BUILD
Build what customers need.
Turn customer intelligence and business goals into experiences that get customers to value quickly, identify what works, and make that success repeatable.
CUSTOMER SYSTEMS
Build what customers value.Scale what drives the business.
I find the gaps between what customers value and experience versus what businesses promise and deliver—and build the systems that close them.
Let’s TalkWHAT ARE CUSTOMER SYSTEMS?
Customer systems connect customers and the business.
Customers generate valuable signals every day through what they ask, do, struggle with, contribute, and share.
But those signals are often fragmented across community, Customer Success, Product, Marketing, Support, content, events, and technology.
Customer systems create the structure that connects those signals to the people who can act on them—and turns customer participation into value for customers and the business.
Depending on the problem, that system might include community, advocacy, onboarding, enablement, content, customer experience, workflows, technology, AI—or several working together.
Growth exposes the gaps.
What worked at one stage of growth doesn’t always work at the next.
The systems, relationships, and customer expectations that once worked begin to strain.
Teams grow and specialize. Information gets trapped between functions. Programs become harder to operate. Technology creates new possibilities—and new complexity.
The gap between what customers value and what the business delivers gets harder to see.
That’s where customer signal matters.
What are customers telling you? What are they doing? Where are they struggling? What do they know that your teams need to hear?
The challenge isn’t just capturing that signal. It’s getting it across organizational boundaries and turning it into action.
That’s the work I do.
THE CUSTOMER SYSTEM
Customer participation creates value when the right people can act on it.
A customer system connects participation and signal to intelligence, action, and measurable value—and keeps learning from what happens next.
PARTICIPATION
What customers ask, share, do, and contribute
SIGNAL
What their behavior and feedback reveal
INTELLIGENCE
What those signals mean
ACTION
What the business builds, changes, or preserves
VALUE + OUTCOMES
What improves for customers and the business
↖OUTCOMES CREATE NEW PARTICIPATION↙
SCALE
Scale what’s working.
Create the structure, systems, and feedback loops that make growth possible while preserving customer trust.
FIX
Find the real problem before you build the wrong solution.
Question the assumptions, follow the customer signal, and find where the experience and the promise have diverged to determine what needs to change.
Diagnose before you prescribe.
Understand how you got here, what’s happening now, and where you need to go before deciding what to build, change, or preserve.
Look across the entire customer experience—from acquisition and conversion through activation, retention, and advocacy—to understand what customers value, where they encounter friction, and where content, events, relationships, and customer expertise can create value.
Then determine what needs to change.
The solution might involve community, advocacy, content, enablement, customer experience, workflows, technology, AI—or several working together.
The problem determines the mechanism.
SELECTED WORK
Different problems. The same discipline.
BUILD
Chia Network
Chia had significant technical expertise in its community, but new contributors needed a more streamlined path to using GitHub and experienced members who could mentor them along the way.
I built their first Champions program from 0-to-1, creating the system for recruiting and training community members who could mentor new contributors, answer questions, and reduce pressure on Support.
The result was a repeatable path for members to learn, contribute, and succeed—while turning expertise already in the community into capacity for the business.
90% Champion retention • 2× volunteer pool • 50% faster time to first GitHub PR
BUILD + SCALE
Techstars
Techstars needed a gated community for more than 1,000 accelerator alumni—and a junior team with no previous community-building experience needed to deliver it while juggling competing priorities.
I led the team from discovery through deployment using a sprint-based approach as we designed, tested, and refined the UX, navigation, onboarding, and member experience. The broader company became beta testers, creating an early feedback loop before launch.
The community launched in six weeks, five months ahead of schedule and within budget.
6-week launch • 5 months ahead of schedule • 1,000 members onboarded • 60% activation • 45% 90-day retention • 76 NPS
FIX
ForgeRock
A once-thriving support community appeared to be languishing. The proposed fix was to bring more employees into the community to answer customer questions and resolve issues before they became support tickets.
Discovery revealed something different: members were comparing approaches, sharing implementation knowledge, exploring products, and learning from one another. It had organically become a community of practice.
I redesigned the experience around the value customers were already creating through peer learning, contribution, knowledge sharing, and member-led programming.
2× membership within one year • Community-generated content consumption grew from 0% to 40% • 15+ practitioner contributors
Listening to customers isn’t the same as understanding what they need.
The signal isn’t always the answer.
The challenge is understanding what’s beneath it—what customers really need but can’t always articulate.
Once you understand and validate what customers need, translate that intelligence so teams know what they need to deliver.
Community and customer advocacy create ways for customers to participate in the business relationship itself—not just receive value from a company, but contribute expertise, ideas, feedback, stories, and support that create value for others.
The work is making sure those contributions reach the teams that can act on them.
Customers need proof that what they shared was heard and acted on—through product improvements, practical content, recognition for their contributions, new and expanded opportunities to participate, and experiences with a clear, fast path to value.
Technology should remove friction, not create more of it.
New technology creates new possibilities. The question is where it can create meaningful value—and whether it’s worth exploring.
I approach technology the same way I approach any challenge or opportunity: understand what you’re trying to accomplish, determine where the technology might create value, validate those assumptions, and decide what’s worth pursuing.
That’s the thinking behind the Community Manager AI Lab, a program I’m building to teach cohorts of community managers how to use AI responsibly in their daily work.
HOW WE CAN WORK TOGETHER
From strategy to a working system.
Build
Build a new customer system, program, or experience from the ground up—from requirements and program design through beta/PoC, testing, iteration, and launch.
Engagements start at $30K.Implement
Already have the strategy? I turn it into an executable system, validating assumptions, identifying gaps, aligning stakeholders, and moving from plan through launch and iteration.
Engagements start at $30K.Manage
Need ongoing senior ownership? I can lead, operate, measure, improve, and continue building the system—with the level of involvement matched to what your organization actually needs.
Fractional engagements available at multiple levels.Systems builder. Connector’s brain.
For 10+ years, I’ve built, scaled, and turned around community, customer advocacy, content, enablement, and customer experience programs across enterprise, startups, and open source B2B SaaS companies.
I build what doesn’t exist yet and find the friction that prevents what’s working well from working better.
I see connections across boundaries: what customers know that Product needs to hear, what Marketing can learn from Customer Success, where technology can remove friction, and where information, ownership, or process is getting in the way.
Then I build the systems that turn those connections into action and make the results visible and measurable.
I work in the space between the customer and the business, strategy and execution, and people and technology—where signals cross boundaries and ideas become systems.
What it’s like to work with me.
“Lori is a genius at designing and operationalizing communities that grow quickly and are extremely active. If you are looking for someone that can build and grow a community that functions as revenue, retention, and a brand loyalty engine, Lori is the right person for you!”
“Lori has a quick mind, broad knowledge, and responsive habits. I've appreciated her edits on my writing, along with her articulate speaking and writing… She's a great cross-functional partner to have.”
“She can take complex ideas and break them down into digestible pieces for others to better understand. She is adept at closing out any project through her persistence and cross functional connections.”
What are you trying to build, scale, or fix?
If you’re creating something new, scaling what’s working, or trying to understand why something isn’t working the way it should, let’s talk.
Let’s Talk