Customer success and product teams can be fantastic allies in building a better product. But there are a few principles that we should keep in mind when cultivating this relationship, to ensure that the right product gets built.
What we should encourage
- The product manager and the success team (especially senior members) should have very regular dialogue.
- Success can help the product team better understand customer needs and most frequently raised problems. Since success are interacting with customers every day, they are bound to have a lot of on-the-ground knowledge to share.
- Success (or product marketing) can help customers understand when changes are going to happen to the product, and communicate those changes. This is especially relevant for B2B product companies with enterprise clients, where success will play a more proactive role.
- Success can shield the product team from the firehose of customer support requests, so that the product team has sufficient headspace to do their jobs and make difficult decisions.
- Success can help to co-ordinate access to individual users for user research sessions, reducing the burden for the product team.
What we should avoid
- High Integrity Commitments (HICs): Success must never make a HIC to a customer around delivery of a certain feature unless this has been agreed by the product manager. HICs in general are very dangerous, so even the product team will exercise great caution before making them.
- Success must not sell custom solutions and "specials" to customers.
- Success must not block the product team from talking to customers: it’s critical that the product team has direct access to users in order to do their own discovery. Of course, those on either team who are talking to customers may need to be properly trained, in order to protect brand reputation.
Further reading
- See Marty Cagan’s Transformed, Chapter 40.