community admin, easier. There are a lot of places where this can happen: setting up the community, figuring out the structure, the pricing, the membership tiers, how to approach this, learning the product, in this case Circle, with AI almost acting in a consultative manner. And then there's a lot of operational drag. Think of all the things a community leader has to do day to day: content moderation, welcoming new members and showing them around, answering the same questions over and over, managing memberships, working on retention. All of this is operational drag that takes time away from the community leader spending time with members on valuable things, or even creating new things, engaging members. So there's a lot of potential for AI to help with those aspects. But the goal is always to make this a more human place, to make it feel more human, not less. When the operational work is handled, the admin can apply themselves back to where they can create real value for their members. And at the end of the day, what people are looking for is authenticity and connection, not more AI slop. If the robots were to take over a community, I think people ultimately sense that, and they'll find less value in it, or be so annoyed that they disengage from it. So if people come for community, for connection and transformation, this is not something we can easily automate on the member side. We've got to be really careful about where we apply AI and where we choose not to.
KUMAR: That's really good. Isn't it a much more intentional approach to AI? It's not AI everything, it's AI where it's needed and can provide the most value, and if it counters the mission of the community, then you don't use it. Maybe at some point you might introduce some sort of AI presence in the community, but I suspect it will be very intentional, service-specific, need-based, and not just, "Let's have robots engage in conversations to make it appear as if there's more going on than there actually is."
RENE: Yeah, on the member side of things, where we believe there is value is, for example, summaries of very long threads. You're going into a post that has fifteen replies back and forth, and for people to quickly catch up, an AI summary is an obvious place where AI can provide value on the member side. But again, as you said, it's about being very selective of where it adds value and where it's a distraction.
KUMAR: Yeah, for sure, that makes a lot of sense. In the case of the course we developed, the AI is not in the platform at all. We're not using Circle, although that's something I'm going to explore after this conversation, because we don't have any AI-enabled features for the admin side in the platform we use, or at least if it's there, it's not to the level of what you're describing Circle does for the admin. But we did embed AI, and agents, as a complement to the course itself, so people could start experimenting with some of the techniques we're teaching. That's proved to be really useful for them, and for us, because we're seeing the theory come to life. They're actually using it in the real world, for example, to figure out how to write stakeholder maps, journey maps, or impact maps for their real work. Light bulbs are going off, and it's generating a lot of really good conversation inside the platform.
RENE: Nice. I think the other angle, and everybody's still wrapping their head around what this really means because it's also new, is that there's the more obvious angle of, "I'm doing things in the community with the help of AI." That's kind of the obvious place to start. But I think where we've arrived is a place where you can have a value-added, consultative conversation with the AI about your community and ask for ideas, insights, best practices. "Look at my members, what do you see? What should I do next? What are some of the patterns you observe? Where should I focus?" So not only is the AI able to execute things on behalf of the user, but ultimately it can provide really valuable feedback and become like a partner or coach in the process of running a community, adding real context and value based on Circle's combined experience that someone new to running a community might not have yet. "What should I do, how should I approach this?" The more consultative, insight-oriented approach is also very interesting. It still comes back to "I can do things in the community," but it's a different mode of working with it.
KUMAR: Yeah, for sure, makes sense. Rene, your role fuses product and engineering into one seat. You play what most companies split into two separate roles. The company I'm working for keeps them separate, and they agree on everything but align on nothing, so nothing really gets done. What does owning both actually change about the decisions you make and the speed at which you make them?
