What kind of Executive Community Should you Create?!

As a [dev|data|platform] tool company it's essential to be realistic when scoping your executive community. You need to match your ambitions to your audiences interests.

All too often I'll get a ping from the founder of a cool new [dev|data|platform] tool company. They've got a great PLG motion, an active developer community with thousands of users, organic hockey stick engagement and they just want a couple of hints so they can replicate that traction with an executive audience. Unfortunately they're seldom able to capture and sustain the same degree of executive attention. 

Executive Communities are Hard

Building an executive community is very different from building a community for Individual Contributors. IC's are paid to go deep, to be in the weeds. They generally love learning about new technologies and if they can become the expert in a new technology that can be their ticket to a promotion, a new job or even life as an influencer in the DevRel / conference world! As such, it's a lot easier to build and sustain engagement - providing your solution can have a substantial impact on their work.

Executives, on the other hand, need to know just enough about all the things to figure out whether they have the right people prioritizing the right projects. They may be deeply curious and technical, but generally they're paid to go a mile wide and an inch deep. If you really want to create a community for executives, you probably have to cover global hiring one month, LLM Ops the next, SEI / developer metrics the month after and how to build an effective platform team the month after that.

For most dev tool companies, that is neither consistent with their brand nor a good use of resources. But there are a number of other ways of engaging with executives. Here are three examples.

Opportunities for Engagement

An Advisory Board

If you're looking for a few executives matching your target personas to brainstorm, refine and validate your thought leadership, executive positioning and product development roadmap, inviting them to an advisory board can be a great way to make them feel special and get their honest insights into your proposed initiatives.

This is an ideal strategy for engaging with a small number (5 → 35) of very senior executives and can support your credibility and help you to improve your executive motion.

Do: Treat them extremely well - good dinners, quality swag, perhaps some advisory options

Don't: Conflate this with design partnerships or sales. Engage with them for their wisdom, not their contribution to quota.

Mid-level meetups

Depending on the scale of the potential impact of your offering, you might be able to sustain a monthly community for Director+ level execs. You probably won't get the CTOs to come, but if (for example) you provide a wide range of solutions for supporting ML Ops, you might well be able to cover evals one month, orchestration then next and graph RAG stores the month after that. If that's all on brand and you can engage with Directors of MLOps, you might be able to generate close to IC like engagement in a monthly format.

Do: Be very clear about the exact level of seniority and portfolio that maps to your target audience and focus on online or cities with a deep pool of such executives.

Don't: Forget that this isn’t a room full of IC’s. You should be ready and willing to answer technical questions, but you probably shouldn’t kick off with a demo of coding using your API!

Executive Events

While you might not be able to sustain a monthly cadence for a C level audience, you might still be able to get them in the room 1 → 4 times a year. Whether it's a breakfast, lunch, happy hour, dinner, sporting event or some other activity, if you can invite some customers, mid-funnel prospects and a few new execs, "one off" executive events on a regular cadence can be a great way to update them on trends in your domain while building goodwill and helping them to grow their networks.

Do: Ensure your events are compelling for the participants. Personally I’d go mid level on the expenses and ensure you’re really thoughtful about the content and facilitation so everyone goes home feeling a little smarter and better connected.

Don't: Believe it’s just about the budget. Few people will turn down dinner at a Michelin starred restaurant. But you’d be surprised how many will be fine with wine and wraps and a really interesting peer group engaging with a nuanced and relevant topic.

It's important to realize just how hard it is to get attention from tech execs. They generally have a wide portfolio, a packed schedule and a lot of contention for their time. But if you can deliver outstanding advice, connections and experiences, first party events can be an excellent way to accelerate your executive GTM.