The Library

Research, articles, case studies and other useful links on guilds, AI Champions communities and employer branding in the AI era. All in one place, open anytime.

AI Champions and AI adoption

Hadar Bismut (Glue): how guilds and communities make AI adoption stick (Talk): Why AI adoption happens through people, and how guilds and communities make it last. From the Glue meetup hosted by HoneyBook Engineering.
Lihi Kab (HiBob): from guild to impact, using AI communities to shorten the SDLC (Talk): How an AI-powered product guild rethought the whole delivery lifecycle instead of single tasks. From the Glue meetup hosted by HoneyBook Engineering.
Daniel Kidon (HoneyBook): build the road before the car (Talk): HoneyBook's Backend Guild Lead on how engineering guilds turn AI chaos into momentum. From the Glue meetup hosted by HoneyBook Engineering.
Asaf Bruner (SAP): building a digital brain (Talk): How the AI Guild at SAP Labs Israel grounded AI in product context, from AI-ready repos to agents in daily work. From the Glue meetup hosted by HoneyBook Engineering.
Netanel Abergel and Sergei Safrigin (monday.com): when agents become teammates (Talk): At monday.com, AI agents join engineering squads with a name, a role and a team. From the Glue meetup hosted by HoneyBook Engineering.
DocuSign: driving AI adoption across engineering without mandating it (Case study): How DocuSign engineering built a network of AI Champions and Multipliers and reached broad adoption without a mandate.
Microsoft: what it learned from its own AI transformation (Case study): Peer huddles, managers who model AI use, and starting from business outcomes rather than tool adoption.
Forbes: why the hard part of agentic engineering isn't the technology (Article): A Forbes Technology Council piece on one company's rollout: lighthouse teams first, then champions, training materials and a dashboard. The hard part, it argues, is people.
Salesforce: the agentic shift for its engineers (Case study): How Salesforce Engineering moves its developers along an AI maturity curve, with champions leading the way.
Showpad: an AI developer productivity guild and AI-native champions (Case study): Showpad's engineering team shares, in the first person, how they paired an AI productivity guild with a network of AI-native champions.
GitLab: the hub and spoke AI operating model (Guide): A page from GitLab's public handbook on how the company organizes its AI work, with a central team and champions across the business.
Dan Cumberland: building an AI Champions network in an AEC firm (Case study): A practical account of setting up an AI Champions network in an architecture, engineering and construction firm.
Angie Jones (Block): building an AI-native engineering org (Talk): Block's AI Champions program, its engineer AI maturity model, and agents that take work straight from Slack and tickets.
Monte Carlo: how to build an AI-native engineering org (Article): Monte Carlo on running a flat engineering organization built around AI.
Elizabeth Stone (Netflix): why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers in the AI era (Podcast): Elizabeth Stone, Netflix's Chief Product and Technology Officer, on Lenny's Podcast.
Maggie Appleton (GitHub Next): one developer, two dozen agents, zero alignment (Talk): Maggie Appleton of GitHub Next on what happens to team alignment when every developer works with a fleet of agents.
AI adoption in development and its impact on developer productivity (Research): Recent 2025 research shows a sharp jump in the adoption of AI tools for code review and code writing at software companies, from 4% to 83% in just 6 months, with a notable impact on UI development, debugging, and code generation teams. It reflects a shift toward steady, everyday use of AI tools in development.
GitHub: how AI Copilot affects developer productivity and happiness (Research): This article presents quantitative and qualitative research from GitHub on AI Copilot adoption and its impact on developers. Over 2,000 developers, plus 95 participants in a controlled experiment, showed that AI Copilot improves the work experience, reduces mental load, and raises satisfaction. It also accelerated development tasks by 55%. The research highlights what AI tools contribute not just to individual productivity, but as a major driver of AI adoption across organizations and better workflows for development teams.
Anthropic: how CRED accelerates fintech development with Claude Code (Case study): CRED, one of India's largest fintech platforms with over 15 million users, brought in Anthropic's Claude Code to streamline its development. The result: 2x development speed, a 10% increase in test coverage, and developers who can break down complex problems and produce better documentation. CRED is now moving toward agentic execution, where developers focus mainly on code reviews while AI handles most of the coding and testing.
Wix: the guilds are changing and merging, driven by AI (Article): Aviran Mordo, VP Engineering at Wix, describes the dramatic change they're making to Wix's development guilds as roles reshape in the AI era. A fascinating read, worth saving!

