“Here’s the thing.
Most of us don’t want to admit it, but we work in silos. The product team is doing their thing and the customer success team is doing their thing. Most organizations (and most people) know this and work to some degree to minimize the separation, but it exists. These silos are evident between product teams and customer success teams. Both have good intentions and work hard to product something that a customer wants or otherwise finds useful, but in the end each team looks that what a customer needs through a different lens.
This is a problem that needs solving because customers don’t care about our lenses. They only care about their own thing…
This is why we wanted to talk to Nichole. She wrote an article, called Product Managers: Why You Should Include Customer Success Milestones In Your User Flows, in which she describes how product and customer success can work better together to be more customer-centric.
To do this, Nichole wants us to focus on helping customers achieve their desired outcomes because often times, even though our product is designed to help a customer achieve an outcome, the customer very often does at least some work outside of your product to achieve that outcomes and maybe your product only helps with some of that work (either by design or because the customer does not know they can use your product for that).”
Resources cited in the podcast:
- Lincoln Murphy’s Definition of Customer Success
- eBook: How to Align SaaS Content Marketing and Product Management
- Article: How to Create Customer-centric User (Not Product Centric) User On-boarding Flows
- Success Vector – the KPI for Customer Success-driven Growth
- Helping Sells Radio Episode 41: Kia Puhm Wants You to End the Product-Sales-Customer Success-Support Tug of War.
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