How to build a product advisory council for your startup

The pandemic has rapidly increased the pace at which companies must evolve to serve their customers, but as the world goes digital, it has also become harder to anticipate changing needs.

In order to design, build and maintain a product that meets changing customer demands, companies need a mechanism that provides unbiased insights from people that represent them.

By design, product advisory councils (PACs) are an invaluable tool that can provide direct access to the expectations of your customers. Once established, a good PAC will provide valuable perspectives on how to solve problems for a broader, evolving market while putting a real face and name to your customer personas, helping your teams feel more connected and motivated to provide tangible value.

There are a number of ways a PAC can influence your business decisions, but most importantly, they will help you prioritize features that have the most value to your customers and help position those features using the same language your customers use. And they can inform future content development by uncovering opportunities you might not have thought to explore.

Here are seven steps to help you set up a PAC and the tactics for implementing them:

Define the goals of your PAC

First and foremost, define and align your goals for the PAC. These should be unique to your business, taking into account your industry, customers and goals.

A good place to start is to ask yourself how you want to grow. For example, you might want to expand beyond your current target customer. To do that successfully, you’ll need to understand how your new customers think. What are their challenges? What are their motivations? What language do they use to describe their work? This will inform the features you want to have to meet the needs of your new customer, as well as how to position the product’s value.

In this case, one of the PAC’s goals should focus on defining and evolving your market opportunity. Clearly defined goals are crucial to helping you decide the kinds of people you want to be represented in the PAC. Consider demographics (age, gender, occupation, location, etc.) as well as psychographics (fears, motivations, influences, etc.).

We implemented a PAC with pretty straightforward goals:

1. Remain close to our existing customer base to prioritize how our product and marketing should evolve.
2. Get better at overcoming barriers to purchase by increasing our understanding of buyers and how decisions are made.
3. Validate and broaden our understanding of our next growth market — the folks we plan on selling to in the future.

At a high level, these goals are valuable because they serve as the inputs needed to inform our product development strategy in both the near and long terms, as well as how we can best communicate the value we want to deliver.

Ensure there is a clear, real value for PAC members who participate

It’s important to think about what you can offer the PAC members to keep them engaged considering your budget, time constraints and your team’s bandwidth. The spectrum for this type of value is wide and can include anything from offering peer networking opportunities to providing exclusive content/training or negotiated discount rates for select member services.

We give our non-customer members exposure to like-minded leaders and potential new partnerships. They also get to learn and share best practices with other members, and in general, have a little fun doing something out of the norm.

Our customers have early access to new features. They also influence our product road map priorities, are included in case studies and customer highlights on our website, and get to learn and share best practices with their peers.

Identify key members and influencers

Once you’ve established your goals and defined the value exchange, identify and invite individuals who you feel will provide valuable insights to your business, as well as influencers to attract additional PAC members. These members should add value, credibility and, ideally, a little excitement to the mix. Your PAC should include representatives from different market segments and buyer personas.

Depending on the goals of your PAC, try to include a mix of the following to represent different perspectives:

1. People who represent decisions makers and buyers
2. People who represent the end user of your product or service
3. People who can bring an influential or unique perspective
4. People who may have insight into your competition
5. People who will challenge your ideas, plans and strategies

These folks will be invaluable in helping you understand how to address both your current and growth market needs. The members benefit from being able to learn from each other as well as be exposed to larger, more mature companies they may aspire to become.

Now that you’ve thought through these groups, identify and list potential members from your network for each, and assess the list with your team. The size of this list will set the foundation for how you will engage with them as a whole.

It’s OK to have a small list of potential members in the beginning. Invite them to attend a PAC session and ask them how to best position your PAC to draw in other leaders and influencers going forward. If your list is too large, consider breaking it down into smaller groups based on segment, market opportunity, buyer persona, etc.

Create a little FOMO

After inviting key members to your PAC, find ways to make them feel valued and important for joining you. To do this, you should invest a little money in quality events such as custom swag, member dossiers, food, drinks, exclusive content, etc.

You might even consider branding your PAC so that it feels exclusive. We made “top secret” folders to share screen grabs and personas with members to add some theatrics. Again, this should be valuable, a little fun, and is completely possible in a virtual setting, too. Before the event, send kits with swag, snacks, or personalized notes that align with the theme. Put thought into what’s included in these packages and who and where you’re sending them to create a sense of importance.

Establish a cadence you can stick to

This is something we wish we would have done better out of the gate. Try to establish a realistic cadence for how and when your PAC regularly meets. Consider at least quarterly for the full PAC, with more targeted meetups for specific personas (buyers and users) or verticals (agencies and consultancies) throughout the year. Publish the PAC calendar and any established themes early and get the invites out. Your PAC members want to help, but they are busy and calendars fill up quickly.

Our goal is to hold PAC meetups at least quarterly. Each quarterly meetup has a specific focus, challenge or insight we’re trying to address. Depending on the topic, we may include guest speakers or influential business leaders that can provide a valuable perspective or experience.

Focus on discussion versus workshops

You may feel inclined to use your PAC to test specific features and ask for feedback. That’s a great idea for smaller, focused groups, and you may want to segment your PAC members for this exact reason. However, when you have the larger PAC together, remember the value exchange and purpose of the meetup.

In our experience, conversations around industry trends and the challenges and opportunities those trends bring are more valuable to our PAC, because they provide a much deeper understanding of how people think, feel and describe the value they are looking for.

The flow of these conversations is also less structured by design, which leaves space for more human connections to be made, ad hoc ideas to emerge and individual personality to shine through, all of which helps with nuance, language and emotional connection. When combined, these elements also reinforce the value exchange, as members can clearly see the value in the conversation versus providing feedback.

Follow up and follow through

This last step is important for both your team and the PAC members. After each meetup, follow up with attendees and share what was discussed, highlights, key takeaways and next steps. Include how their input is having an impact on the product, marketing and your team.

Consider highlighting members in your newsletter. Find people who are influential or are doing something cool within their industry, and give them a spotlight — of course, get their permission before you post.

At the end of the year, share a recap with observed trends and related new opportunities/challenges that may be of interest to the group. The goal here is to ensure the value exchange continues beyond the meetups. Such regular communication will also help when it is time to recruit more PAC members, and can be done through a newsletter.

Depending on the composition of the PAC, you could also create a Slack channel for more ongoing discussion and community-building between meetups.