#cabs

@Lauren Stefano I relate to this so much! It sounds like they really trust you which is such a blessing and a curse. Some execs love to wing it and it’s not the vibe were going for hahah

@Shelly Ryder That sounds like a great approach! I do think it’s all in the prep.

Hello fellow CABbies! Is anyone going to the Customer Advisory Board Conference in Boston Monday Oct 21? I'll be there!

The exec wrangling is always an adventure. Having a great relationship with the EA has helped a lot, and I also think the execs are seeing the value of both the meetings and the prep the more CABs they attend. But it's still a challenge to get to the top of their list as far ahead as I would like. In our most recent round talking about slides, one exec said "surprise me and I'll make a good story of out of it" 😆. I appreciate having the vote of confidence, but not exactly what I'm going for in this situation

Thank you all so much for your advice! This is incredibly helpful and reassuring at the same time. Great tips on prep, timing, that I’ll definitely use.

The prep is so important. I’m not sure if you all run into this, but wrangling the execs in my company can be very challenging - they see the CAB as extremely valuable, but we’re often scrambling and so the prep (which is the most important) feels rushed.

I’m happy to chat CABs anytime! I’ve done 4 in person and this will be my second virtual - the first one was obviously a little hairy (from my perspective) so wanted to connect with others about how they plan and execute. Really appreciate you all for taking the time to give your advice 🙂

We have a virtual CAB coming up this week actually so this is fresh in my mind 😉 We do 1.5 hours, but keep each segment fairly short. We have one member interview/deep dive on a hot topic in the industry, and then a second segment is a guided open conversation amongst all the members where they've seen the questions ahead of time.

We have been doing an in-person and a virtual 6 months apart, but we've recently begun toying with the idea of holding shorter virtuals each quarter, but keeping the 1 in-person.

We've had success with 2 hour virtual meetings, but always include a 10-minute break after an hour. I agree with the advice to share discussion topics ahead of time to allow members to come prepared

<!here> Hey everyone! Wondering if anyone has advice or best practices for engaging virtual CAB meetings? We’ve had two in person CAB meetings this year with our North American Cohort and EMEA Cohort and we’re doing a virtual meeting at the end of October to gather the two cohorts as we head into 2025. The meeting will only be about 1.5-2 hours and we have 15 members in total across the board. So lots of attendee’s and not a ton of time, but I want to ensure it’s useful, people feel heard/can share and we make the most out of the time.

Thanks in advance!

We have had good results doing a "Voice of the Customer" section where we ask them to prep in advance to answer a set of questions (either with slides or just think about their answers). In the spring we were asking about their priorities for the year, roadblocks they were anticipating, and how we could help them meet & overcome them. It sparked a lot of conversation between the members who saw they all had a lot of similar issues.

I also keep thinking that everyone must be sick of talking about AI, but it seems like I'm the only one . For our next virtual meeting, we're going to share our readout and a preview of our 2025 plans, and then I think we're going to discuss team structures (the different approaches our members are taking to structuring their teams, and pros/cons of different options). While it won't be directly tied to our product, I think we'll get some good insight into their areas of investment/priority and their thought processes

Thanks Lauren! We definitely had a good discussion at our CAB last week around AI, where we sent out a survey in advance and discussed survey results at the meeting. At our in person CAB earlier this year, we did a topics voting survey and AI and Technology Adoption (not only with our product) were the two most popular topics they wanted to talk about. Technology Adoption was also a favorite topic at our 2023 in person CAB, followed by Innovation & Process Improvement. We had customers volunteer to lead roundtables on those topics (we called it "Table Topics") and it was a fantastic discussion. They worked at their tables for 30 minutes, then every table did a 30 minute readout/discussion with the entire room to get everyone involved. Definitely a hit and several CAB members said it was the best CAB they ever attended. But how to replicate that in virtual CABs? There's got to be more than AI that is of interest to C-Level IT leaders.

We are trying to focus on listening to the execs to inform our strategy/roadmap. We give them some high-level questions around a big topic like AI, and then listen as they discuss as a group. We all learn a ton! As I've explained it our CTO who loves the JTBD framework, we're looking to our CAB to help us identify the jobs. Then our job is to take all of that feedback and use it to help us figure out how to help them get those jobs done. And next time, when we share an update on our plans, it will be through the lens of "we heard you say that you need to do X, so we are building Y capabilities that allow you to do that"