Cultivating a strong Product/CS relationship

In the first part of our series on how to set up both product and customer success teams for success, we dug into the benefits of a deep partnership between product and customer success matters. But, how do we establish and nurture this relationship?

In this second installment of the series, Jennifer Chiang, Author of The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success, and Clement Kao, Founder of Product Teacher, will break down how to achieve and maintain a fruitful alliance between the two functions.

In our experiences, we’ve found the following 5 principles to be the most impactful:

1. Share the same customer narratives
2. Communicate using shared language
3. Eliminate barriers to collaboration
4. Hold each other accountable
5. Build empathy for one another

Below, we discuss how to bring these principles to life within your product management and customer success teams.

To be clear, while we’ll provide a variety of initiatives that you could take on, you don’t have to implement them all.

Our goal is to provide you with a set of ideas to choose from, but ultimately you must decide which of these investments will yield your teams the highest ROI.

1) Share the same customer narratives

Product and Customer Success teams share the same end goals: they’re both focused on solving customer pain and driving business growth through renewals and expansions.

To achieve these goals, both teams need to share the same customer narratives.

Some examples of customer narratives include:

• What is the customer’s emotional mindset as they move through the product journey?
• How is the customer supposed to use the product?
• What does “successful usage” of the product mean to the customer?

If the two teams are using different customer narratives, they’ll wind up contradicting one another, which causes internal misalignment and creates customer confusion.

Therefore, product leaders and customer success leaders need to stay in sync with each other. They need to establish a shared customer narrative, then they need to iterate and refine them.

First, to establish a shared customer narrative, product managers and customer success managers should align on the following key details:

• Which user segments are we serving?
• Which user segments are we not serving?
• What pains are we focused on?
• How does the product solve those pains?
• How should users be educated on how the product solves these pains?

In essence, the product team and the customer success team should share the same story about how “a specific kind of user learns about how the product solves their pain.”

The output should be a written “mock case study” coauthored by both the customer success team and the product team. This case study should clearly identify what a successful user looks like when they use the product, and what results the customer should reap by using the product.

To refine this narrative further, product organizations and customer success organizations should also establish shared repositories of information.

Product teams should make the following artifacts available to the customer success team:

• User research findings
• Usability test findings
• Product analytics dashboards
• Experimentation results

And, customer success teams should make the following artifacts available to the product team:

• Customer meeting notes, action items, and learnings
• Customer survey results
• Customer journey map

By doing so, both teams can revisit the shared customer narrative on an annual basis, so that they continue to focus on “what does it mean for the customer to successfully use the product” while accounting for new customer segments and new product functionality that might have been unlocked over the last year.

2) Communicate using shared language

The best customer success and product team relationships are those where the leaders of both organizations are bilingual in the language of product and the language of CS.

To be fluent in any language, you must understand the culture. Product and Customer Success is no different. Both teams should take the time to understand each other’s working processes, decision-making frameworks, and priorities so that they can align their efforts.

To begin, product managers should take the time to better understand what the customer success team needs to drive productive conversations with their customers.

One of the biggest challenges that customer success managers (CSMs) face is when documentation is too technical. When their customers aren’t able to digest the language, it causes customer confusion, which then leads to reduced product adoption.

Here’s the litmus test: is this language something that non-technical end users will grasp so that they understand the implications and how it affects them? Sometimes, it’s okay to use industry jargon if the end users understand that jargon. But, most of the time, it’s not okay to use terminology that end users cannot digest on their own.

Another challenge that CSMs face is when customers receive updates to the product without supporting guidance. When customers come to CSMs with questions on how to use the updated product, CSMs are frequently left in the dark as they weren’t equipped with walkthroughs or other external-facing materials.

By providing walkthroughs in the form of live sessions, written documentation, or video recordings, product managers can help position CSMs as valuable partners to their customers and preemptively answer questions about new features before customers get confused and reach out.

