Pipeline Community Builder

Executive Summary

Core objective: Grow Pipeline’s engineering community.

Purpose: Create commercial value for Pipeline by increasing our visibility, credibility, relationships, and access to engineers and engineering leaders—ultimately generating more opportunities from paying customers.

Your job is not to sell Pipeline’s engineering services. Your job is to make the community much bigger, more active, and more valuable.

The Problem We Need You to Solve

Pipeline has already built several community platforms, events, and media channels:

• The Wave — engineering community, resources, education, jobs, and tools: thewave.engineer
• Being An Engineer Podcast — 250 conversations with high-performing engineers: teampipeline.us/being-an-engineer-podcast
• PDX — Product Development Expo — engineering and product-development expo: pdexpo.engineer
• PDX Webinars — online technical education and industry content: thewave.engineer/product-development-expo/pdx-webinars
• Phoenix Hardware Meetups — local gatherings for engineers and people building physical products: luma.com/Phoenix-hardware-meetup
• CAD Club — CAD, engineering, and mentorship for young people: teampipeline.us/cadclub
• The Alliance — a network of engineering and manufacturing companies built around collaboration, referrals, education, and growth: thealliance.engineer

The proverbial flywheel is already moving. Now we need someone to figure out how to make it spin much faster.

How do we attract more engineers? How do we create events they genuinely value? How do we reach more engineering leaders? How do we grow PDX into a substantially bigger event? How do these channels reinforce one another? And what opportunities are we missing entirely?

We are looking for someone intelligent, creative, resourceful, and entrepreneurial enough to help answer those questions—and then make the answers real.

Why We’re Building This

Pipeline’s core business is helping companies solve difficult product, process, and production engineering problems. Our community gives us a way to build relationships and credibility with the people and companies we ultimately want to serve. Pipeline already positions these community efforts as an extension of its broader mission to support engineers beyond its core engineering services.

There are several ways we believe a larger community can create commercial value:

• Build awareness, trust, and credibility for Pipeline.
• Develop relationships with engineering leaders who can ultimately send commercial opportunities to Pipeline.
• Reach individual engineers who can recommend Pipeline within their organizations.
• Create a recruiting network for Pipeline employees and contractors.
• Create a broader engineering talent pool that can help other companies hire.
• Increase the value of the Alliance by giving its members access and exposure to a larger engineering audience, strengthening the Alliance referral engine.
• Provide the audience, relationships, and infrastructure that could eventually help Pipeline replicate itself through local chapters, operators, partners, or similar models.
• Create valuable opportunities we simply cannot see yet.

We do not assume we already understand every way a large engineering community might become commercially useful. Part of the strategy is to build the asset first and learn what becomes possible as it grows.

What You’ll Own

Your primary responsibility is simply to grow the community.

You will architect and manage marketing campaigns, organize in-person and virtual events, develop partnerships, recruit speakers and exhibitors, promote content, manage outreach, and continually experiment with new ways to increase participation.

A major part of the job will be understanding why someone should participate in the first place. We want to use a Jobs to Be Done mindset: What problem is an engineer solving by attending this event? What do they learn? Who do they meet? What useful outcome makes the experience worth their time?

You will also help us create more programming specifically for engineering leaders. Those relationships are particularly valuable because managers, directors, VPs, founders, and technical leaders are often the people who ultimately decide when to engage companies like Pipeline.

PDX will be an important focus. We want more attendees, more exhibitors, better programming, more attractions, more awareness, and more reasons for engineers to consider it an event they should not miss.

Most importantly, you will look across all of these platforms as one ecosystem rather than a collection of independent projects. A podcast guest might become a PDX speaker. A meetup attendee might join The Wave. An Alliance member might host a webinar. A community member might become a Pipeline employee. A relationship created anywhere in the system might eventually become a customer.

What Success Looks Like

The primary scorecard is refreshingly straightforward:

• Grow The Wave membership.
• Grow Being An Engineer downloads and audience.
• Grow PDX attendance and exhibitors.
• Grow PDX webinar attendance.
• Grow attendance at local and virtual events.
• Grow participation from engineering leaders.
• Grow overall engagement across the ecosystem.

Higher numbers mean we are making progress. Stagnation means we need to change something.

Pipeline leadership will separately measure the downstream commercial impact: community-generated opportunities, project revenue, referrals, recruiting outcomes, Alliance growth, partnerships, and other value created from the network.

You will not be responsible for closing those opportunities.

You will be responsible for creating the audience, relationships, and visibility from which they emerge.

Who We’re Looking For

We care more about how you think than whether you have held this exact job before.

We want someone who is intelligent, creative, resourceful, entrepreneurial, organized, analytical, comfortable building relationships, and capable of turning ideas into things that actually happen. We also need someone who is able to attend local events in-person, occasionally in the evenings, as well as come into the office on occasion.

This is not primarily a social media job, event coordinator job, or traditional marketing job. You will use all of those tools, but the real assignment is broader: Take the community and visibility engines Pipeline has already started building and figure out how to scale them.

You will have guidance and strategic involvement from Pipeline leadership, but we do not want to hand you a task list every Monday. We want you increasingly taking the reins and identifying what should happen next.

One Question for You

Imagine we hand you The Wave, a 350 episode engineering podcast, PDX, PDX webinars, CAD Club, the Alliance, and a growing series of engineering meetups. They all have some momentum, but none has reached anything close to its potential. Your job is to dramatically grow their reach and participation. What would you do during your first 90 days?

If that question immediately gets your wheels turning, reach out to Aaron Moncur personally (LinkedIn DM, email, etc). We will not be checking applications submitted on LinkedIn, so if you are genuinely interested in this role please reach out directly to Aaron.