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 → Engagement Patterns → Problems → 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.

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.