RENE: Yeah, maybe a caveat first: every organization is different in terms of size, culture, the products they run, and their history. There's no one-size-fits-all, so whatever works at Circle may not translate well to other organizations. And I'm a little biased in that my background is a bit more product than technology. But when I think about this question, ultimately, technology and product aim to solve a problem for the user, the customer, with technology that at the same time still creates value for the company. That's ultimately the mission. With that, I think the focus on the product, the solution, makes a lot of sense. Technology is still incredibly important, and there are new capabilities almost every day, that's all super important. But at the end of the day, it's about solving the problem of the user, and how we package this technology and put it to use with the goal of solving that particular problem. Technical capabilities on their own, in isolation, don't necessarily create value. So in my role, I'm focused more on the why and the what, but at the same time, it's a very symbiotic relationship. I need to work very closely with my technology leaders because we have to work together, we have to all contribute to the same mission in order to succeed. And by the way, there's one more party at the table we haven't talked about yet: design. That's another key participant, but maybe that's a different topic. In terms of product and technology, we take a pretty pragmatic approach, but we also can't ignore aspects like performance, security, maintainability, quality, and so forth. So whatever decisions I make in this environment, I need to live with the consequences as well, and I'm very aware of what that means. Ultimately, I think product and technology, regardless of how you structure it organizationally, need to be a high-trust, collaborative partnership with the ultimate goal of user value creation. And lastly, in terms of speed, yes, Circle is definitely moving quite fast, and we can't afford to make the perfect decision and overanalyze. Obviously, we can't be rash either in how we approach things, but we like to keep our options open and think about extensibility with regard to product and technology. So we're thinking two or three moves ahead, but we're still releasing an MVP and reacting to feedback. It's a delicate dance, but I think we're all aligned, including our engineering partners, on what we're trying to accomplish. And as the leader of product and engineering, I have to keep both in mind. I can't weigh too much on one side or the other, because ultimately we both have to deliver, and design feeds into that as well, as a component of the solution we're creating.
KUMAR: So maybe it's more that you're in the role you're in because you're able to bring these different perspectives to the table, and you're already aligned on the direction, the vision the product is meant to take in service of the user experience in Circle. Your role, though it combines product and engineering, is more that you're the conduit through which these perspectives come together, and you collaborate toward a shared outcome.
RENE: Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we approach a new feature, a new project, we need to have a very healthy relationship with my technology leaders. I need to be able to go and say, "Here's what we're thinking about, what does this look like from an engineering perspective?" And they need to be able to come back to me and say, "You're crazy," or, "We can't do this, the timeline doesn't make sense." So we have a back and forth to arrive at something that's desirable from a product perspective, feasible from an engineering perspective, and usable from a design perspective, all of those things. It's definitely a negotiation, it can't just be pushed down in record time. You can do that for some period of time, but you're going to burn out people, create a poor product experience, and probably create a lot of technical debt. That won't work for more than a year or two, and then it'll crumble. So a really healthy relationship in support of a common goal is really important here.
KUMAR: And I guess the lesson for companies where these roles are actually different people is that it's about alignment more than anything else. You can agree on any number of things, but if you're not aligned, the agreement is just surface level, because it doesn't surface the conflict that may be underneath. So it's better to strive for alignment on what the goal is and how you can get there together, rather than, "Oh yeah, that looks good," and walking away to do something completely different.
RENE: Yeah, absolutely.
KUMAR: All right, so again, you've alluded to this in the conversation so far: Circle ships faster than any team you've ever seen, and somehow without building a Frankenstein. Most people will tell you that speed that high always creates a mess, a lot of technical debt and things like that. What are you doing, and you've alluded to some of this, but maybe there's something deeper here, what are you doing that lets you move fast without the product falling apart?
