Customer Success to Product Management: My top 3 challenges and how they help me become better at product management
Starting out in Agtech
A bit of background about me… While studying Agriculture at university, I started out my career at AgriDigital where I currently work as a senior product analyst. In its early days, I was one of the first in the customer success team where I helped build a streamlined process. I later moved into the product team where I started building my passion for growing products and solving customer problems.
Customer success prepared me for product
It makes sense right?
- You know the product through and through
The quickest way to learn the ins and outs of a product is to be on the support desk; answering real customer questions, seeing where users get stuck and what they enjoy and don’t enjoy about the product. The CS team is a key feedback channel through to product managers, being the real voice of the customer in the business.
- You understand the industry
Working with customers to solve their software problems requires an understanding of how their business operates so you can provide the best solution available. You quickly learn to just get it (even if you are faking it until you make it)! This is critical for product work to understand the wider industry of the problems you are solving.
- You know your customers
Whether it’s calls from customers at 7am or answering their emails at 9pm at night, you get to know your customers. They call you when things are not going right, so it’s core to problem solving. Being on the front line is not easy. But it helps build empathy and reminds you that technology should be an enabler, not a stress inducer. This ability to put yourself in your customers shoes, even when you’re not out on the farm in our case, should be how you spend your day thinking as a product manager.
Knowing all of this, I felt ready to dive into a product role. But it didn’t come without its challenges.
Challenges of moving from customer success to product management
- The desire to solve every problem… immediately!
This was a challenge (for me at least)! Working in CS, I had an ingrained desire to solve and “close” problems as quickly as possible. I’ve come to learn that product management requires quite a different approach. It requires longer term strategic thinking and decision making that impacts all aspects of the business. - Why can’t the product team just build the feature?
It’s natural, everyone thinks about what would make their lives easier. And for someone in CS, it often feels like if we just “build this feature” it would solve a lot of problems. And for sure that might help that day or week or month… but there will always be new features that customers want. This has taken me longer to understand than it should have but in CS, the aim is to close every support ticket… in product, you are never going to have an empty backlog! If you do… you are probably out of a job. - Learning you don’t have to do everything yourself
CS individuals often work independently to solve customer problems, with the last resort being to reach out to the tech or product teams. Product roles are almost the complete opposite. They sit in the middle of the company interacting with every team. Collaboration is critical to being a great product person (something I am still learning to do effectively). But I have learned that things always work out better when I’ve had more conversations, discussions, and brainstorming sessions with as many teams as possible to solve a particular outcome.
While customer success and product play different roles in a company, at the end of the day, the goal remains the same — solving customer problems!
AgriDigital aims to power trust in grain supply chains by combining inventory, data and finance in one simple technology platform for farmers, brokers, buyers, storage operators and processors. Sign up here today!
