Product Management in the Age of the Customer
I’m incredibly excited about the merger of Aptrinsic and Gainsight. Here’s why.
We started Aptrinsic because we wanted to solve one of the biggest challenges businesses face: achieving hyper-growth in an era where products and services are being consumed through web and mobile apps at an unprecedented pace.
This being the case, a big part of the customer experience today is actually delivered through the product. Which is why we at Aptrinsic decided to focus on product experience in order to help companies turn their product into a sustainable growth engine for their business.
Most companies claim they know their customers, but understanding client needs in the Age of the Customer is a huge challenge, as customer habits are changing rapidly. Unfortunately, most Product Managers lack a detailed view of customer behavior needed to make informed strategic decisions about how to grow and how to build great products.
In my decades of experience in technology, I have heard time and time again that Product Managers want to make product decisions and demonstrate the impact of their product using empirical evidence, not anecdotes or opinions. And they wanted a way to quickly and easily engage their users directly within the product. At Aptrinsic, we set out to build a platform that would provide Product Managers the tools to do both.
Our solution, the very first product-led growth platform, automatically tracks and analyzes detailed product usage data, collects contextual user feedback, and delivers winning in-app engagements with zero friction. Our goal is to help Product Teams make more strategic decisions aimed at delivering great product experiences, as well as understanding how these experiences drive bookings and revenue.
But I quickly realized that the product was only part, albeit an important part, of the solution. While driving a great product experience is critical, so are the efforts of the Customer Success team in ensuring that customers were maximizing the business value of the products they were using. The more I listened to customers, the more I believed that better alignment between the Product and Customer Success teams would yield better results for clients.
In my conversations with Customer Success leaders, they conveyed their desire to leverage the product itself to help them more efficiently scale user onboarding and drive adoption. They knew that driving Customer Success at scale couldn’t be achieved cost-effectively if the answer was to continually throw people at the problem. They also wanted to gain influence over the product roadmap and find a way to more easily deliver to customers the best practices they’d learned through their many client engagements.
It wasn’t hard to connect the dots. I knew that our platform could help solve these problems. We could help them effectively scale onboarding by delivering guided onboarding journeys within the product using contextual in-app engagements. And we could help them bake their best practices into the product itself using our in-app guides and walkthroughs. Beyond that, we could help them improve their survey response rates with in-app surveys that captured customer feedback in a frictionless manner.
As I saw collaboration between Product and Customer Success accelerate, I began to formulate a much bigger vision in my mind. One that not only encompassed adoption, but also expansion. Insights from the product could help the Customer Success team take a more targeted approach to going after upsell and cross-sell opportunities. In fact, it’s never been more clear to me that in the Age of the Customer, building the most successful products that also deliver the most business value require that Product Management and Customer Success teams join forces. This is why we’re joining Gainsight.
Gainsight’s industry-leading Customer Success platform helps companies address customer risks and opportunities at scale. It provides companies a 360-degree view of their customers, including multidimensional customer health scores, and uses these insights to drive actions — both human and digital — aimed at delivering great experiences and measurable business outcomes throughout the entire customer journey. In addition to all the things I mentioned earlier, the addition of Aptrinsic lets companies seamlessly extend this journey into the product.
I am so excited about this merger because Gainsight is now the only company in the world to offer a solution that fully delivers on the promise of both product and customer success to help companies win in the Age of the Customer. This unique value proposition creates tight alignment between the Customer Success and Product teams in order to help companies build winning solutions that exceed customer expectations.
From the countless hours I’ve now spent with the Gainsight leadership team throughout the acquisition process, it’s clear to me that Gainsight not only has an amazing culture, but also one of the best teams I’ve ever seen. Which is why I’m so confident that together we can execute on our ambitious vision of ushering in a new era of growth for subscription businesses — with Customer Success and Product teams leading the way.
Gainsight’s CEO, Nick, has a novel perspective on this new partnership in a blog post he wrote. It’s all about how CSM and Product Management are the new “Sales & Marketing” in the Age of the Customer. I encourage you to take a look!
You can also learn more by checking out the following:
- Read the Press Release.
- Get all your questions answered.
- Read Allison Pickens’ blog post on what this means for the Customer Success world.
- Start your Aptrinsic Free Trial.
Mickey Alon (Co-founder & CEO @ Aptrinsic)
