Straddling the 2 worlds of Products and Customers
Product Management as we know is dead. Why Customer Success Management has already overtaken Product Management.
My experience from the field of Product Leadership and Business Consulting
Over the past 3 months I have struggled to convert a major prospect to becoming our business client. The prospect has multiple products and the immediate challenge is a large pool of unsold inventory. Our pitch to them was, to help us figure an ideal customer profile (ICP) first, so that we can sell many different products, which in-turn would determine their go-to-market and sales approach. But our prospect still believes in hard sales and also that excellent products, will sell themselves to any needy customer. In short, they believe in their product, have been reluctant to make tweaks to their offering, spend money and engage in the exercise of finding the ideal customer profile. I now realize that many like them, are still stuck in the old model of finding customers for their products, hence they’re looking for a proverbial Sales Organization, which will create hard quotas and SELL. No, this approach is obsolete many many years ago.
Great divide between Customer Success Management and Product Management
Difference between Customer Success Management vs Product Management, is a fundamental difference in orientation, and most importantly it is a paradigm shift on how you approach business success. Product Management is old school, where excellence in product engineering is given more weightage than customer adoption. Great if you are in a job, and Product Management is your specialization. But if you are running a business, you very well know, that even high-tech world-class engineered products, mean nothing if customers don’t adopt it. In fact, the best Product Managers I know, are also the best Customer Success Managers. However most Product Managers have not made this switch, and a great divide exists, between the Customer Success world and Product Management world.
Customer Success world, is about ensuring emotional-durability over product-durability. Products may come and go, products are easy to tweak, as it’s within our control, but customers are not within our control. So Customer Success Managers are oriented to always work with and within themselves first, to change themselves according to the needs or desires of the customer, and hence always find themselves adequate enough to satisfy the customer. In fact, the world is about Customer Success today. For the past 3 years continuously now, Customer Success Managers/Specialists are among the Top 10 jobs published by LinkedIn. Paradoxically hence, the future of High-tech industry is not about machines, or Artificial Intelligence, it is about People and how well we understand People. High-tech skills will fall behind people skills.
Further Exploration — Product Success and Sales Success are both contingent on Customer Success
People are still operating in the old school and old paradigm of Product Excellence and Sales Excellence. They need to unlearn their dependency on their own pursuit-of-excellence. How much we know about the product, how much we know how better our product is compared to the rest of the market, how much we know about our competitors and their products, are of little consequence if there are no customers or not enough customers. It’s a given that products need to be engineered well, but that is in our hands is it not? We can continue to revise our products, continue to upgrade it, but customers are not in our hands. Our pursuit of product excellence needs to dwarf, in comparison to our obsession for Customer Success. I have written about my own transition from a pursuit of Computer Science excellence towards Customer Success here. Product Managers, Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders who are still focused on their Products and Sales, are better advised to embrace Customer Success immediately. In fact, only when we care for the needs of the customer and constantly obsesses about Customer Success, will we find success.
Straddling the tension of Excellence and Relative Mediocrity through Adequacy
In almost every field now, experts are being branded and labelled as Elitists, and people are seeking hands-on and tangible solutions (try before we buy), more than visionary solutions, based on pure-excellence. There is a reason for it, the mad pursuit of excellence has rendered most experts out-of-touch with reality. It’s hard to unlearn excellence, but at the same time it’s very important to learn to accept relative-mediocrity, as a reality of existence. So, what is the answer, or solution? As High-tech Entrepreneurs focused on product-excellence, if you cannot immediately unlearn excellence, there are baby steps you can still take. Start by, incorporating Customer Success in your organization even before SALES. Its a good first step, before you flip to a completely customer-success centric organization.
In fact, I would advise that Customer Success, and customer success organizations, needs to be ahead of all product/project activities. But that would demand an overhauling of the entire organizational practice. So, for now, as Huggy Rao, from Scaling Excellence says, Plumbing before poetry. You have got to fix small things, before you make the giant leap. Hence adequacy is the way to straddle the tension of excellence and mediocrity.
How do I unlearn excellence and learn to straddle the tension of dualities?
We at Maker’s Practice and I personally, have learnt from many true customer success catalysts, who are willing to first change themselves to the customer demands and who have managed to straddle many emotional worlds of dualities. Like co-holding Ambivalence-and-Indifference, co-holding Exploration-and-Exploitation, co-holding Excellence-and-Mediocrity and most importantly straddling the 2 worlds of Products-and-Customers. Maker’s Practice is a framework based on straddling many such dual-worlds for Customer Success Practitioners, which can be experienced through workshops like Shubh-Labh as noted in our blog article before. It’s really about building a community of Customer Success Catalysts who are taking on a greater responsibility for supporting Customer Success transformation efforts. Don’t wait, be a fellow at Maker’s Practice. Leave a comment, write an email (manjunath at catalystor dot com) or call us.