RENE: Yeah, it's hard to answer, because it's almost like asking a high-performing basketball team to describe the chemistry they have in order to make it repeatable for other teams. You can certainly get to some answers, but at the end of the day, there's some secret sauce there. Circle, of course, isn't perfect, but there are some key ingredients that come together within our organization that allow us to do this reasonably well. One is that we have a unique combination of leadership, and the culture and tone they create. They combine technical, product, and design backgrounds very effectively, which is maybe an unusual constellation. They're not just visionaries, they're people who can also sweat the details, get into the weeds if needed, and yet they still allow the teams to make decisions and delegate as needed. They're systems thinkers and designers with great product sense. And we're ensuring consistency across a fairly large app to avoid Conway's law. And maybe another anti-pattern I've seen in other organizations: we're not building one-off features just for one customer. That's probably the quickest road to a Frankenstein. The way we approach product is more that we're trying to think six, twelve, twenty-four months ahead at any point in time. We have a vision of where we want to go, and we're moving toward that vision. But on the more practical side, we have really fantastic engineers who combine great technical skills, communication, coordination, and ownership, but also product sense, which is really helpful. We have shared infrastructure and architecture with a shared design system, which ensures consistency while multiple teams have their fingers in the pot, so to speak. And on that angle, it's important that you want to enable teams to ship fast on their own, make them almost independent, and remove outside dependencies. As an agile coach, I'm sure you talk about dependencies a lot, and enabling teams to ship fast. But at the same time, you can't go overboard on this, because ultimately whatever is being created still needs to fit into the larger whole. So there needs to be the right balance: the team can ship fast, but how do you ensure consistency across teams, and what mechanisms can you create to still ensure cross-team coordination and collaboration? It's a tricky balance, and that certainly takes some tweaking and optimization. And then lastly, Circle is shipping fast, but ultimately the things we're shipping fit into larger Circle iterations and life cycles. So it's almost like you get a reset. With Eclipse, in essence, it's a bit of a reset, a new starting point for the product. It's like a macro cycle. We internally started referring to this as Circle 4.0. There was a Circle 3.0 before it. I think those bigger iterations, every few years, combine a number of different things. It's almost like you have a reset point, and anything that's gone a little off the rails and started to drift, you can reset back as you're starting the next macro iteration. And then you still have to listen to customer feedback, and we're going to make mistakes and fix those. But the combination of all these factors, I think, has allowed us to move very fast. We call it product velocity, more so than agile velocity, we're not trying to run a feature factory. It's really about rapid impact on the product, on our customers, that's what we're aiming for. We're getting a few things wrong, but overall it's been successful, even though the organization has grown quite a bit from just two years ago. So the cultural aspects and leadership are still important, they're the glue that holds it all together and creates that common foundation.
KUMAR: That's fantastic. You mentioned impact, I'm sure you have things in place to measure the impact of what you're delivering for your customers, your Circle customers. What does that cycle look like? How do you decide, in your next micro or even macro cycle, these are the areas we want to get to, and these are the kinds of impact we're looking to achieve, both for the company and the customer?
RENE: Yeah, certainly more art than science. I think in ten organizations you'll find ten different versions of this complicated dance. You're trying to combine vision and long-term product strategy with short-term feedback, with bugs coming in, and thinking about how to act on all of these things. We're certainly listening to our customers a lot, getting feedback from our customer success team, our support team. We have a customer community where our customers interact with us. We have mechanisms in the product to get feedback, and we're combining this with quantitative data on how people are using AI, how people are using the product. I personally love to poke around in the database and get some quantitative information there. But ultimately, it's an art form to bring all of that together and combine it with the vision for the product. And we've elected to do quarterly planning, not in the SAFe sense, more in the sense of coming together with leadership, product, and engineering, and trying to map out the quarter, look at our different priorities and the feedback we've received so far, and come up with a reasonable plan for how we're approaching the next quarter. That happens at the team level, but in some cases, multiple teams need to be on the same page in terms of priorities, to deliver on something larger. Circle AI, or Eclipse, has been one of those efforts where you need almost the whole company, the whole engineering organization, to be in sync to deliver it, because it's not just one team's responsibility, it's cross-cutting. So the quarterly plans were set so that all teams were focusing on this at the same time. Again, a very interesting problem to solve.
