Practical tips on Bridging the gap between Customer Success and Product teams

What makes a successful business? Happy, successful customers that love the products they use? Which teams primarily drive this outcome for an organisation? Primarily the Product team as they are ones who develop and execute product strategy, based on inputs from their customer-facing teams. And primarily, the Customer Success(CS) and Customer Support teams who have a great vantage point over the customer's entire journey post-sales. Often, the Customer Success team is on the front lines and can gauge customers needs, usage, limitations and opportunities. The Customer Success team can funnel back this information to the Product team as inputs to consider in the roadmap. Sounds like an excellent symbiotic relationship? 

Unfortunately, only a very few organisations are able to achieve perfect, harmonious synchronization between both these teams to deliver great value to customers. In practice, there is always a slight simmering tension between both these teams. Why? Different objectives, different perspectives? CS team is frustrated that tickets are not being fixed or features are not being worked on, while the Product team is frustrated that the CS team has unrealistic expectations or gives less than adequate information about a bug resulting in several rounds of back and forth. 

We sensed this sentiment several times within our CS Amsterdam Meetup group. The organising team invited two organisations who have masterfully synced their Product Team and Customer Success team. In a panel discussion we invited:

• James Parsons, Global Director for Customer Success & Operations at OTA Insights 
• Ivo Minjauw - Director of Product - OTA Insights
• Adrian Gregory, Sr. Director Customer Success at Amplitude 
• Kate Adams, Product Manager, Amplitude

To share their thoughts on how we can bridge the gap between these two teams. We outline here a short summary of the meetup, perspectives from/for a CSM and PO/PM to consider and a few practical tips to round it all off 

Short Summary points:

• Start with aligning your teams around a Northstar, for OTAInsights its about NPS. Product and CS teams align their activities that drive these Northstar metrics. 
• Other Leading indicators should be your lagging indicators e.g. NPS. 
• Obsessively, measure and track customer feedback for inputs for the roadmap topic development and not features. More on this later. OTAInsights has built several key features based on customer feedback. 
• The Product Team gathers feedback from the CS team across all of their key meetings like QBR, renewals, feature adoption calls etc. 
• Tracking all feedback across channels and quantifying them can be overwhelming. Think of a tool or system that can allow you to do this in an effortless manner. 
• Goal creation: Set goals for both teams based on feedback from the Customers, this will help align them much better.
• OTAInsights enjoys a 0 Bug Backlog. Bugs, when reported, are not added to a backlog, they are pushed straight to the engineering team, where they triage it and determine the next steps.
• If you have committed something to your customers, just do it! Under promise, over deliver and deliver early! 
• At Amplitude, they have different product squads focused on parts of our product. One is Customer Love to deal with things outside of our strategic pillars. Their KPI’s and Northstar metric is aligned to our strategic pillars. The Customer Love Squad does things that don’t necessarily tie to these KPI’s but drives Customer Love. 

CS Perspective:

A lot of it has to do with communication, expectation management and clarity. Focusing on a few things will help CSM’s get a lot more collaboration from their product counterparts.  

• A key skill as a CSM is natural curiosity. So when customers make a feature request, don't just make a note of it. Ask them (5 why model) why they are asking for a pink button, and how it will help them drive more ROI from the product. Then structure and process this feedback internally as per your workflow. This will make your feedback/feature request a lot more actionable. 
• Try to make the PM/PO’s your best friends. Be close to them, understand their challenges and offer them unique customer insights that will help them make a better product decision.
• A good tip would be to create a standardised template of questions about feature request or bugs for yourself, so you are consistently collecting information and are then sharing it with the appropriate/relevant stakeholders. 
• Your colleagues in Product teams have to balance a lot of demands from different teams, failing QA tests, overrunning EPICS/tickets. Being sympathetic to their problems will help you go a long way. 
• Ask your PM/PO’s for workaround or tips to circumvent a product issue, rather than outright saying no to a customer for a new feature request. Ask for a solution /workaround. 
• Instead of calling it a feature roadmap, you can call it an R&D roadmap. This way you are able to avoid putting a specific timeline on features and get richer insights to share with your PM/POs.The other positive outcome of this is that you will be able to gather insights into the problem areas of your customers, rather than discussing specific features. 
• Ideally, if you can, take along your Product colleague to an important QBR. This way they can share what they have been working on and can gather feedback directly from customers. 

