RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

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

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. Teams win when their individual members trust each other enough to prioritize team success over individual glory; paradoxically, winning as a team is the best way for the team members to achieve individual success. The members of a winning team are highly sought after by other teams, both for the skills they demonstrate and for their ability to help a new team develop a winning culture. — The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, et al. Source: Amazon Kindle […]
  2. 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 […]
  3. Build I walked the candidate into our meeting room. “Welcome to Mozi Labs” I said, as I signaled for her to sit in front of our panel. “I will inform the rest of the team that you made it here safely so that we can start the interview. The weather is really bad outside, I hope that you did not have too much trouble finding our office?” “No,” she responded. “I was so excited about this interview that I made a trip in advance yesterday to ensure that I would be able to find my way easily.” Way to win […]
  4. Innovation Accounting (IA) is a way of evaluating progress when all the metrics typically used in an established company (revenue, customers, ROI, market share) are effectively zero. It provides a framework of chained leading indicators, each of which predicts success. Each link in the chain is essential and, when broken, demands immediate attention. It’s a focusing device for teams, keeping their attention on the most important leap-of-faith assumptions. It’s a common, mathematical vocabulary for negotiating the use of resources among competing functions, divisions, or regions. It provides a way to tie long-term growth and R&D into a system that […]
  5. Alignment means that managers should explicitly seek and highlight the commonality between the company’s purpose and values and the employee’s career purpose and values. Some obvious commonality emerges naturally: both sides thrive on progress. Companies want to launch new products, grow their market share, and expand into new markets; employees want to take on new responsibilities, increase their capabilities, and yes, make more money. In other words, both company and employee want to be on a winning team. But zoom in a bit more, and differences appear. Perhaps the employee has a side interest in early childhood education, but […]

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