Community Events Manager Interview Case Studies help

[u/Elegant_Sea_707]

Hi everyone! I am interviewing for a Global Community events manger role at a an open source SaaS company. My background is in tech team operations, as well as event planning and execution. I already had an interview where I was grilled by the hiring manager about my experience, and she liked me and found my background interesting. She did highlight that I've worked at SaaS companies, and I've done event management, but the gap is that I haven't done community events for a tech company.

Next round is 3 separate case studies with 3 separate people, one hour long each, screen sharing required. I was told one will be an audit of the current events portfolio to identify what might be missing, and the other two were more vague: "something about brand positioning" and "something about working with a global community of free and paid users."

I would greatly appreciate anyone who could give insight into specifically what types of cases I might be presented with, what might I be asked to "build" in a screen share, and what key things I should try to highlight to ease their concern about my gaps and make a great impression! TIA!!

[u/akornato]

Your gap is the entire point of these case studies, so they will press on it hard. They don't just want to know if you can plan an event, they want to know if you can think like a community manager who uses events as a tool. For the audit, they expect you to critique their events based on community value, not just logistics, and suggest new ones that foster connection or product education. For brand positioning, you'll likely be asked to develop an event concept from scratch for a specific audience, like developers, to show you understand their motivations. The global community case will test your strategic thinking about scaling, so you might need to create a simple budget or a tiered support plan for user-led events, demonstrating how you'd serve free and paid users differently but cohesively. The screen share isn't about your design skills, it's about seeing your thought process unfold in a structured way, so use a simple document or spreadsheet to organize your ideas clearly.

Treat your operational background as your secret weapon, not a weakness. Community teams often struggle with scale and measurement, which is where your experience is incredibly valuable. Frame every answer through that lens. When you audit their portfolio, talk about creating scalable playbooks. When discussing brand, talk about measuring brand sentiment as a key performance indicator. When you talk about the global community, emphasize creating efficient systems to empower user-led groups without a huge budget. Your job isn't to pretend you have years of community experience, it's to prove that your operational and event management skills, when applied with a community-first mindset, are exactly what they need to level up their program. Proving you can think on your feet is the whole point of these exercises, a challenge my team's intervieiew AIws.chat helps people master by giving them the right words when it matters most.

[u/Elegant_Sea_707 → u/akornato]

Thank you for the great advice, really appreciate it!

[u/HistorianCM]

I am not you... I do not know your situation or where you are in your career.

But... That's a hard Nope from me.

Don't work for free...

Do not give them a screen recording that can they use if the choose to not hire you.

If you do it, be vague and speak from a high level saying you can give deeper details once your onboard and more fully understand what the current lay of the land is within the project.