Technical Roles in Customer Success

Scott Hopper

What kinds of roles do companies have.  

TAM,  CSE, other?  

Kelly Hook

We created an Onboarding Architect role which includes technical acumen, industry expertise, and strong interpersonal skills. They are responsible for understanding pain points and blockers to fast onboarding and turning those into relevant product requests. They also handle technical documentation for onboarding and look for areas to automate redundant processes. I think these hires have been critical for us because their deep, end-to-end understanding of the customer and our product enable them to create a very efficient feedback loop to product. 

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

Enterprise Late Stage SaaS - We have TAM, PM, IM. Our Solutions Engineers work with us a lot, but they role up to Sales.

Samma Hafeez

Our solutions architects were incredibly valuable technical resources at my last company. That said, depending on how technical your product is, I would argue that everyone in CS ought to receive a basic to advanced degree of technical training depending on the nature of the accounts they are managing.

Matt Vadala

In the roles I've been looking to apply to, I've found the title "Customer Success Manager" be a support person more and more.

Jason Viglione

Our CS organization had 3 teams - Account management (non technical, post launch), Technical Support (technical, post launch), and professional services which was project managers and solutions architects (PMs had technical acumen, but no technical tasks and SAs were all technical. This team was almost all pre-launch during implementation but would reengage for projects or footprint expansion).

Scott Hopper

That's an interesting role.  Sounds like looking at on-boarding with an eye to wear friction exists as part of the process.  

Scott Hopper

Yeah that's is very similar to how IBM used it's Lab Services teams on the professional services side of things.   

Scott Hopper

@Kevin Mitchell Leonor thanks for sharing that.  Is PM product or project manager IM implementation manager.  

Scott Hopper

@Samma Hafeez  obviously products will dictate the depth of required skills.

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

yes it is.