Hi all -- happy Friday! For those of you running CABs or similar-named customer advisory boards, what kinds of topics do you cover with C-level customers? We are a very product-driven organization and sometimes struggle to keep the agendas appealing to C-level, without going too deep with product roadmap demos & feedback sessions. Our attendance has been poor lately -- except for this week where we had near perfect attendance for an AI roundtable discussion. We do have a relatively new Technical Advisory Board (TAB) with lower level/functional job titles and can certainly move some of the product heavy CAB topics to the TAB. But to fill the gap, I'd love to hear some example topics you have on your C-level advisory boards.
We do 4 CAB and TAB meetings per year (8 total). One of the CAB meetings is in person, and all the rest are virtual, about 2 hours long.
High level themes work well with C-suite: macro industry trends like AI, corporate culture building, balancing long-term strategy with short term profitability goals, etc.
Do you do interviews with your CAB members? We made all our topics related to things they wanted to talk about, and that kept our attendance high. We also ask them in a post-meeting survey to suggest topics as they come up. It takes some more internal alignment to get everyone to focus on the topics members want to talk about, but it definitely helps increase engagement.
We do "check in" interviews with CAB members who may be due to rotate off, and they're asked what they think of the CAB and any feedback for us at that time. We also send a post-meeting follow up that has a question about topics for next meeting. That survey had one CAB member say that he feels we're too in the weeds for C-level attendees, which sparked my question here.
