How do you arrange and use your product / client advisory board members to maximize their involvement in your strategic and development efforts?

There are multiple ways to go about a client advisory board. At Oracle, we took a more independent approach. Since our solution offering was in the regulatory space, we encouraged our customers to form an advisory board with Oracle as a participant of the board. Some specifics, 

• The board was not a product-specific or Oracle-specific board. Instead, it was an industry-specific group where we discussed relevant regulatory topics. 
• The initial membership of the board included most of our customers. 
• Other market practitioners (who used a competitive product) were welcome to the group. 
• Oracle employees were members of the board, but there was no product show & tell in these groups. Everything was about industry problems and how the practitioners can improve their performance. 
• The board did keep track of Oracle customers so that in the event that Oracle-specific information was shared, the group had an option to share with Oracle-only customers. Though that rarely happened and we never pressed too much for confidentiality. 
• The group met four times a year. Three times over 90 min long conference calls and one time for a one-day in-person session. 
• We also had topical threads spawning out of this group that were handled by sub-committees. These were called Working Groups. 
• The group was governed by Chatham House rules  

This group was quite useful for our brand and for our product roadmap. All the major players in the industry (our customers or not) knew about the group. We always welcomed members who were using competitive products. And they were impressed by the knowledge and insights they gained in these sessions. 

We rarely worried about product-specific information falling in the hands of non-customers because it was not that difficult to get competitive product-specific information from other sources (people moved a lot around the industry and there were several consulting firms that worked with all the products in the market). 

I have been part of several user groups and customer advisory boards. This independent structure helped with customer engagement and customer success. And though the group was independent of Oracle, everyone knew that the founders of this group were Oracle customers and indirectly their champions. So the Oracle brand was indirectly associated with this group. 

This type of structure is not possible for all solutions. It is very much dependent on your product's target market. But if you can leverage such a structure it will make a big difference.