Guilds and communities of practice

Hadar Bismut (Glue): how guilds and communities make AI adoption stick (Talk): Why AI adoption happens through people, and how guilds and communities make it last. From the Glue meetup hosted by HoneyBook Engineering.
Lihi Kab (HiBob): from guild to impact, using AI communities to shorten the SDLC (Talk): How an AI-powered product guild rethought the whole delivery lifecycle instead of single tasks. From the Glue meetup hosted by HoneyBook Engineering.
Daniel Kidon (HoneyBook): build the road before the car (Talk): HoneyBook's Backend Guild Lead on how engineering guilds turn AI chaos into momentum. From the Glue meetup hosted by HoneyBook Engineering.
Showpad: an AI developer productivity guild and AI-native champions (Case study): Showpad's engineering team shares, in the first person, how they paired an AI productivity guild with a network of AI-native champions.
Wix: the guilds are changing and merging, driven by AI (Article): Aviran Mordo, VP Engineering at Wix, describes the dramatic change they're making to Wix's development guilds as roles reshape in the AI era. A fascinating read, worth saving!
Aviran Mordo (Wix): how the guilds at Wix work (Video): Aviran Mordo, VP Engineering at Wix, talks about the organizational structure that lets the company grow at scale.
NewsCred: the developers' guild (Case study): A case study on developer guilds, including insights, conclusions, and lessons learned.
Spotify's guilds (Research): Fascinating research, with data and insights from guild activity inside Spotify. A must-read.
Gong: how it built its frontend guild (Case study): A thorough blog post on how Gong built its frontend guild. The author covers the guild's structure, its development stages, and more.
How is community connected to preserving and developing organizational knowledge? (Guide): In this thorough, interesting article, the authors explain the basic principles of community development and how they tie into learning on the job.
Why people share knowledge in communities (Research): This research (from the Ministry of Welfare) gives a nice, accessible summary of all the reasons people choose to share knowledge, or hold back from sharing it, in professional communities.
Professional communities as a knowledge-sharing mechanism (Guide): The big advantage of professional communities (brand or internal) is knowledge sharing. Here are a few important principles to keep in mind.
How effective knowledge communities are for learning inside organizations (Research): The research traces the evolution of knowledge communities in organizations, with several excellent case studies from global companies.
The traits that create a knowledge-sharing community (Research): Empirical research into the traits that create a knowledge-sharing community found traits shared by active, thriving communities: the nature of leadership, members' emotional commitment, trust, and more.
McKinsey: learning as a way of life (Article): McKinsey, the strategy consulting firm, writes about the new world of work, and especially the constant demand to keep learning and refreshing our skill set (and what that means for both employees and employers).
How do guilds help large companies move fast? (Podcast): Small, agile developer teams can ship fast, but as a company grows and branches out, it can start to slow its teams' ability to deliver. A great episode of Osim Tochna covers guilds and how they help developers ship fast even at large companies.
The excellent guild model at Outbrain (Podcast): How do guilds bridge knowledge gaps in large organizations? When is the right time to start one? Why do excellent teams struggle with cross-organizational work? This excellent episode of Reversim hosts "guild masters" from Outbrain who talk about the company's journey toward far more efficient, connected work through guilds.
How did Spotify implement guilds, and why? (Video): Spotify is widely seen as the first organization to successfully implement guilds at scale over the past decade, and many companies got excited about the model and adopted it (or parts of it). In this video series, Spotify shows how they work and the engineering culture behind their development teams.
Guilds and Agile (Guide): A short, sharp overview of everything worth knowing about guilds from a scrum master's perspective, and the lessons he took from working with them.
How to set up guilds or professional communities (Guide): In this article, the author offers guides for setting up guilds and sums up the key points he used to set one up at his own company.
How guilds can act like a small, agile startup inside a large, complex organization (Research): Software development in a large organization can be hard, since there's less freedom and flexibility to try new things. In this research, a team studied 5 guilds in a large organization and looked at how they help it keep innovating quickly by acting like a small startup within the bigger company.
Squads, chapters, and guilds: what's the difference (Guide): A short, sharp glossary with examples and a visualization of how each one looks and works.
Hadar Bismut (Glue) with guild leaders from Israel's leading organizations (Talk): Hadar Bismut, CEO of GLUE, moderates a panel with guild leaders who share how guilds work inside their organizations.
Chen Feldman (Gong): what guilds are, in one thread (Article): Chen Feldman, a developer at Gong, gave a talk on guilds at the "Reversim 2021" conference. He turned part of it into a Twitter thread.
What is Guild Week at Wix, and how do you make it work? (Article): A detailed, interesting Medium article by one of Wix's employees about guild week at the company.
The guild model at Wix and how it fuels the company's growth (Article): Aviran Mordo, VP Engineering at Wix, walks through how the guilds were set up, their structure, and a few examples of what the day-to-day looks like.
Communities of Practice across a range of organizations (Case study): The article looks at different organizations, different rollout processes, and interesting results.
Chen Feldman (Gong): guilds in organizations, at Reversim 2021 (Talk): Chen Feldman strikes again with a great talk on guilds, their structure, what you need to know to set them up successfully, and more from his own learning inside Gong.
The server engineers' guilds at Wix (Video): A short video with an in-depth look at the Server guilds. It covers the guild's activities, knowledge-sharing practices, best practices, and how new employees are recruited and onboarded.
The Product Analytics guild at Taboola (Article): A post on how Taboola built its Product Analytics guild. Lior Sayfeld, who wrote it, shares the daily practices that make the guild work and succeed.
Examples of professional development tracks in organizations (Tool): Organized, accessible templates from a range of the world's leading companies to help you measure and think through different professional development processes.
HoneyBook: the story behind its development guild (Case study): An interesting case study on setting up the development guild at Honeybook. Inside, you can read how it helps the company grow, move fast, and stay at high standards.
Hadar Bismut (Glue): the Guild Iceberg and the engagement challenge in guilds (Talk): From a meetup with Wix Engineering on engagement in industry development guilds.
Glue and Wix Engineering: engagement in development guilds, the full meetup (Talk): The playlist of talks from the meetup. Case studies focused on different areas, including: How to raise engagement in recruiting processes; What made a developer get more involved than before; How to get management to take part and back the activity; How to get guild members to give technical talks.
Amir Shevat (Person / blog): One of the world's leading voices in developer communities. Formerly senior at Google, Amazon, and Slack. Now Head of Product at Twitter.
Mibifnim (From the Inside) (Podcast): 'Mibifnim' is my podcast (Hadar Bismut), where I talk with community leaders at the biggest, most interesting, and most complex organizations in Israel. The podcast opens up hard-won knowledge and experience on internal communities, so people can build a community, connect employees, and move big things together.
Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge / Etienne Wenger, Richard A. McDermott & William Snyder (Book): In one of the most influential books on internal communities, the authors lay out the stages a professional community goes through inside an organization, show how communities make strategic impact (organizational innovation, employee retention and recruiting, problem solving, and much more), and offer a wealth of examples and case studies from the world's leading companies.
Community Pulse (Podcast): A podcast entirely dedicated to managing professional developer communities.
Lemonade's squads (Podcast): Erez Dickman, VP R&D at Lemonade, talks about bringing Spotify's squad methodology to Lemonade, what works, and especially what doesn't.
Amir Shevat in an interview on "HaShavua" with Eitan Levit and David Katz (Podcast): A hall-of-fame episode for anyone interested in developer communities who wants to understand how they help a company scale and move the business.
The World Bank: saving money with knowledge communities (Case study): A case study on the World Bank, which saved 400 million euros over 5 years through knowledge communities that rolled out new systems and ways of working organically and efficiently.
TE: a Community of Practice for analysts (Case study): A Community of Practice for analysts at TE (a global company with thousands of employees). A full case study with the approach, the topics, the structure, and even the basis for the work plan.

