The Opportunity Adobe Community Experts are a curated tier of highly engaged, product-knowledgeable creators and professionals who power peer-to-peer support, provide structured product feedback, and amplify Adobe messaging across their networks. The program is one of Adobe's most strategically important community assets - operating across all Digital Media categories including Photoshop, Acrobat, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, and InDesign.
The Community Experts Program Lead owns the end-to-end strategy, operations, and evolution of this program. This role is accountable for transforming the program from a peer-support function into a strategic, AI-enabled activation engine that drives product influence, creator advocacy, and measurable business outcomes.
You will lead a program at the intersection of community management, product advocacy, and VOC intelligence. Your core mandate is threefold:
- Program Strategy & Evolution: Define and own the multi-year strategic direction for Adobe's Community Experts program - including tier architecture, engagement models, recognition systems, and integration with product and marketing workflows.
- Expert Engagement & Activation: Manage the lifecycle of Community Experts from recruitment through recognition - ensuring high engagement, sustained contribution quality, and structured channels for Experts to influence Adobe product direction.
- Insight Generation & Influence: Operationalize the Experts program as a structured insight channel - ensuring expert feedback is captured, synthesized, and routed to product and PMM teams in a format that shapes roadmap decisions.
What you'll Do 1. Program Strategy & Architecture
- Own and evolve the strategic definition of the Community Experts program - encompassing program vision, Expert tier structure (entry, core, elite), eligibility criteria, and graduation pathways.
- Design and maintain the Expert value exchange framework: define what Experts receive from Adobe (recognition, access, tools, visibility) and what Adobe expects in return (quality answers, product feedback, advocacy output).
- Lead the integration of the Experts program into the broader Community 2.0 strategy - including alignment with the BASE/Bettermode platform migration, point attribution logic, and gamification mechanics.
- Establish a scalable operating model for the program: detailed playbooks, onboarding frameworks, engagement cadences, and customer concern protocols.
- Develop and sustain a strategic transition plan, ensuring continuity through leadership changes and ensuring the program is resilient, clearly detailed, and handover-ready.
2. Expert Engagement & Lifecycle Management- Own the full Expert lifecycle: recruitment, onboarding, ongoing engagement, recognition, and off-boarding.
- Design and run regular Expert touchpoints - including monthly roundtables, beta access program, product previews, and AMAs - using a structured Agenda Framework (Feature Focus 15 Engagement Patterns 15 Problems 15 Feedback Pathways).
- Manage Expert communications: transition announcements, program updates, feedback requests, and recognition moments - at volume and with personalisation using templated workflows and AI-assisted drafting.
- Build and maintain diverse Expert representation across Adobe's product categories (PAFEI), user types (freelancers, SMBs, agencies, in-house teams), and geographies.
- Identify and address Expert burnout and engagement drop-off proactively - through participation incentive reviews, workload calibration, and periodic Expert NPS/satisfaction measurement.
- Lead Adobe MAX Expert activation planning - including Expert spotlights, community presence at the event, and post-event engagement follow-up.
3. Insight Generation & Product Influence- Operationalize the Experts program as a structured VOC channel - ensuring every roundtable and feedback session generates actionable outputs structured as Themes, Opportunity Areas, and Problem Statements.
- Manage the entire feedback loop. Provide a pre-session brief five business days before. Facilitate sessions with AI-assisted transcription. Deliver a post-session summary within 48 hours. Route feedback to marketing and product development teams.
- Partner with PMM and Product leads to align Expert engagement sessions with roadmap validation cycles, beta program achievements, and feature release windows.
- Contribute expert-sourced insights to the VOC Insights & Advocacy Program, ensuring Expert voice is represented in the unified insight model alongside Sprinklr, UnitQ, and Gainsight signals.
- Track and report influence signals: decisions impacted in roadmap, feature requests raised, bugs submitted, and marketing amplification (social posts, tutorials, AMAs) attributable to Expert engagement.
4. Platform & Operations- Own Expert-related configuration in BASE/Bettermode - including point attribution, tier logic, badge management, and Expert profile maintenance.
- Partner with the Gainsight team to surface Expert engagement data within community health scorecards - ensuring Expert contribution quality, response rates, and CAR metrics are tracked and visible in reporting.
- Build and automate Expert-related workflows using available tooling (Sprinklr, Gainsight, BASE) - minimizing manual overhead while maintaining high program quality.
- Maintain accurate Expert rosters, participation tracking, and representation data - feeding into monthly metrics reports (attendance, diversity mix, engagement outcomes).
- Coordinate with Trust & Safety (DSA compliance) to ensure Expert program operations meet regulatory requirements around content moderation and user data.
5. Cross-Functional Partnership- Serve as the primary point of contact for all Expert-related queries from PMM, Product, Marketing, and DE&C leadership.
- Represent the Expert program in quarterly business reviews - presenting return on investment, influence metrics, and program health to executive collaborators.
- Collaborate with the Beta Community program lead to leverage Expert cohorts as a pipeline for early product validation participants.
- Partner with the AI Community Experiences team to explore how Expert-generated content can feed LLM training pipelines (Genie, Infinity, Sprinklr AI+).
- Contribute to the Creator-Led AI Activation strategy - positioning Experts as the primary human demonstration layer for Adobe AI features.
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What you need to succeed Essential- 8-10 years of experience in community program management, developer/creator advocacy, or customer success in a SaaS or digital media company.
- Proven track record managing structured advocacy or expert programs - including lifecycle design, engagement operations, and executive-level reporting.
- Strong written communication skills with experience managing high-volume community communications, program updates, and collaborator briefings.
- Analytical approach - comfortable with community metrics, engagement data, and building scorecards that demonstrate program return on investment.
- Experience working cross-functionally with Product, PMM, and Marketing teams - translating community insight into business-relevant recommendations.
- Ability to operate in a high-ambiguity environment - building structure, documented processes, and scalable playbooks from scratch.
Preferred- Experience with community platforms (Gainsight Community / Khoros / Bettermode / Vanilla), CRM tools, or advocacy platforms.
- Familiarity with Adobe's Creative Cloud or Document Cloud product portfolio - as a user, community member, or former specialist.
- Experience using AI tools for operational efficiency (e.g. AI-assisted transcription, automated synthesis, communication drafting at scale).
- Prior experience managing Expert or Ambassador program with measurable product influence or roadmap contribution outcomes.
- Background in VOC, user research, or product operations is a strong plus.