Too frequently, PMs simply let CSMs know that a new feature has been deployed without providing guidance on how to use the feature. For example, say that a newly released feature enables customers to input their specs for an order directly on their dashboard instead of having to fill out a deprecated survey form.

CSMs need to know where to direct the customer to input their specs and how to help the customer troubleshoot (ex. They entered it incorrectly the first time but it won’t let them resubmit the form). Without this knowledge, this may lead to the CSM reverting back to the old process lagging or diminished feature adoption, which creates operational inefficiencies.

Yet another challenge is that CSMs frequently need to handle inbound objections from customers. To help scale this process, product managers and customer success managers can create a shared repository of inbound objections and the messaging to use to tackle each objection. And, whenever features are released, product managers should invest some time to first pre-populate this objection handling guide.

We’ve now covered how product teams can learn the language of customer success teams. Let’s analyze the reverse: how can customer success teams learn the language of product teams?

Customer Success should understand how Product evaluates new feature ideas, what the product team’s priorities are, and how feature development works at the company.

The key to remember is that product teams are always focused on return on investment (ROI). So, whenever customers have ideas or feature requests, the Customer Success team is naturally best-positioned to determine how high the ROI is, and to build the business case for investing in that functionality.

ROI is calculated as “total benefits” divided by “total costs.” You can calculate total benefits by multiplying breadth (number of customers impacted) times depth (how much revenue per customer is unlocked).

Therefore, Customer Success teams can position feature requests as higher-priority by pulling any of the following levers:

• Identifying other customers who also need it (breadth)
• Reframing the problem so that it solves the pain more fully (depth)
• Descoping the ask so that it’s faster to implement (cost)

By pulling together a document that lays out the breadth and depth of the problem, Customer Success teams can establish the financial business case for investing in a given need.

That’s why when a customer shares a new idea, CS should dive deeper into exactly what their root problem is so that they can bring it back to the product team to brainstorm on how to solve the root issue.

For example, is it that they want the button to be blue, or is it because they can’t find the button because the button is currently yellow and it’s on a yellow background?

If the problem is a UX navigation problem that impacts all customers, then that’s high-breadth. But, if it’s simply a preference from this single customer account to have specific color-codes, and no other customers have this preference, then it’s low-breadth.

Similarly, when CS is sharing customer stories and ideas with Product, they can group things in ways that align with current charters and priorities. This also means that CS can better time their asks because they better understand the context that Product is working in.

For example, if increasing first-time adoption is Product’s top priority, talking about customer ideas for improving the login page would then be brought up prior to talking about a bug that only occurs for our power users.

To this point, each customer account will typically have a running list of requests for the product team to implement. The customer success team is best positioned to work with customers to rank-order the list from highest priority to lowest priority.

After all, the product team is working with limited resources and has to fund the highest ROI asks across the entire customer base, so having a prioritized list enables the product team to make informed decisions that truly benefits customers.

By sharing the same language and understanding each other’s working processes, product organizations and customer success organizations can set one another up for success.

3) Eliminate barriers to collaboration

People collaborate when it’s convenient. And, when there are too many barriers to collaboration, people rarely take the time and effort to break down these barriers.

Here’s an example. Perhaps you’ve witnessed firsthand (back during pre-pandemic times) that bananas at the office fruit bowl are usually the first fruits to disappear, while the oranges just stay in the basket forever.

It’s not that bananas are superior in every way to oranges; it’s just that bananas are much easier to access and eat than oranges, especially when you’re busy and on the go!

Communication works much the same way.

Many times, the systems that we use become more complex over the years as we add more rules and conditions. We can have elaborate alerting systems and multi-layered escalation paths, but the sheer complexity of these systems gets in the way of their effectiveness.

The simpler the system, the easier it is for all stakeholders to participate. And, the more we can automate manual processes, the more we can all focus our efforts on the things that matter.

One of the fastest ways to break down the silo between product teams and customer success teams is to simplify communication channels.

