As a Product Manager, you develop user flows to chart how customers move from signup to successfully using your SaaS product. Your colleagues in Customer Success are doing the same thing — mapping a flow of customer milestones to success.
But “success” can mean different things to PMs and CSMs. And, while both teams employ user flows (or customer journeys), what they put on them are very different, reflecting their very different goals.
You are responsible for making the product functionally work, with enough awesome UX so it’s relatively intuitive for the customer to use. For your team, “success” often means that the product works. It does what it says it will do, and does it well.
Customer Success is responsible for helping customers use the product to achieve their desired outcome. Most of the time, that desired outcome isn’t in the product – it’s outside of it. For example, if I purchase a budgeting app, my desired outcome is to save enough money to sun myself on a Caribbean beach, with a good-looking server to bring me fruity drinks with umbrellas in them. The Customer Success manager’s job is to get me there.
You might say it’s a conflict between focusing on the world inside the product and the wide, wide world outside of it.
And that conflict can bring about a deep divide between Product and Customer Success.
Yet, we’re all working towards the same goal: Creating a product people love, need and want more of.
What if you were to bring both user flows together, so the functionality inside the product meets the desired outcomes outside of the product?
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[…] 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 […]