Product and Customer Success have a lot in common. After all, they tend to be the most customer-obsessed departments, and with good reason. Product is tasked with building a product customers will use and love, and Customer Success is responsible for ensuring that customers effectively use that product. But most organizations haven’t figured out how exactly Product and CS should collaborate. This fuels tension and creates confusion around responsibilities, alignment, and shared goals.
For Product and Customer Success executives, getting your teams aligned and working to make your customers successful is crucial. And for individual PMs or CSMs, you need specific strategies and tactics to ensure you build and maintain successful relationships across departments.
In this webinar, we dig into the relationship between Product and Customer Success and how PMs and CSMs can work together to scale customer-centricity. The expert panel includes Emily Mortimer, Director of Product at Appfolio, Erica Acroyd, Product Manager at Pendo, and Nick Fields, Manager of Customer Success at ProductPlan.
Our expert panelists talk through six practical tactics for driving alignment:
- Bi-Weekly Meetings – Establish a regular cadence for meeting in person, with time set aside for open discussion about hot topics.
- Consistent Communications – Outline clear communication channels and expectations about what will be communicated.
- Shared KPIs – Align teams with shared KPIs to get everyone rowing in the same direction.
- Integrated Processes – Make sure Product and CS don’t live in their bubbles and document processes and areas of overlap.
- Prioritization Techniques – Include insight from CS in feature prioritization, and consider using customer delight in your prioritization framework.
- Mutual Understanding – Build as much foundation of mutual understanding as possible to prevent conflict.
Our panelists also dig in and answer some of the 100+ questions submitted before and during the webinar from Product Managers and CSMs.
Here’s a look at some of the insights from panelists:
Customer communication: “Always ask the CSM if it’s ok to reach out to the customer first, and it’s even better if you ask them how they want to be involved with the user research. The CSMs own the relationship, and they take it very seriously.”
– Erica, Product Manager at Pendo
Bilateral relationships between Product and CS: “If a PM understands that their CS team is an asset to them, they can use them to learn and be as close to the customer as possible.”
– Nick Fields, CS Lead at ProductPlan
Early-stage customer feedback: “In those early stages when you’re trying to get customer feedback, it’s really challenging to build a customer-centric product when you don’t have that, so I think it’s really important to find people that you can work with and have pain for what you are trying to solve.”
– Emily Medjuck, Director of Product at Appfolio
Check out the full webinar to hear first-hand stories about how Product Managers and CSMs have collaborated to create successful products and customers.