RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

Customer Success: Some tech companies have what’s referred to as a high‐touch model of helping their customers, and some have a low‐touch model. You need to understand what your company’s customer success strategy is, and you need to ensure that your products are aligned with that strategy. Again, if you are proposing something that would represent a change, you’ll want to sit down with leadership and discuss the options.

— INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Marty Cagan

Source: Amazon Kindle

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. Good teams have product, design, and engineering sit side by side, and they embrace the give and take between the functionality, the user experience, and the enabling technology. Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers’ struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems. Good teams understand who each of their key stakeholders are, they understand the constraints that these stakeholders operate in, and they are committed to inventing solutions that work not just for users […]
  2. While it is perhaps counterintuitive that Customer Success should have a close working relationship with the Product team, this is absolutely the case. Because Customer Success is highly attuned to how value is being created (or not) for the customer, having a tight feedback loop into the Product roadmap is essential. As a bare minimum, CSMs should participate in feature planning sessions. More formally, the product ticketing queue should include a Customer Success track for features that need to be prioritized. — Farm Don’t Hunt: The Definitive Guide to Customer Success by Guy Nirpaz, Fernando Pizarro Source: Amazon Kindle […]
  3. Visionaries take a greater interest in technology than in their industry. Visionaries are defining the future. You meet them at technology conferences and other futurist forums where people gather to forecast trends and seek out new market opportunities. They are easy to strike up a conversation with, and they understand and appreciate what high-tech companies and high-tech products are trying to do. They want to talk ideas with bright people. They are bored with the mundane details of their own industries. They like to talk and think high tech. — Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive […]
  4. Opportunities framed from your company’s perspective: Product teams think about their product and business all day every day. It’s easy to get stuck thinking from your company’s perspective rather than your customers’ perspective. However, if we want to be truly human-centered, solving customer needs while creating value for the business, we need to frame opportunities from our customers’ perspective. No customer would ever say, “I wish I had more streaming entertainment subscriptions.” But they might say, “I want access to more compelling content.” Review each opportunity on your tree and ask, “Have we heard this in interviews?” If you […]
  5. Mental Model #1: Address “Important”; Ignore “Urgent.” These are entirely separate things that we often fuse together. Important is what truly matters, even if the payoff or deadline is not so immediate. Urgent only refers to the speed of response that is desired. You can easily use an Eisenhower Matrix to clarify your priorities and ignore urgent tasks, unless they so happen to also be important. Mental Model #2: Visualize All the Dominoes. We are a shortsighted species. We think only one step ahead in terms of consequences, and then we typically only limit it to our own consequences. […]

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