The team needed a trusted line to power users: a place to recruit research participants, pressure-test direction, and build loyalty with the accounts that mattered most. None existed; feedback was ad hoc, and the most valuable customers had no relationship with the people building the product.

I founded a customer advisory community and designed the whole program: member criteria weighted toward power users and high churn-risk accounts, a hand-selected founding cohort spanning travel, food, fintech, retail, and tech, and a year-long cadence of an in-person kickoff, monthly virtual sessions, quarterly events and newsletters, semi-annual surprise events, and a dedicated channel. Running every detail myself, down to sourcing branded swag and untangling vendor logistics when a contractor underdelivered, mattered because the trust the program runs on is built in the details.

The founding cohort proved the model in one region. Scaling globally meant choosing where to invest next without spreading thin, through partner teams wary of anything resembling a sales push into their accounts.

I built a scoring model ranking expansion cities by churn risk, account size, renewal timing, and growth potential, then sequenced the rollout across Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific, so investment followed evidence, not enthusiasm. A repeatable nomination and outreach process, region-specific plans, and internal positioning as a customer community brought the teams who owned those relationships along instead of pushing back.

A community only earns its keep if it changes the product. Every advisory program risks becoming a nice-to-have where members feel heard, nothing moves the roadmap, and trust quietly erodes.

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

The accounts most worth investing in were often the most at risk: large customers weighing competitors mid-contract, with no strong reason to stay. The real test was whether sustained, genuine engagement could turn someone evaluating alternatives into an internal defender of the product.

I treated the founding cohort as the proof of concept and invested directly in the relationships. Retention held across the full cohort; the one departure came from a layoff, not a decision to leave. The clearest signal: a member mid-evaluation of a direct competitor fought internally to keep their company on the platform, the exact at-risk-to-advocate arc the program was built to create.