“We can’t do that, our platform won’t allow it”
Only the second half of that sentence is true.
The great thing about technology is you can do almost anything you can imagine.
With enough resources, skill, willingness, and ingenuity, anything is possible.
The real reason you “can’t do” something is you haven’t figured out how to gather the resources, acquire the skills, or make the trade-offs to do it.
Treat these as small problems you need to solve.
Need more resources? Either make a clear case for the benefit or find ways to save resources in your current efforts.
Don’t have the skills? Speak to peers, figure out exactly what the problem requires, and hire/learn the skills required.
In practice, the problem isn’t usually skills and resources, it’s about trade-offs.
For example, is it best to keep members within a single, integrated, community experience which doesn’t offer the full feature(s) you need or also create accounts on platforms that do (Slack, Meetup, etc…). That’s a prioritisation problem, not a resource/skill problem.
If it’s really important, you can always figure out a way to do it.
The hard part really isn’t figuring out the way to do it, but to figure out what’s really important in the first place.