Product Perspective:

• The Customer Success team is your first internal customer, they often use the product daily more than the customers. They know all the quirks of the platform! So engage them upfront when new features are being developed so you iron out more of them pre-launch. Post-launch works closely with them to quickly fix any niggling issues that hinder product adoption. However, some small issues can be extremely hard to fit into a roadmap. 
• If you CS colleagues come to you with vague feature requests/bugs. Train them on what you need to make a well-informed ticket. 
• Internally host a quarterly feedback review on the product roadmap. This helps your Customer Success team understand the development and bring it forward to their customers. This way, the CS team can cement their relationship with the customer as a trusted advisor. 
• Once a month holds a formal meeting to talk about the roadmap. 
• When certain features will not be a part of your roadmap. Explain to your CS colleagues why this is the case, and what are you building instead. How this new feature could potentially bring more value to the customer than the intended/original one. Similar to new features, if you are not going to fix a bug, explain to them why not and if there is a workaround for this. Do empathise with your CS colleagues, they have to deal with tens, if not hundreds of irate customers every single day. 
• How you can help your CS colleagues prepare better for a new feature release: Give them all the information well in advance. E.g What was the problem this feature is trying to solve. Where and how can they find technical/user documentation. Give them a demo of how the features work. Listen to the feedback of the CS team, if they have any and try to incorporate them before the launch. So the feature adoption goes smoothly. Help the CSM’s to answer any of the questions the customers may ask. Try and keep a real-time feedback loop post-release to address any quick wins, because you won't get everything first the first time itself.
• Instead of sharing the feature roadmap, you can label this as a Problem Roadmap/A Feature Idea roadmap. In essence, you share the problems you ar trying to solve. This way you open up conversations for getting feedback about the feature and information about the specific topic.
• The outcome of non-delivery of what you promise customers can be severe in some cases. Best would be to keep timelines opaque. Strive to underpromise, over-deliver and best if you deliver before the set deadline. This will keep your customers super happy. 
• Be transparent if you miss some deadlines and explain what you are doing to meet the gaols. And if all else fails, use the shiny new object tactic to divert attention from the problem. 

Practical tips:

• Use a tool like Productboard and Intercom to setup customer feedback, feature voting based on criteria that drive your Northstar metrics. This will help you structure vast amounts of feedback from customers and the CS team are asking for. 
• Product/Feature Launch tension. PM/PO should engage the right stakeholders at the outset of the feature planning and development. This way the PM/PO can get an insight into how users may use the feature. The CS team knows what value a feature will bring the customer, where the setup/technical documentation is and how the feature will work. The PM/PO and CS teams can then plan a feature adoption strategy along with marketing. Ideally, this is all done well in advance of the feature launch. Post feature launch, the PM/PO can track product adoption and follow up with the CS team to identify why things are off track and how it can be improved in the short term. 
• Create an extensive checklist involving all stakeholders and activities are covered for a smooth feature launch. E.g. Maybe the CS /Marketing team has several activities they need to complete before the feature launch. This was all bases are covered. 
• To drive product adoption, don't launch the feature without having a powerful testimonial from your trial users. Ask them for quotes on how this feature helps them do their job better/achieve their goals faster or better. At Amplitude, they won't launch a new feature without having such a customer quote. Because no one wants a feature, they want a solution to the problem they are facing. 

Summary 

Both the CS and Product Teams work hands-on with the product every single day. These two teams hold a wealth of knowledge and insights about what customers and users want from and how they interact with the product. Thus, having these two team functions at peak collaboration levels is an absolute must for any organization that is looking to scale the organization. Peak collaboration will result in delivering a product and service that drives insane customer ROI and satisfaction that leads to effortless renewals, expansion and upsells.  A lot boils down to seamless and fluid communication between the CS and Product team and understanding each other's perspectives. Creating small frameworks that are aligned towards a single goal, can help the CS and Product teams bridge the gap they may be encountering. Also, a special thanks to Steven for moderating the session, you were fabulous!