⚡Ben Lang, Head of Community at Notion
Community Conversations
In This Edition
💗 How Personal Projects Can Shape Professional Paths
📩 What Internal Comms Can Learn from Community
🧱 Consider studying building products to Keep Learning
About Ben
I’ve spent my life hopping between New York, Tel Aviv, and San Francisco. I'm a builder, former founder, and community guy, always in multiple places at one time. I'm currently leading community efforts at Notion. I joined Notion four years ago where I’ve seen the team grow from 15 to 500+. I actively make angel investments and advise a few select startups.
What sparked your path into Community?
I’ve always engaged in community work in different ways. It started as a personal passion. The earliest example is when I moved to Israel after high school. I was trying to meet new people so a friend and I organized the first hack-a-thon in the country. It was a really cool experience to connect with people who wanted to work on interesting projects.
I took the same approach when I served in the Israeli military. I connected soldiers who were interested in tech through events and a newsletter. Years later, when COVID-19 hit, I started a Facebook group with a couple of friends for people to post about their single Jewish friends. It turned into a group of 25,000 people and more than 50 couples have gotten married from it.
Similar to all of these personal stories, professionally, it’s been a similar path. Before I joined Notion, I was obsessed with the product. I began sharing my setup and people were interested in learning more so I started a Facebook group for other users to share how they were using Notion. That's how I met the Notion team and started working here.
What projects are you particularly proud of accomplishing over the years?
On the personal side, I’ll share a fun example first. From the hack-a-thon I hosted in Israel, I decided to try to invent a food holiday! Since I like hummus, I thought it would be fun to have a day to celebrate it. I bought the domain name and actually forgot about it until the holiday went viral on accident! The next year, restaurants joined the celebrations. Over the years, it’s grown in exciting directions — we were on The Ellen Show, Sabra sponsored it, and governments supported it. For me, this is a really cool example of how you can find something that you are passionate about, build an idea and bring people together around it. It was not a business endeavor, but a fulfilling passion.
Professionally, I've been at Notion for four and a half years now. I've seen the company grow quite a bit. With community, we've done things a little bit differently than people might expect. That’s resulted in what people say about us — we hear from people that the Notion community is one of the kindest and most generous communities out there. That’s not the first thing you would think of for a productivity tool, but people really feel that way. Over the past year, I traveled to Peru, Japan and Colombia and met so many Notion users — they are passionate, generous and giving people. It’s been really incredible to be a part of building this with an exceptional team.
What are the skills that are most important for someone to succeed in community?
Empathy and kindness to start. When you're interfacing with people who are so passionate and engaged with what you're doing, sometimes there are challenges or disappointments that arise. It makes a huge difference in how you handle these situations with empathy and kindness.
Creativity and grit are also interesting to consider. It’s such a unique field and so different at every company. You need to be innovative and embracing a builder mentality can make you really successful.
What do you think Internal Communications can learn from community?
While I haven’t worked in internal-facing roles, I can see parallels to it as a version of community building. First, I think curation is key. Find ways to connect people who are passionate about similar interests, and make them feel proud to be connected with the work. Creativity is also important here — I always try to encourage people to do things differently and think outside the box than just the standard work. That can really make a community feel stand out to others.
How do you continue learning about your field?
I like to look a lot of like what people are building with Product Hunt and Hacker News. I enjoy seeing what people are creating and how that can apply to community building in different ways.
There are also a few great groups that gather community professionals for learning, such as The Community Club and CMX Hub.
Thank you for reading The Switchboard. ☎️ Every edition is personally written by me — Julia Levy. Learn more about why I write. Review the Index of past posts.
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As I love hummus, the idea of building a holiday around it is very appealing! Fun interview, Julia!