Just so we get definitions right - Most IT teams in a company are who handle managed devices/software (My company laptop, our internal network, OKTA, is all managed by IT).
Upwork itself is built/owned by our product organization, which is made up of endless teams who work on different portions of Upwork.
Community is a bit unique. We don't fit into the usual structure, and you will find Community sitting under different teams at every organization you look at. Sometimes it is Customer Support, sometimes it is Marketing, and sometimes it is somewhere else entirely, or split between multiple teams.
In our organization, we now sit within Customer Support. Part of my team includes a technology manager and our two engineers (I say 1.5 as one of them works part-time). They work primarily on the Khoros platform. Khoros is a Community platform, essentially forums, blogs, knowledge bases, groups. They offer an out of box cookie cutter experience, which a lot of our forum functionality is.
On our homepage for for example, this "Recent Forum Activity" component is entirely built in-house. Khoros offers no component to easily filter through these options, so we built it. As with endless things we do, our plan we to also add these filters to each indiivdual forum, but unfortunatley we haven't made it that far. Our Academy is built entirely in-house. There is no functionality within Khoros to do any sort of learning/training, so we did the next best thing and built it. We could spend all day on why we built it ourselves instead of purchasing an off the shelf LMS/LRS system, but regardless, we built and maintain that entire platform, yet we are utilizing Khoros as the backend platform that powers it.
Khoros pushes updates out every ~6 weeks or so that are platform updates. These updates are pushed out regardless if we like them or not as happens with many SAAS companies but they won't (usually) change any styling/front end functionality. At times, these can introduce bugs, sometimes in major ways, sometimes in minor ways. For example, we currently have a bug where we can't invite folks to our events under certain circumstances. Only a few community members would notice it, but its a huge deal for us on the Groups side.
At the end of the day, we can in general make any changes we want - The platform has API's for the vast majority of it, and we leveraged those to create all that you see in Academy. This also allows us to do various integrations we have between the Zendesk (which our Help Center uses), Coda, and Upwork itself. We spend much of dev resources in Academy over the past year though, and have pushing many issues down the road for the next gen platform update ("Aurora" is the Khoros term for it). In this case, Upwork made a branding change, we ourselves updated the font to match that, and it didn't look as good as we hoped. We're still working to fix it, this is a great example of where a vendor can cause us a delay. Normally, we can push out a change immediately. In this situation, we have an open ticket with our vendor, and as it requires a backend change, we're not able to revert our own change, until they unlock our instance, which requires us to go do a Q/A, which in turn required our engineer to be here to do that. So we're going through the stages of rolling back all of these steps to get to a point of being able to revert a font change.
For what it's worth, you can Google "community /t5/" to find endless examples of Khoros communities. Atlassian is by far one of my favorites.
https://community.atlassian.com/
https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Power-BI-forums/ct-p/powerbi
https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Seller-Community-US/ct-p/Seller_Community_US?profile.language=en
I'm not sure you or anyone cared for that much detail, but I had 5 minutes free so you got the extended version of the answer.
(Does anyone care about any of this stuff? We've long talked about doing a blog series on what/how/why Community and Academy works, how it is all built, why we prioritize the work we do, etc). My team tries to keep me hidden in the basement and away from customers though.
Community Manager