For example, consider creating a shared Slack channel for PM and CS teams to share updates with one another.

Or, if the product team has an ongoing initiative that impacts multiple large customers, spinning up office hours for that initiative can help to reduce the barriers to communication and reduce repetition or undocumented knowledge.

Another way is to invest in automation.

Here’s an example: if your customer success team logs all calls in a CRM system today, asking them to also manually send an email to specific product managers is probably quite difficult.

But instead, if you have Slack workflows that kick off messages with specifically tagged product managers immediately, that would reduce the burden on the CSM team. In other words, customer success managers no longer need to proactively reach out to the product team, because automation solves that problem.

Another example is say your product team created a new ticket in JIRA for a common problem that they are hearing from customer calls. Instead of asking CSMs to “look at JIRA” and sort through all of the tickets, you could add the head of CS as a “Watcher” and have an email report sent to all CSMs at the beginning of the week to share new updates.

Your individual contributor (IC) PMs and CSMs will have deep insight on which specific processes to automate, so don’t hesitate to run a brainstorming session with your team on how to reduce collaboration barriers within your organization.

4) Hold each other accountable

The leaders of both the customer success organization and the product organization need to jointly commit to shared accountability, so that their reports are incentivized and aligned appropriately.

Both leaders should commit to as many of the following as possible:

• Shared working sessions
• Shared metrics and goals
• Shared vision
• Open communication channels

Both teams need to also commit to high deliverability with one another.

In other words, if a product manager says that they’ll deliver a particular feature at some point to a CSM, it’s their responsibility to keep the CSM in the loop as the feature progresses, and to let the CSM know if any risks or unforeseen circumstances crop up.

And, if a CSM has committed to securing pilot users from a customer account, they need to keep following up on that account and keep their PM in the loop so that PMs can plan accordingly.

Both leaders should also revisit metrics, goals, and vision together on a quarterly basis, so that they stay in sync with one another at a high level. Does the story still make sense for both organizations? Are both leaders genuinely excited and energized about the shared vision for the coming quarter?

5) Build empathy for one another

At the end of the day, people communicate more effectively with others that they like, and they’re less likely to trust one another or work together when they don’t like each other.

That’s why building empathy and genuine relationships is important for the partnership between customer success and product.

Here are some ways in which you can build rapport with one another:

• Informal coffee chats, with work topics being off-limits
• Team building offsites and events
• Rituals for giving one another kudos, props, and gratitude
• Guest speaker opportunities (e.g. have PMs be guest speakers at CS group meetings, and have CSMs be guest speakers at PM meetings)
• Shadowing opportunities (e.g. have PMs join customer QBRs, and have CSMs join engineering and design reviews as flies on the wall)

You know you’re on track for building empathy when your direct reports proactively praise their cross-functional partners in private 1:1’s with you!

Who’s in charge of implementation?

While ideas are valuable, implementation is what brings ideas to life! So, who exactly is responsible for bringing these principles to life?

For small startups where you have less than a dozen PMs + CSMs, the leadership team needs to drive this work. After all, it’s unfair to ask an IC PM or IC CSM to drive this work, as their bandwidth has already been allocated towards moving their own initiatives forward.

If you have more than a dozen PMs + CSMs combined, then it may be time to invest in a new department called “product operations”, abbreviated as Product Ops or ProdOps.

One of the responsibilities of a product operations team is to pave the way for product teams and customer success teams to collaborate successfully with one another.

More broadly, product ops teams serve as the interface between product management teams and all other customer-facing teams within the company, including sales, marketing, customer success, and customer support.

Closing thoughts

To build up a fruitful partnership between the product organization and the customer success organization, both sets of leadership need to bring the following 5 principles to life:

1. Share the same customer narratives
2. Communicate using shared language
3. Eliminate barriers to collaboration
4. Hold each other accountable
5. Build empathy for one another

Now we turn it over to you: How have you cultivated a strong product and customer success relationship at your organization? Be sure to comment below!