Rick Ling: Inside How Discord Builds Products and Communities
Product principles and examples from Discord's ex-Head of Community Product
Level up your product and creator skills in just 5 min a week. Join 57,000+ readers:
Dear subscribers,
How does one of the world’s most popular community platforms build products?
Rick Ling was the Head of Community Product at Discord for 4+ years. I spoke to him about:
How Discord builds products
How to build a great Discord community
Let’s dive in.
This post is brought to you by…Typedream
Typedream lets you launch a website and sell an online product in less than 10 min. You can sell digital products, newsletters, courses, and even services all in one place.
Sign up to try Typedream for free below and get a chance to win $100 each to help you start your online creator business.
How Discord builds products
Welcome Rick. Can you give us an inside look at how Discord builds products?
We start by defining the target user, the jobs to be done, and the user’s emotional state.
Our teams are organized around target users (e.g., community admins) instead of feature areas (e.g., discovery) so that each team can build a complete view of the user journey.
Every Discord product team needs to have a clear definition of:
Who is the customer?
What do they care about?
How do we serve them holistically?
Given the variety of communities on Discord, how do you know who to build for?
We have two product principles that help us identify the target user:
All big things start small
Do one or two things well first
An example of this is our video chat feature “Go Live.” Unlike Zoom, our first version didn’t even have screen share. Instead, you could only stream games.
We wanted to nail the narrow use case of “I want to hang out with friends while gaming” first. This focus let us prioritize features like one click to stream games that wouldn’t have been possible if we also had to support screen share.
Nail a narrow use case for a specific user first and then expand outwards.
Can you share another example where you solved a target user’s needs holistically?
Sure. “It just works” is another principle of ours.
When we launched AutoMod (our content moderation system), we knew that admins and mods had already spent a lot of time building keyword lists in spreadsheets.
So we took extra care to make it seamless for admins to copy their keyword lists into our editor. We even made sure that the words would be formatted correctly by default.
New features should simplify existing workflows instead of creating more work.
Discord has also built a strong 3rd party ecosystem of bots and integrations. How do decide what to build 1st party vs. 3rd party?
We follow the principle of “Build primitives” for our 1st party features so that others can build tools on top of them. Discord wouldn’t be where it is today without our 3rd party developers and community of admins and mods.
I’m a big believer in community-led product development. How does Discord build with the community?
We want our PMs to either run their own community or talk to admins and mods in one of our Discord feedback servers. The entire product team hangs out in these servers to socialize with users.
I think that’s the best way to build user empathy.
Has Discord added more processes to talk to users as the company scaled?
No, I’m not a fan of that stuff. I think it’s a massive disadvantage to not get regular customer input on what you’re building.
Jason (our CEO and founder) sets the example in this area.
Can you tell me more about Jason and Stan’s leadership style?
I think they have different superpowers:
Jason is incredibly customer-obsessed.
If you pitch a new feature and only communicate the business opportunity without also highlighting how a normal Discord user can benefit, Jason just won’t buy it.
Stan is an amazing systems and first-principles thinker. He's able to come up with elegant solutions to complex problems. He also leads with empathy and does the actual work instead of only speaking in hypotheticals. That leadership style has worked well for the engineering culture at the company.
How to build a great Discord community
How can someone build a great Discord community? I think Discord is great for small communities but a bit noisy for larger ones.
I personally don’t think that every community is a good fit for Discord.