#cabs

I used to host our ThoughtSpot CABs with a hybrid mix in between our conference.

Our annual in-person conference would be in the fall so we would host quarterly events via Zoom. It was required that each CAB member at least participated in 2 out of the 4 events per year to be eligible for the CAB consideration the following year.

@Daniel Palay runs our CAB here at Grafana and also offers a hybrid model for our customers 🙂

We have done hybrid meetings, and they've gone better than I initially expected. We have a relatively small group which helps a lot. And I make a very conscious effort to call on virtual attendees. I also monitor the chat and read out comments to the room. For breakouts, we do an all-virtual group. And make sure you have good tech in the room so that the virtual attendees can see and hear everyone

how long are your meetings? part of my concern is that it's a lot to ask virtual attendees to be on Zoom for 8 hours...

also have you found a good way for virtual attendees to interact with each other/other members? or they just join for the content portions and log off for the rest?

but really good to hear they've gone better than expected!!

Our quarterly events would be around 1.5-2 hours with a 15 minute break.

We used to have a Slack channel in our corporate workspace for them to interact with each other and asked them to please keep their cameras on whenever we were in the discussions.

Ours have been roughly 9-2, usually with 2 10 minute breaks an longer lunch break built in. It's not the same experience as being in the room, but feedback from virtual attendees has been positive and they still feel that they are getting value from the day. I make sure to mail them any swag or other gifts that we distribute on site

that's awesome!! really glad to hear they still feel it's valuable. i think we'll try it out for our APAC meeting and see how it goes. thank you!

Good luck! Feel free to ask if you have any more questions. I'd love to hear what you decide to do and how it goes

Sorry @Taylor Page, been a little bit of a heads down day over here, but yes to <@U08MBG24LRM>'s point, i do run our CAB and we do have a hybrid approach. To be more exact here is what we do:

In-person
1-2 in person events each year co-located with our two tent pole conferences (one in ~April & one in ~October) -> These events are in-person only with no full day remote aspect. That said, we end the day with an AMA/interactive session with our CEO where we set up a zoom for folks who couldn't travel for whatever reason to join.

Virtual meetings
Up to 4, quarterly 90-minute meetings, focused on 1-2 subjects (so they can be 30-40 minutes per subject). These are generally structured with subject area co-chairs on our end who help us plot out the topics and then we make sure our co-chairs know they only should speak for 20% of the time. The idea here is that it is one large plenary session without any breakouts

Workshops
By the end of this cohort, we'll have hosted 3 of these series of events. The basic gist is that each is a 3-meeting series run by our Product and Product design team to help identify common problems on a shared subject that we'd like to be able to solve for our customers. Each of the 90 minute sessions includes 10 minutes of personal time to fill out a prompt on the subject and then we break into small groups (2-3 customers per group) and then identify common themes each of them have put on their own prompts. That goes on for about 20-30 minutes and then we spend the last 20-30 sharing as a big group. The last meeting in the series is actually where we put together a plan for how their consensus recommendation will make it on our roadmap and what it will look like. We've completed 2 of these workshop series so far and we've seen great feedback both from our CAB members and our product/engineering leaders who have joined in the discussions.

And since I didn't mention this before, I'll say this here...for our virtual meetings, we don't have any breaks built it.

The way I view it is that 90 minutes (so long as it's engaging) isn't long enough to require the break and in some instances can break the momentum and flow of the meeting which is then hard to get back.

Hope this helps.