What role should a customer advisory board have in influencing your product roadmap, and why?

CABs are great. Customer advisory boards have several common objectives in mind, including:- To create champions for the brand- To validate product ideas and guide the product roadmap- To help shape marketing messaging- To gather market intelligence - Understand the buying triggers of the company’s market- Provide beta users for the company’s new products- Help the company identify new markets A customer advisory board can provide insights into how customers are actually using your products, wha ...Read More

A customer advisory board can be a great way to capture high level roadmap feedback from your most important customers. But to my mind, it's main value lies elsewhere: in giving your most important customers the feeling (and reality) that they are being heard not just by a CSM or a sales rep, but by the executive team; in giving your customers a chance to hear from each other, which validates their individual decision to be your customers and often also cross-pollinates ideas / use cases / produ ...Read More

A customer advisory board should be an imyportant source of validation of product vision and roadmap, but not the only one. The best customer advisory boards have a good representation of key customers that can help you better understand market dynamics, buyer personas, and market conditions. This advisory board can also help validate future product ideas by giving you a different perspective. That being said, this board will likely be a very small representation of the total population of your ...Read More

IMO, your roadmap needs to be representative of your company vision. And practically, your company's growth opportunities would come from customer expansion and new deals. So I'd advise that you leverage your advisory board to really understand your current install base well. As you think through segmentation for future opportunities, your current install base may be an analog to your highest potential addressable market, or it may not. Thus, how much your advisory board plays into your roadmap ...Read More

Customer advisory boards are great ways to bring product, leadership, and your customers face-to-face to really help everyone understand if what is being built will really solve customer needs. Along the entire product development journey, there are ways to involve customers that aren’t just focused on getting people to use a beta version of a product. I have found that customer advisory programs that meet semi-regularly and ideally at least once a year in person are helpful in building rapport ...Read More

It's best practice to create CABs with one specific business focus – and that focus could very much be to help inform your product strategy. The weight that member feedback carries depends on the makeup of your board. If you have diverse representation across all segments, use cases for your product and types of users, your CAB can be a key input for your roadmap. And because you have access to the members over an extended period of time, you might find that the feedback builds upon itself in a ...Read More

You’re describing a common situation. Customer advisory boards (CABs) represent an important channel for bringing VOC into your organization, not just for immediate product development but also to understand overall trends in the market. Before convening your CAB meeting, product marketing and product management should have a common understanding of what they want to achieve. Product management should be able to provide their input but product marketing should lead the conversation and be respon ...Read More