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 EMEA, 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 and a fast channel to pressure-test direction. With the pool in place, concurrent studies ran across product areas at the roadmap's pace, screener quality and clear synthesis boundaries keeping every insight attributable instead of bleeding together. Each study was framed as a hypothesis it could disprove, with its scope lines drawn before a session ran. The cohort's input validated or influenced eight roadmap items, from dynamic landing pages to an attribution tool to bulk creation enhancements, and three have since shipped. Within 48 hours, 85.7% of founding members had joined the channel, and within the first week members were answering each other's product questions.

Before designing anything, we needed to know how enterprise customers worked at scale, where the tooling fell short, and what they'd built to compensate. Foundational discovery: no prototype, just open questions about real workflows.

I ran discovery sessions with enterprise customers across retail, grocery, hospitality, media, and sports, then synthesized them into cross-interview theme documents. The strongest signal recurred in every vertical: customers had independently built elaborate parallel spreadsheet systems because the in-platform experience didn't match how they worked. The recurring themes, naming and discoverability at scale, export and audit gaps, a hard code dependency for non-technical users, each became a structured deliverable with quotes, implications, and next steps the team could design against.

Demand arrived through three disconnected channels: a sales request log, a research repository, and live meeting notes. Each has its own bias. The log favors the loudest account, the repository favors whoever was studied, the meetings favor whoever was in the room. Prioritizing from one channel meant building for the loudest voice.

I synthesized each channel on its own terms: 340 logged requests from an 18-month window coded into weighted themes, a multi-year research repository mined, months of meetings across 20+ enterprise accounts distilled. Cross-reading the three produced one demand picture where confidence comes from agreement: themes confirmed by all three channels became high-confidence priorities, two-channel themes carried their caveats, and single-channel signals were held for validation. The roadmap now prioritizes from evidence no single channel could provide; user roles and permissions is the current example.

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. A year in, 7 of the 8 founding accounts are still in the program; the one that left did so after its member was laid off, not by choice. The clearest signal: a member mid-evaluation of a direct competitor fought internally to keep their company on the platform, and the company renewed, citing the program as a big reason.