Ambassador communities and employer branding

Gallup: what connected employees say about your brand (Research): Years of Gallup research show that employees who feel they belong and are connected to their workplace become company ambassadors, recommending it to friends and acquaintances at 23 times the rate of employees who don't feel connected.
What ambassador communities are (Guide): An explanation of ambassador communities and how they shape an organization's marketing and employer branding.
Personal branding for employees (Guide): Every reason to invest in personal branding for your employees, and how to channel it into your organization's employer branding.
7 great reasons to invest in employee personal branding as part of employer branding (Guide): An e-x-c-e-l-l-e-n-t overview of why personal branding, employer branding, and company branding matter, and how each one reinforces the next.
Cisco: ambassador communities are the growth engine of the future (Article): In this article, Dr. Christine Bailey of Cisco talks about why ambassador communities matter to an organization's marketing, and explains why ambassadors earn more trust than traditional marketing channels.
Summary of a webinar on the effectiveness of ambassador communities (Article): A short webinar recap with 2 case studies and more interesting insights on how ambassador communities shape consumer trust (spoiler: many times more than the trust consumers feel toward the CEO).
Josh Bersin: how to become a sought-after employer (Article): Josh Bersin, one of the world's leading HR experts, shares the 5 principles that turn companies into workplaces people want to join.
The impact of LinkedIn ambassador communities on future hiring (Research): Research on how candidates check out their next workplace shows that 80% of them will look up other employees from the same company on LinkedIn.
Mibifnim (From the Inside) (Podcast): 'Mibifnim' is my podcast (Hadar Bismut), where I talk with community leaders at the biggest, most interesting, and most complex organizations in Israel. The podcast opens up hard-won knowledge and experience on internal communities, so people can build a community, connect employees, and move big things together.
How HPE built ambassador communities to reach decision-makers in B2B (Podcast): After realizing that B2B decision-makers trust employees' opinions 47% more than the marketing department, HPE's global CMO set up an employee ambassador community to build more credibility in the market. In this episode, he talks about the strategy and impact of ambassador communities.

