Experts Aren't Free Marketing. Treat Them Like Colleagues.

Sooner or later, every tech company builds an expert program. They're called champions, ambassadors, heroes or Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), but the idea is the same: find the people outside the company who know your product best and share that knowledge with others, and build a relationship with them.

Inside the company, the pitch for such a program often sounds something like this: these people already love our product, so they'll spread the word for free.

That's the mistake. And it's the most expensive one you can make with the most valuable people you have.

I've spent years working with Microsoft's MVPs on AI, including the sessions where those experts sit down with the teams who build the products. Here's what I've learned about what experts actually want, and what they're actually worth.

What experts actually want

Swag is nice. A badge looks good on a profile. But in my experience, those aren't the reasons the best experts stay. Four things matter much more.

Access. Time with the people who build the product. Early looks at what's coming, so they can prepare their community before everyone else asks questions. For a real expert, ten minutes with the engineer who designed a feature is worth more than any gift box.

Being heard. Experts give feedback constantly, and it's often the best feedback a company gets: detailed, informed, based on real projects. What they want in return is simple: to know it went somewhere.

Real recognition. Not a generic thank-you to "our amazing community," but recognition for the specific thing they did. The talk that brought fifty people into a technology. The sample that half the forum now uses. Specific recognition says: we noticed you.

Freedom to be critical. The best experts are trusted precisely because they tell the truth, including about the product. If being in your program means they have to stay positive, you've just asked them to spend their credibility on you.

The free marketing trap

Treat experts as a free marketing channel, and it shows quickly. Posting targets. Launch hashtags. Ready-made messages to share. Content that has to be approved.

You get exactly what you asked for: posts that look like ads, from people whose followers notice right away. And you lose the best experts first, because their credibility is the reason anyone listens to them, and they won't trade it for a badge.

I've written before that developers don't trust logos, they trust people. An expert program built as a megaphone turns trusted people into logos. That's the opposite of what you needed them for.

What they're really worth

The real value of experts runs in both directions.

They're your earliest and smartest feedback. Long before a problem shows up in a support ticket, an expert has run into it on a real project, worked around it, and written down how. If you listen, you hear about problems months before the rest of your users do.

They're already where the developers are. In their city, their language, their meetups, their forums at two in the morning. In my post about the parachute problem I argued that local voices carry further than visiting ones. Experts are exactly those voices.

And they help other people succeed. The answer an expert gives in a forum or at a meetup is often the moment a developer decides to keep going with your technology instead of giving up.

The feedback loop is the program

If I had to pick one moment that shows whether an expert program works, it's this: an engineer from the product team telling an expert, "We changed this because of what you told us."

Nothing builds loyalty like that sentence. And nothing destroys it faster than feedback that disappears into a void. Experts don't need every request to be accepted. They need to know what happened. "We're not going to do this, and here's why" is a perfectly good answer. Silence is not.

That's why the sessions between experts and product teams are the heart of the program for me. Not because of the information shared, but because they close the loop between the people who use the product most deeply and the people who build it.

How to build a program experts value

If you run an expert program, or you're thinking about starting one, five principles:

Give access before you ask for anything. Time with the builders, early information, a direct line. Start by giving.

Close every loop. Tell experts what happened to their feedback, even when the answer is no.

Never script them. Criticism is a feature. An expert who can say "this part isn't ready yet" is the one whose praise actually means something.

Recognize what they did, specifically. Name the talk, the sample, the city they brought together.

Measure what they changed, not what they posted. Which feedback improved the product? Which communities grew around them? A count of posts tells you about volume, not value.

Colleagues who don't work for you

The best way I know to think about experts is as colleagues who don't work for you. They don't owe you anything. They choose to spend their evenings learning your product, teaching it to others, and telling you what's wrong with it.

Treat them like a channel, and they'll stop talking. Treat them like colleagues, and they'll make your product better, and help a lot of developers along the way.