Revolutionize Product Development with Feedback-Driven Customer Advisory Boards

In a rapidly evolving business landscape, understanding and responding to customer needs is not just an advantage — it's a necessity. At Splunk, we've taken a bold step by applying a product manager mindset to our Customer Advisory Board (CAB) program, transforming it into a dynamic platform for both customers and our product teams. Our innovative approach has not only made our Practitioner CAB program a resounding success but has also paved the way for exciting expansions: an Executive CAB and industry-specific Go CABs, localized for deeper industry engagement.

Why a Product Management Approach?

By viewing CABs through a product management lens, we can systematically gather invaluable feedback that directly informs our product development. This approach ensures that feedback is not just collected but actively drives product evolution. The success of our Practitioner CAB program lies in its ability to engage with a diverse array of customers — from Splunk Admins to Security Engineers and DevOps Engineer — across various industries. This diversity fuels robust product development, ensuring our solutions are tailored to meet the broad spectrum of our customers' needs.

The Customer Feedback Program Cycle: A Strategic Blueprint for Success

To enhance our CAB program, we drew inspiration from SurveyMonkey's comprehensive research on customer feedback programs. Recognizing that customer feedback is the cornerstone of every successful business, we crafted a Structured Feedback Cycle based on the chapters outlined in their studies — where customer input is not just collected but actively drives product evolution. This cycle is designed to help us systematically gather and act on customer insights, providing a clear roadmap for enhancing customer experiences (CX). With 89% of CX professionals acknowledging the customer's experience as a leading factor in customer churn, our investment in a structured feedback program is essential for our company's longevity and success. Our ultimate guide to building effective customer feedback programs explores these pillars in depth, ensuring we create winning customer experiences regardless of the business model. We are committed to delivering exceptional value and fostering long-term customer relationships by integrating these practices into our CAB program.

We aim to build a best-in-class CAB program that continually evolves and improves. To achieve this, we also draw on insights from the CAB.org study, the largest global survey of CAB programs since 2010, and materials from the adjacent Ignite Advisory Group.

Post CAB sessions, feedback is meticulously compiled by our CAB team into detailed reports accessible to all Splunkers, from entry-level employees to Mangesh Pimpalkhare, GM, Splunk Platform. Product Managers play a crucial role in linking this feedback to their roadmap items in product development tools and Splunk Ideas. Every piece of feedback is accounted for and tracked leveraging Splunk to pull data from source systems, ensuring nothing gets overlooked and can easily be visible within our Splunk dashboard.

Source: Splunk CAB program, September 2024

^{Source: Splunk CAB program, September 2024}

We evaluated each pillar to identify our current practices and opportunities for improvement, benchmarking our progress at stages ranging from Early to Maturity Stage.

Planned improvements include expanding stakeholder involvement to enhance collaboration across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams and refining success metrics to capture customer engagement and advocacy better. Developing data-driven dashboards and AI-driven internal tools will facilitate efficient trend identification at scale and make it easy for everyone within the organization to search for insight out of the CAB program.

Transforming Feedback into Actionable Product Enhancements

The influence of our CAB program on product development has been significant and far-reaching. On average, 30% of new customer-facing products and features have been shaped by feedback gathered during CAB sessions. Every year we discuss around 30 pre-launch products and features, record 200+ feedback requests and action items, and add 80+ new Splunk Ideas - our public platform where Splunk users can submit, vote on, and comment on feature requests and product enhancements directly.

“In my experience, the CAB provides the ability to give direct, unfiltered feedback about the actual problems faced, helping to avoid solutions in search of a problem.  In compliance areas, such as public sector orders, that includes explaining the real problem we face and our actual pain points.” – CAB member, Security Architect, Public Sector

A notable example of CAB impact is the feedback provided on audit logs. As a result of a CAB session, we are thrilled to announce that the first set of changes is now available as of Splunk Cloud release (9.3.2408) and will be included in the upcoming non-maintenance release of Splunk Enterprise.

“By presenting our strategy to the CAB, we got critical feedback to validate our approach and make on-the-fly adjustments without waiting for the typical "release-and-get-feedback" iteration cycle. This allowed us to not only adjust our priorities but added valuable real-world context to ensure the features we planned to deliver would actually address the problems we were looking to address.” – Steve McMaster, Principal Product Manager, Splunk App Platform

This update addresses previously missing audit events for changes to fields, lookups, data models, dashboards, and UI panels. It also introduces a new audit dashboard, offering a straightforward interface for viewing logs and valuable examples of how to leverage audit data. While this release marks the beginning of our enhancements in this area, it represents a foundational step toward more comprehensive solutions. We are now progressing towards developing a new audit logging format, demonstrating our commitment to continuous improvement fueled by CAB insights.

Actionable Insights for Your CAB Strategy

For those looking to enhance their own CAB programs, here are some actionable steps drawn from our experience:

1. Leverage Customer Diversity: Engage a wide range of customers — from small to large accounts across various industries and roles — to gather comprehensive insights. This diversity ensures that our products address unique challenges and drive versatile, effective innovation.
2. Structured Feedback Cycles: Implement a systematic approach to collecting and utilizing feedback. This involves not just gathering insights but actively integrating them into product roadmaps, closing the loop with customers when their feedback is implemented, and reflecting periodically to evaluate and evolve the program.
3. Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Work closely with marketing and the field teams, such as sales and customer success to identify and involve the right participants in the CAB program.

Our CAB program stands as a testament to the power of collaboration and customer-centric innovation. By integrating diverse feedback from our practitioner community, leveraging best practices from industry leaders like SurveyMonkey and the Ignite Advisory Group, and consistently refining our strategies, we ensure that our products not only meet but exceed customer expectations. As we continue to evolve, our commitment to fostering a dialogue between our customers and product teams remains unwavering, driving sustained growth and excellence. Together, we are building a more responsive and innovative Splunk, committed to building a safer and more resilient digital world to tackle the challenges of tomorrow.

Together, we are building a more responsive and innovative Splunk that is equipped to tackle the challenges of tomorrow.