Should You Form a Customer Advisory Board?
Shaking things up when you’re lost in your roadmap
“What do customers want, and what will they buy?” is the essential question for every product manager. There are lots of ways to get answers. This article will explore one approach: The Customer Advisory Board. What is it? Why do it? Who should be on it? How do I run it?
A CAB isn’t for every product. Let’s assume you have a product that already has some market adoption. You’ve made it past the initial stages of finding product/market fit, and you even have some loyal customers. The challenge went from, “will anybody buy it?” to “what capabilities do I need to add to keep customers happy AND find new ones?”
Inside your organization are opinions, and maybe even hypotheses about what to build. To find the truth, you have to get outside and learn from customers and the market. If you’re in a business-to-business (B2B) context, you are unlikely to get enough volume from A/B testing or adding dead-end test links to potential features to make decisions. These techniques are great for consumer software, but in B2B, you risk alienating or annoying these crucial customers.
How can you test your ideas and see what makes sense in the real world?
