Community is more than a channel.
It's your product, insights, and growth engine.
Most companies treat community as one lane—a Discord, a Slack group, events. Then they wonder why it stalls.
Community compounds when it informs customer experience — sitting across product, marketing, service, and success, surfacing insights and introductions you can't get anywhere else, and turning your most engaged users into your most powerful growth lever. Like a town square with a roundabout. I design the network and the intersections.
I'm Tim Courtney.
I was on the founding team of LEGO® Ideas — we turned a fan community into a $100M product line, a talent pipeline, and a marketing engine with authentic stories that outperformed paid ads and company-driven PR combined.
I've spent over 20 years at the intersection of community, product, and growth. I help companies design the streets their users actually walk, not the highways they wish people would take.
Roundabout is how I work with you. Thoughtfully designed intersections, engineered for continuous flow.
How We Work Together
Private Keynote
The on-ramp.
The inside story of how LEGO® IDEAS went from a fan experiment to a $100M product line.
Story — How a community of passionate creators became LEGO’s most unexpected product engine, and what almost went wrong along the way.
Frameworks — How to develop co-creation models, map stakeholders, engage, capture, and integrate value from your most engaged users.
Q&A — A rich discussion of your real questions and problems, paired with my perspective and experience.
Outcome: An inspired team, and the frameworks they can apply Monday morning.
On-site or virtual. Customized sessions with extended discovery and a written debrief also available.
User & Community Research
Better signals, better decisions.
Research that ignores communities ignores the context in which your most valuable customers exist.
I design research programs that surface what your most engaged users actually need — quantitative, qualitative, and segmentation work your product and marketing teams can act on — and a program to leverage voice of community in your ongoing work.
Outcome: A research foundation and program that continuously delivers rich insights to your product and marketing teams.
Community Product Strategy
Desire lines pave the roadmap.
Stop making product decisions based on support tickets and NPS scores. Shift gears toward your community voice.
I help you design community-led product teams — connected to your roadmap, research, service, success, and your growth model.
Outcome: An integrated community strategy your board will fund, connected to your product and revenue engines.
Community Leadership Advisory
A protected lane for your community leader.
I don’t manage communities. I make the people managing your community more effective.
Helping them think in systems, measure what matters, and earn a seat at the product table.
Coaching — Weekly coaching calls.
Access — Async access with 24 hour response for perspective and decision support.
Co-working — Two days per month, side-by-side as your design and execution partner.
Outcome: A community leader who operates like a product strategist — and a team that knows what to build next.
Are we a fit?
Yes, if you're
An established company with $1M+ ARR that's decided community matters enough to resource it properly.
You're in the role of Head of Community, Head of Product, or a founder who knows that your most engaged users are an underleveraged asset.
You're ready to move.
No, if you are
A pre-revenue startup still finding product-market fit.
Looking for hands-on community management. I develop community leaders, I don't replace them.
Early-stage startups
We love you, and can work with you once you have revenue and traction.
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What People Say
“Tim Courtney is an incredibly resourceful leader who finds creative ways to help folks both understand challenges and sign up to help implement high impact solutions.”
“Tim is a talented community leader who understands the workings of driving business growth through developing and scaling global communities and platforms. His expertise in the creator economy and community-led growth initiatives have driven impressive, measurable results. Anyone fortunate enough to collaborate with Tim will immediately recognize his ability to drive innovation, inspire teams, and deliver exceptional results.”
“Tim was a valuable part of our customer research and interview process, especially in terms of creating repeatable processes we could use in multiple interviews.”
“You have truly left your mark in the history books of the LEGO Group and specifically those of LEGO Ideas.”
“Tim has the skill and ability to be your personal consigliere or sponsor advocate. Working with Tim whether to flesh out an idea, create a plan, turn it into actionable steps, or simply share knowledge is invaluable. You want to have him in your sandbox.”
“I worked with Tim on LEGO Ideas, one of the world's largest crowdsourced open innovation communities. That Tim was able to do this with a small, part-time team, and maintain such a tremendously high standard of responsiveness and content quality, is nothing short of superhuman. The thriving LEGO Ideas community has led to several very successful LEGO products, and Tim has been a key contributor to the entire process.”
Interested? Put your blinker on.
30 minutes. Tell me where you're headed, and we'll map a route together.
Listen to
The Roundabout Show
Conversations at the intersection of creators,
community, and customer experience.
The Roundabout Show with Tim Courtney talks with creators, builders, designers, and leaders about what happens when you design for trust, participation, and belonging — and why the companies and communities that do it well produce results that nothing else can replicate.
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About Tim Courtney
Tim Courtney surfaces the most valuable signals and relationships hidden in plain sight in your user communities — and connects them to your product, insights, and growth engines.
He's spent 20 years doing this across open source, developer conferences, early-stage startups, and at The LEGO Group, where he was on the founding team of LEGO® IDEAS — scaling it to a million members and $100M in community-driven products. He's also led user research and program design for LEGO's BrickLink peer-to-peer marketplace.