Change management

Hadar Bismut (Glue): how guilds and communities make AI adoption stick (Talk): Why AI adoption happens through people, and how guilds and communities make it last. From the Glue meetup hosted by HoneyBook Engineering.
DocuSign: driving AI adoption across engineering without mandating it (Case study): How DocuSign engineering built a network of AI Champions and Multipliers and reached broad adoption without a mandate.
Julie Zhuo: you cannot mandate an AI transformation (Article): Julie Zhuo's 10-step field guide: start with personal belief and the chores nobody loves, bank small team wins, turn them into systems, and only then rethink how the organization rewards people.
dscout: AI resistance isn't about capability, it's about identity (Research): dscout research with 96 workers on why people push back on AI: it reaches into the parts of the job they see as their own.
Microsoft: what it learned from its own AI transformation (Case study): Peer huddles, managers who model AI use, and starting from business outcomes rather than tool adoption.
Forbes: why the hard part of agentic engineering isn't the technology (Article): A Forbes Technology Council piece on one company's rollout: lighthouse teams first, then champions, training materials and a dashboard. The hard part, it argues, is people.
How to get decision-makers on board (Guide): Starting an internal community is no small undertaking. It takes collaboration, budgets, and support and buy-in from the decision-makers in your organization. Here's how to do it right.
Bain: every way to connect work cultures after a merger (Case study): Management consulting firm BAIN lays out all the ways to build employee connectedness after a merger, and the right way to "weld together" 2 completely different cultures to create synergy and avoid losing valuable people.
HBR: the secret behind every successful merger is people (Case study): HBR reviews why mergers and acquisitions fail or succeed. The explanation is simple but hard to pull off, and it always comes back to employee connectedness, a sense of "togetherness," and blending business cultures.

Tools for community leaders

Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose / Jennifer Breheny Wallace (Book): Mattering is the feeling that we are valued and have a chance to add value. This book gives practical tools for making people feel significant, which is exactly what keeps a community alive.
How to run successful onboarding for community members (Guide): Onboarding new members becomes critical, especially once the original community has already developed its own vibe. Here are the 3 steps for bringing new members on board.
Keeping morale high in the community and among the volunteers who lead it (Guide): Community members and leaders give their time and energy on top of their day jobs to be part of the community. Here's what to keep in mind so you can keep the enthusiasm alive and make sure they know they're appreciated.
Community engagement (Article): What does it take to get community members involved? A few ideas and thoughts worth reading.
Building commitment in a community (Guide): A great article on building commitment gradually and smartly, in a way that draws people in to participate and helps nurture engagement.
The community canvas (Tool): Want to start a community but not sure where to begin? The community canvas helps you map out the community's needs and walks you step by step through everything you'll need to think about.
Community joining questionnaires (Tool): Here are a few examples of joining questionnaires from different communities. Some are very short, some are formal, some are friendly, all depending on the community's structure and goals. Worth a look to get a feel for them and draw inspiration for your own.
Icebreaker ideas for community meetups (Tool): 32 ideas (some great, some very American :)) for icebreaker activities that build an atmosphere of collaboration and teamwork.
Creating and tracking community engagement (Tool): A roadmap you can use to plan a community around commitment and how members feel at every stage of its growth.
10 ways to boost community engagement (Guide): A collection of useful methods for any community leader looking to get members participating actively.
Douglas Atkin (Person / blog): One of the world's pioneers in leading internal communities.
Richard Millington (Person / blog): Founder of FeverBee, which consults on setting up communities around the world.
People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams / Peter H. Diamandis (Book): The book breaks down the world of communities and the business and economic logic behind building brand and internal communities, with case studies from the world's biggest companies. The author tackles the big questions community leaders face: how to get people to join, how to explain a community's value to decision-makers, and what impact a strong community can create.
The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging / Charles Vogl (Book): Charles Vogl tells the stories of the world's most interesting communities as he traces 3,000 years of humanity living in community. In his book, he sets out the 7 golden rules for creating belonging and a sense of community, and of course how to do it in the modern reality of organizations.
Douglas Atkin on belonging and building commitment in communities (Talk): One of the world's community pioneers, Douglas Atkin, in a talk on his journey to understanding communities and building a sense of belonging among people who want to do big things together.
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (Book): Author Priya Parker takes readers on a journey of great ideas for turning any gathering (a talk, a meeting, a party, anything) into a real experience.
Leading a community: a collection (Case study): A collection of case studies on different topics in the world of communities (internal and brand alike).

Know a link that belongs here?

Send it my way, with a line on why it's worth reading. I go through every suggestion.

hadar@glue-team.co.il