How I Run Customer Advisory Boards Without Turning Them Into Wishlist Sessions
The Problem Hit Me in Our Second CAB Session
At Finvestfx, we set up a customer advisory board thinking we'd get strategic direction from our enterprise treasury clients. What we got instead was a wishlist that would've taken us three years to build and completely derailed our roadmap.
One CFO spent 15 minutes describing a custom reporting module for his specific currency hedging workflow. Another wanted us to integrate with a legacy system that exactly two companies in India still used. By the end, I had 23 feature requests and zero clarity on what actually mattered.
The issue wasn't that customers were being difficult. It's that I set up the session wrong. I asked open-ended questions like "what would you like to see?" and then wondered why everyone treated it like a product suggestion box.
Here's the Structure I Use Now
I frame the entire session around a specific strategic question, not product features.
When we were deciding whether to build deeper compliance automation at Finvestfx, I didn't ask "what compliance features do you want?" I asked: "When you think about your treasury workflow in 2 years, what part of compliance do you think will still require human judgment, and what should be fully automated?"
That shift changed everything. Instead of listing features, customers talked about risk appetite, regulatory uncertainty, and where they actually trusted automation. One treasurer said he'd never automate foreign exchange approvals over $1M because the stakes were too high. Another said manual reconciliation was pointless busy work that added zero value.
That gave me something I could actually use. We focused our compliance roadmap on reconciliation and reporting automation, not approval workflows. That came from strategic framing, not feature requests.
I share our constraints upfront, and I'm brutally honest about them.
At Sonic Linker, when we ran a CAB with our early AI SaaS customers, I opened with this: "We have a 4-person eng team and we're shipping every 2 weeks. We can build one major capability over the next quarter. If we try to build three, we'll ship garbage. So help me pick the right one."
That constraint forced customers to prioritize. They couldn't ask for everything because I'd already told them I couldn't build everything. The conversation shifted from "here's what I want" to "here's what would actually move the needle for us."
One customer wanted better bulk processing. Another wanted more granular permissions. A third wanted API access. When I asked them to stack rank based on what would make them use the product daily instead of weekly, API access dropped off the list entirely. Bulk processing won because three out of five customers said it was the difference between using us for 10% of their workflows versus 60%.
I wouldn't have gotten that clarity without forcing the trade-off upfront.
I validate problems, not solutions.
This is where most CABs go sideways. A customer says "I need a dashboard that shows X, Y, and Z metrics in real-time." Most PMs write that down as a feature request. I ask: "What decision are you trying to make that you can't make today?"
Usually, the real problem isn't the dashboard. It's that they're getting surprised by something (a currency swing, a compliance issue, a workflow bottleneck) and they want to catch it earlier. The dashboard is their mental model of a solution, but there are five other ways to solve that problem.
At Finvestfx, a client asked for a custom alert system for forex exposure. When I dug into the problem, it turned out they just wanted to know when their hedging ratio dropped below a certain threshold. We didn't need a custom alert system. We needed one calculated field and a Slack integration. Shipped it in a week instead of a quarter.
What I Actually Walk Away With
A good CAB session gives me three things:
- A prioritized problem, not a feature list. I know what's painful enough that customers will change their workflows to use a solution.
- Validation on a strategic direction. I'm not guessing whether customers care about compliance automation versus analytics. I know.
- Language I can use in positioning. When a customer describes a problem in their own words, that's how I write marketing copy and sales decks.
I don't walk away with a roadmap. I walk away knowing which *bet* to make next.
The Real Shift: Stop Asking What They Want, Start Asking What They'd Trade
The breakthrough for me was realizing that CABs fail when they're too open-ended. Customers will always ask for more if you let them. The job isn't to collect requests. It's to force trade-offs that reveal what actually matters.
At Sonic Linker, I started ending every CAB with this question: "If we could only ship one thing in the next 90 days, and you had to bet your usage of the product on us getting it right, what would it be?"
That question cuts through everything. Customers stop being polite. They stop hedging. They tell you the truth because you've made the stakes real.
And that's the whole point. A CAB should feel less like a focus group and more like a strategic planning session where everyone has skin in the game. If it doesn't, you're doing it wrong.