Get Together: How to Build a Community with Your People
A practical guide to community building from people who did it at Instagram's early community team and studied it across dozens of other contexts — from running clubs to open source projects to neighbourhood groups.
The book is structured around three phases: sparking the community, stoking participation, and passing the torch to member-leaders.
It is short, concrete, and built on interviews with community leaders rather than abstract theory.
For product directors, the relevance is direct: every product with a user base faces the question of whether it has a community or merely an audience, and the difference determines retention, feedback quality, and long-term defensibility.
Richardson, Huynh, and Sotto avoid the mistake of treating community as a growth hack and instead treat it as a relationship that requires genuine investment and eventual decentralisation.
Central argument
Richardson, Huynh, and Sotto argue that communities are not audiences that happen to be engaged, but intentional relationships built through three distinct phases: sparking a shared identity around a specific activity or purpose, stoking participation through rituals and recurring touchpoints, and deliberately passing leadership to members so the community survives beyond its founders. The central thesis is that community health depends on decentralisation — a group that requires its creators to sustain it is fragile, whereas one that produces its own leaders compounds over time. Drawing on real practitioners rather than theory, the book treats community-building as a craft with learnable patterns, not a byproduct of product growth.
Critique
The book's grounding in communities built around passion and identity — running clubs, open source projects, neighbourhood groups — creates a selection bias toward cases where participants opted in voluntarily and share a clear common purpose. This makes the framework harder to apply to product communities where the user base is heterogeneous, the shared identity is weak or manufactured, and commercial incentives on the company's side create asymmetries of trust that the authors largely set aside. The advice to 'pass the torch' also assumes a community mature enough to have emergent leaders, but the book offers limited guidance on what to do when early communities stall before reaching that stage.
Why it matters for product
For a product director, the book's distinction between audience and community is a strategic diagnostic: a large active user base that cannot self-organise, generate peer support, or produce advocates without company intervention is a retention liability, not an asset, and no engagement metric will reveal this until churn accelerates. The three-phase model maps onto product decisions with real resource implications — community infrastructure (forums, events, rituals) requires sustained investment in roles that sit uncomfortably between product, marketing, and operations, and leadership teams frequently under-resource this precisely because its ROI is lagged and indirect. The emphasis on decentralisation also challenges the instinct to keep community management centralised for brand control, pushing product directors to ask whether their governance model is building dependency or genuine member ownership.