I started my career as a project and programs manager, then later worked at a few startups doing customer success, support, and developing customer journeys. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was the beginning of my professional community work. I was responsible for putting together customer events, figuring out support to scale, and helping our customers be the most successful using our products by providing an online forum where they can share tips and stories with one another, and where our team could also jump in and help where needed. It was during this time that I also became an active member of the Salesforce Trailblazer Community.

I had implemented Salesforce a few times by then and relied heavily on the community for help learning all of the things, from implementation to customizations to training/enablement. I adored the community and the product, so when I saw an opening for a Program Manager on the Salesforce Trailblazer Community team, I knew that was where I wanted to be.

As time continued on, I found myself focused less on things like community engagement, moderation, and being interactive on a daily basis with our community members, and more on time doing things behind the scenes. I was creating project plans for upcoming commununity events and programs. I was setting up our tech stack and tools for both the team and our community members to use. I was setting up reports and dashboards and circulating them to relevant stakeholders. I was finding inefficiencies and figuring out ways to move faster and more automated. I was getting feedback from community members on how they navigate the tools and resources we provide them. These were the things that were the start of my love for community operations, that perfect balance between front and back of the house activities for community. Internally I was hearing more of, “Tiff will handle the operations,” and I leaned into that.

After almost four years at Salesforce, I was recruited to join Venafi, a company that has been around for a long time but had not yet built a community. The opportunity to build a community from scratch for an established company was intriguing to me. Getting to experience the community space outside of the Salesforce bubble was exhilerating – I had no idea how many community tools and platforms there were, and I also absolutely loved meeting other community builders in the industry. It was around this time I also met Cassie Mayes, who was doing community ops for the Atlassian community team, and it was an “Aha” moment when we realized we were not the only ones of our kind, so we started Community OPServations, a community for community operations people. We hold monthly meetings and share best practices and knowledge with one another, and we now have over 300 members. I’ve made it a point to try and give community operations a name – I write content, created a course dedicated to commops hosted by CSchool, assist with creating job descriptions for teams looking to hire a community operations person, and speak at conferences and on podcasts to educate and spread awareness to others in the industry.

Around this time, I also started doing some strategic consulting work with Talkbase, a startup that was focused on building a community operations tool. It started as providing some feedback on their product and their roadmap, but then evolved to a deeper level of engagement, when I worked on re-launching their community and launching some community programs. I truly enjoyed working with the team and had a strong belief in the product, so when I was affected by layoffs and my position at Venafi was eliminated, I was asked to join full-time as COO at Talkbase.

Getting to be COO allows me to continue to guide the direction and establish operational excellence throughout the company, but I also have the pleasure and privilege of leading the Talkbase Friends Community team. It allows me to expand my scope and still be highly involved in both the community and the community ops space.