KUMAR: Yeah, for sure. And you're right, it's more art than science, but it seems like you're doing the right things to measure the success of your product velocity. And it's not just velocity, it's also the impact that velocity is providing you and your customers, ultimately. I suppose, I don't know if this is the way you're going, but using AI to look at how customers are using the community tools and which tools are getting more use, and maybe AI isn't needed for some of those things. People were doing that twenty years ago, analyzing which features got more attention. I remember a story about Gmail being in beta for eight or ten years or so, while Google analyzed which features of Gmail people used most and which ones they didn't, and that shaped the product strategy for the tool that was finally released. But it was in beta for years, and millions of people used it in the meantime. Another example would be the mislabeled "full self-driving" from Tesla. We're all the testers, people like me who own a Tesla, and it's certainly not full self... well, it's close, it's pretty impressive, but they can't call it that. So now it's "full self-driving, supervised."
RENE: Yeah, I think on the note of testing, and I didn't mention this earlier, depending on the size of the project or feature we're introducing, we're also trying to get early feedback loops going. We might release something internally to our own community, or to a small set of partners, or we might have an alpha with a relatively small group, expanding into a beta and gathering feedback, iterating. By the time a GA launch happens, we've already gone through multiple iterations and refinements before the general public even sees it. So that's another mechanism we look at, based on the technical risk, the product risk. It's part of getting something refined enough to confidently launch it to everyone.
KUMAR: Very interesting. So for a leader listening to this podcast who runs a community, or is thinking about starting one, or maybe isn't even thinking about a community, it's really more about product strategy and how to evolve a product from nothing into something that has impact, maybe with or without AI. What's the first move they should make with AI that gives them time back without taking away from the human element?
RENE: Yeah, so I'm hoping they're on Circle, because we're the first AI-native platform. If they're on a different platform, I'm not sure how much AI will help them, but if they're on Circle, really get help figuring out what the community should look like, the structure, the plans, the subscriptions, memberships, the products, the pricing, and either set it up accordingly or adjust it. With Circle AI, you can have these consultative conversations now, which is really cool, that bring a lot of that knowledge from Circle to bear. And we talked a little bit about the operational stuff, so use that as much as possible to reduce the drag on your time and get some headspace back to focus on creating value, engaging members, that kind of stuff. And I mentioned the consultative insights you can get from AI, but really use it as a thought partner, ask it, "What do you see? What can I do next? What are some best practices I need to follow?" Or, "I have a sense something's going on, can you look at the details and analyze this for me, come back with it, and then partner with me on whether this is something I need to address, and if so, how do I address it, what are the things I need to do?" So it becomes more of a business and community advisor. And nowadays, you even have an MCP with Circle, so you can do this in the tool of your choosing, or certainly in Circle AI, which has more of the Circle context. At the end of the day, AI or not, for somebody leading a community, it's really about engaging members, providing value, not just in terms of content, but also being a catalyst for members' transformations and helping people connect, emphasizing the human aspect. I think that's probably what one could consider the lifeblood of a community. Those are the key things that come to mind.
KUMAR: That makes a lot of sense. We're getting to almost the forty-minute mark. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you'd like to share about Circle, about community building in general, anything at all?
RENE: No, I think we covered a lot of ground, so I don't know if you had any other aspects you wanted to drill into. I'm happy to, there's so much.
KUMAR: It's just, in the interest of time, we probably should cut this one short and invite you back, if you're open to it, for another conversation on other topics related to community building, to AI, there are so many tangents we could go through. What is it that's important about a community that makes people want to join, how do you create that pull for people wanting to join a particular community, and then how do you keep them there? I'd love to explore some of those questions, maybe in a follow-up conversation, if you're okay with that.
RENE: Yeah, absolutely, happy to chat.
KUMAR: All right, awesome. Well, Rene, thank you so much for getting on the show and sharing your perspectives on AI, on community building, on product. The collaboration that needs to be central to any product strategy between product, engineering, design, architecture, those three stools, right, feasibility... I forget how you put it, usability, and something else, I don't remember what the third one was. But those are really important things to think about, whether it's one person sitting in the chair or three people who have a voice. Ultimately, it's about bringing those perspectives together and gaining alignment. So I appreciate your time and your sharing. Thanks, everyone.
RENE: Thanks for having me.
KUMAR: Sure, bye-bye.
