Draft a Champion Program Brief for a Connected-Hardware Brand
Objective: Given Peloton's broad consumer base and its need to deepen loyalty among its most vocal super-users, pick the right community model from the lesson's three-model framework and write a one-page brief that justifies the choice.
You're a lifecycle marketer at Peloton. Leadership wants a business case for investing in a smaller, more curated group of super-users, not just growing total member count.
Recommend one of the three community models (external customer community, internal champion program, open-source community), justify it against Peloton's audience, and define one success metric that isn't a vanity number.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Free, shareable, no account friction for a stakeholder-facing document
The process
1 step
Step 01 of 01
The lesson splits communities into three shapes: an open external customer community for broad-audience products, a curated internal champion program for products where a small group of power users drives outsized influence, and an open-source community anchored on the codebase itself.
Peloton already has millions of members and an open community (Facebook groups, leaderboards). The brief needs to recommend the NEXT layer: which model best deepens loyalty among the small slice of members who already evangelize the brand unpaid?
Procedure
- State the business problem in one sentence: broad community exists, but the most engaged 1% aren't formally recognized or leveraged.
- Pick a model: internal champion program (invite-only, curated, direct product input).
- List 3 selection criteria for who gets invited (e.g. instructor-tagged leaderboard activity, referral count, community moderator history).
- List 3 perks that cost Peloton near-zero cash (early class access, direct line to the content team, named recognition on the platform).
- Define one non-vanity success metric and its target.
CHAMPION PROGRAM BRIEF Problem: Peloton's most engaged members get the same treatment as a first-week rider. Model: Internal champion program (curated, invite-only). Invite criteria: - Top 2% by monthly class count - 3+ successful referrals in the last 12 months - Active in official Facebook/Discord groups as an unpaid moderator or top contributor Perks (near-zero cost): - Early access to new instructor drops - Quarterly call with the content team - 'Founding Rider' badge on profile Success metric: NPS delta between champions and the general member base, target +15 points within 2 quarters.
Healthy
The brief ties the model choice directly to Peloton's actual audience shape (mass-market product, small highly-engaged tail) rather than picking whichever model sounds trendiest.
Unhealthy
Recommending an open-source community for a hardware/subscription product with no codebase, or an external community when one already exists and the real gap is deeper engagement of existing members.
What this means
The right model answers 'what does THIS audience's engagement shape actually need,' not 'what community model do competitors use.'
So what do I do about it?
| Symptom | Action | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Champion program brief lists perks that cost real money per member | Swap for recognition-based perks (badges, early access, direct input) that scale to zero marginal cost | 30 min |
Final deliverable
A one-page champion program brief: problem statement, chosen model, invite criteria, perks list, and one non-vanity success metric.
See a reference example
Figma's early champion cohort (invite-only, pre-enterprise era) gave a small group of design leads direct input on the plugin API in exchange for public advocacy. By the time Figma sold enterprise deals, those champions were already trained, unpaid internal salespeople inside their own companies.
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Picks one of the three named models and justifies it against the audience, not just preference
- Invite criteria are behavior-based (activity, referrals) not just tenure or spend
- Success metric is not a vanity count (followers, posts) per the lesson's measurement section