The team needed a steady, trusted line to power users, somewhere to recruit research participants, pressure-test direction, and build loyalty with the accounts that mattered most. There was no such structure. Customer feedback was ad hoc, and the most valuable customers had no real relationship with the people building the product.

I founded a customer advisory community and designed the entire program: the member criteria weighted toward power users and high churn-risk accounts, a hand-selected founding cohort of enterprise customers across travel, food, fintech, retail, and tech, and a year-long cadence, an in-person kickoff, monthly virtual sessions, quarterly events and newsletters, semi-annual surprise community events, and a dedicated channel. I ran all of it, the kickoff, the events, the newsletters, the relationships, down to sourcing branded swag and solving vendor logistics when a contractor underdelivered.

The founding cohort proved the model in one region. Scaling it across the globe meant deciding where to invest next without spreading too thin, and doing it through other teams who were wary of anything that looked like a sales push into their accounts.

I built a scoring model to prioritize expansion cities by churn risk, account size, renewal timing, and growth potential, then used it to sequence a rollout across three global regions covering Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific. I drafted the nomination and outreach process for partner teams, created region-specific plans, and carefully positioned the program internally as a customer community rather than a retention tactic, so the teams who owned those relationships came along rather than pushing back.

A community is only worth the effort if it changes the product. The risk with any advisory program is that it becomes a nice-to-have, members feel heard but nothing they say actually moves the roadmap, and the trust quietly erodes.

I wired the program directly into the product process, using it as a standing recruitment pool for studies and a fast channel to pressure-test direction. The founding cohort's input traced to multiple concrete roadmap influences, from dynamic landing pages to an attribution tool to bulk creation enhancements. The dedicated channel became self-sustaining inside the first week, with members answering each other's product questions, which deepened engagement without adding support load.

The accounts most worth investing in were often the ones most at risk, large customers weighing competitors, mid-contract, with no strong reason to stay loyal. The program's real test was whether sustained, genuine engagement could move someone from evaluating alternatives to actively defending the product internally.

I treated the founding cohort as the proof of concept and invested in the relationships directly. The result was retention that held across the full cohort, with the only departure caused by a layoff rather than a choice to leave. The clearest signal came from a member who, mid-evaluation of a direct competitor, actively fought internally to keep their company on the platform, the exact at-risk-to-advocate arc the program was built to create.