Alignment of Product Managers and Customer Success

The best place to look for your what’s and why’s are most likely within your Product and Customer Success teams. The problem is that they are often focused on those areas separately and they do a mediocre job merging to two, if they’re doing it at all.

In fact, most of the time, these teams live in separate applications and are looking at completely different sets of data even though they often want to answer similar questions when it comes to user adoption.

Last year, we facilitated a benchmarking survey in collaboration with SuccessHacker and ProductCamp to hundreds of customer success and product management executives to find out how these two teams work together today. This survey was the first of its kind and we uncovered so much insightful data, like the fact that 80% of product and CS teams work with separate applications. We also found that most respondents felt least aligned on who their ideal customer was. That’s concerning to think about when knowing your customer and understanding your users is so critical to your success as a business.

Regardless of what role you’re in, if you asked your peers in other departments who your best customers are, would you all come up with the same list of common characteristics? Not knowing your audience is pretty scary, and becomes even more complex when you have different types of users and multiple product lines. Without understanding the needs, characteristics, and expectations of your customers, you leave open the potential for miscommunications, an inability to tailor your efforts, and misguided direction on how your product fits into their day-to-day.

One way to go about aligning your customer success and product teams toward the customer and their success is to consider how you can merge your efforts. Take a look at the success flows your customer success team is thinking about (moving customers along the customer journey) and the user flows your product team is thinking about (guiding users through key features) and look at ways you can combine these into one map of the customer journey as it relates to your product.

(Click the image above to see the user flows).

The takeaway here is to bring together your product and customer success teams more often to discuss what they’re seeing, to share data, and to ultimately come to a conclusive idea about who your ideal customer is and how you can WOW! them both online and offline.