When the idea of companies having ‘public teams’ or ‘spaces’ was first brought up, my mind went to all the ways it could possibly go wrong. But I was also really curious about whether there was any genuine value that organizations could add for our users. So this sparked our first big research and design effort: a 5-day design sprint, attended by a wide range of teams from across the company; product management, community management, product design, engineering, data, product research, and more. 

While Stack Overflow needs paid products in order to operate, we want to do this by adding value to the community, not changing things for the worse. So we settled on the following mission statement for our design sprint: “How might we enable companies to build relationships with the Stack Overflow community in a way that improves Stack Overflow as a resource for developers?”