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Glossary
Customer feedback

What is Customer Advisory Board?

A Customer Advisory Board is a representative group of high-value customers who provide strategic feedback on a product's direction and future roadmap. Unlike general user testing, these boards focus on long-term business alignment and qualitative insights from a company's most influential users.

When to use it

Teams should establish a Customer Advisory Board when they need to validate long-term strategy with their most invested users or when moving into new market segments. It helps solve the risk of misaligned feature development by creating a direct feedback loop between company leadership and key stakeholders.

Example

A SaaS team building a project management tool invites 12 power users from different industries to a semi-annual workshop. After reviewing the upcoming Q4 roadmap, the board highlights that 'cross-project dependencies' are a higher priority for their scaling teams than 'AI-generated summaries.' Based on this consensus, the product manager shifts resources to accelerate the dependency engine, ensuring the next major release addresses the board's most pressing workflow bottleneck.

How Planet Roadmap helps with Customer Advisory Board

Planet Roadmap has a public feedback portal that lets you track specific voters, allowing you to filter and prioritize requests coming from your advisory board members.

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FAQ

How is a Customer Advisory Board different from a beta program?
A beta program focuses on technical testing and bug finding for a specific feature, while a Customer Advisory Board focuses on high-level strategy, business challenges, and long-term roadmap prioritization.
What is the ideal size for a Customer Advisory Board?
Most effective CABs consist of 8 to 15 members; this is small enough to allow for deep discussion among all participants but large enough to provide a diverse range of perspectives from different organizations.

Related terms

Voice of CustomerFeedback PortalProduct StrategyBeta ProgramFeature RequestInternal Roadmap

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