Category: Community

I Was Hired by Microsoft as a Director of Community

On August 10th, I started a new role with Microsoft as a Director of Community, ending a six month job hunt that eventually I’ll write about. The LinkedIn announcement got a lot of attention (140K impressions as of today) which was fun to see! 🙌

One point of confusion is that I was hired as a Director of Community, not the Director of Community; there’s an assumption that somehow I am overseeing everything that Microsoft does with communities which is not the case. I’ve had people ask me if I can help fix/improve/change a variety of Microsoft community programs, and I’ve had to tell them all that I’m not involved with any of those communities. 🤷 Director at Microsoft is a title not that different from Amazon’s Principal manager, and I’m currently an individual contributor. I hope to be at Microsoft for many years to come!

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Chatting Community with AWS User Group Ecuador

Last weekend I had a chance to connect with Gabriel Torres for an AWS User Group Ecuador live event! We discussed a variety of topics including all the usual “why community” ones, along with a few hot-button AI topics.


🌎 If you’re in/around Ecuador in early September, be sure to attend their AWS Community Day. As I explain in the video, connecting with other people and building your learning network is one of the most important things you can do for your career and well-being.

This will very likely be the last AWS-related event I do as I start a new job pretty soon, and it’s not with Amazon… 😉

I Was a Guest on the Day Two DevOps Podcast

Last month I had a wonderful opportunity to be on the Day Two DevOps podcast and talk with 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈 Kyler Middleton and Ned Bellavance about community management, how community works in the AI era — including the impossible challenge of detecting AI-created content — and some delightful topic side quests, including the first public sharing of my vibe-coded solution for movie collecting that has been tremendously effective at draining my wallet. 😅

💖 I had a lot of fun connecting with these two great people and I encourage you to give it a listen/watch.

I Was a Guest on Gainsight’s UNCHURNED Podcast

🎤 Back in May I was a guest on the Gainsight podcast, “Unchurned”, with host Josh Schachter and the episode went live recently.

We had an excellent conversation about building communities, the importance of the tone early members set, and how metrics that matter to community program managers — such as community active rate — might have no relevance to senior leaders. Community managers need to be prepared to answer the “So what?” question and point to metrics that impact team goals.


You can also listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if that’s your thing! Here’s a summary from the Gainsight blog post:

Two hands. A free Slack channel. A spreadsheet. That was the entire toolkit when AWS asked Jason Dunn to build a developer community.

Jason Dunn spent five years on building something people actually want to belong to. He grew a developer community into thousands of members spread across more than a hundred countries, working with far less budget and tooling than you’d expect.

This conversation digs into what separates a living community from a glorified contact list. Why your earliest members carry so much weight. When to keep the door open and when to guard it. How to prove value when your best wins resist a dashboard. Why technical people walk the second something smells like a pitch. And how one small, slightly absurd reward became a badge people chased for months. A Real talk on getting people to show up for each other.

The Builder Story: Featuring Me!

I had a wonderful opportunity to be on a video podcast (these things need a new name now that they’re all videos) with my friend and ex-AWS co-worker Shafraz Rahim.

We talked for a little bit over an hour about building communities, how I approached building the AWS Community Builders program during my six years at AWS, as well as the unceremonious exit 🫠 that I underwent in January and the way the community reacted.


I’ve had the opportunity to be on a few of these in the past couple of months, so this is the first of three that I’ll be sharing here.