Focus on customers has always been Cloudinary’s mantra. Because we owe them our success, we are constantly reaching out to our customers, not just for feedback on our offerings, but also for their vision, wish list, and buy-in of what Cloudinary can do to meet their needs and make them succeed. About six months ago, it occurred to us that it would be beneficial if we could meet regularly with those who are behind innovation at our key customers—executives, product gurus, developers, content managers—to swap strategies, product roadmaps, best practices, and such. In particular, we’d like to solicit actionable feedback as a foundation for our plans of product enhancements.
A subsequent meeting with our product chief, Nadav Soferman, started the process of the formation of a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) with representatives from Cloudinary and from our key customers. The board’s first all-day meeting will occur on Friday, May 3 at Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California, the day after Cloudinary’s annual digital-media conference, ImageCon 2019, to be held at the same venue on May 1-2.
Altogether, the Cloudinary CAB boasts a customer membership of 25 representatives from 15 companies, among them Jane.com, Just Eat, Hike, HelloFresh, Kenshoo, Nintendo, and StubHub. They hail from 11 countries: Canada, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, U.K., and others. Representatives from Cloudinary include our three founders: Itai Lahan, CEO; Tal Lev-Ami, CTO; and Nadav Soferman, CPO; also Amit Sharon, VP of Customer Success.
Attendance at the two-day ImageCon—whose agenda includes workshops, tech talks, and keynote speeches—prior to the CAB meeting promises to spark new ideas and concepts, transforming everyone’s digital experience.
The agenda for the May 3 meeting features the following:
- Presentation by Cloudinary’s CPO on product strategy, roadmap, and analytics
- Presentation of use cases by three customers
- Brainstorming sessions in three groups with a focus on verticals, use cases, and product and market trends
- Summary of future directions and priorities
The Cloudinary CAB is a collaborative forum that emphasizes sharing of experiences, observations, concerns, problems. Both Cloudinary and its key customers stand to reap many benefits. Here are a few of them:
- An opportunity to help strategize Cloudinary’s product direction and roadmap
- Networking avenues with peers and other professionals in the visual-media sector
- Establishment of rapport, camaraderie, and communication channels with Cloudinary’s product-team leaders and management
- Illuminating insight into the trends of the visual-media market
Cloudinary’s CAB program is ongoing. We plan to meet annually, face to face, as exemplified by the upcoming May 3 meeting. Periodic virtual meetings will follow during the rest of the year.
The birth of the Cloudinary CAB, a milestone in the company’s history, is shaping up to be the cornerstone on which rests the success of Cloudinary and its partners and customers for many years to come. Need I say that we can’t wait?