What are the boundaries between product and customer success?

Liam Dunne

Hi all, hope everyone's having a lovely week!

I'm interested to hear the opinions of others on this, and how you're operating at your companies.

To me, it's clear that product are responsible for things such as product strategy, competitor/market research, generating product ideas, overseeing development and design, etc.

But what about things such as gathering product feedback or drilling deeper into requirements? Is there a point where the conversation becomes too deep in the weeds and it then gets handed over to product?

Thoughts would be appreciated!

Tine Van Dyck

Hi Liam,

When I started in my role, I worked with my team on the CSM strategy/ambition and what initiatives we needed to start to realize the ambitions. I then took the plan & aligned internally with the different teams. As a result, we are now working closely together with our Product Management team on several of the initiatives.

Sometimes we are driving this, other times the product team is driving the initiatives. Some examples:

• CSM often hears feedback first hand, so it's important that we can share this feedback internally in a structured, centralized way. Our product team is now looking into tooling for this (not just for internal use, also for our customers) as they should manage the feedback: analyse it, see if more customers have the same request, decide to put it on the roadmap or not and when to develop it, etc. They are asking for our input on the requirements for the tool, but they are in the driving seat.
• We have an initiative to get feedback through a customer satisfaction survey. It's something the CSM team launched, but again in close collaboration with the product team as we expect to receive a lot of feedback. 
• Our product managers are asking to be involved in discussions with customers about new requirements/capabilities to get direct feedback and be able to ask "why" themselves. So when we know that will be a topic in a CSM related meeting, we invite them as well.
• Our product team is following up on user adoption of specific parts of our solutions. CSM is launching campaigns and also working 1-1 with customers to improver the adoption. We're in the driving seat, but are again working in close collaboration with the product team.

Hope this helps,
Tine

Jeff Heckler

Ah, yes...the ever-mounting problem of CS becoming the "Everything Department."

What I've found to be the most effective use of time and efficiency is to document/track the most common product "ideas, issues, requests" etc.

Do this in either your CSP or your CRM or a flat file, tag and organize the items by functionality/feature/product capability.

Also, make it easy and organized to CSXs can do this in-the-moment or shortly after engaging with a customer.

You can also collate this data from a Community and/or Support forum.

Then, assign either an At-Risk or an Upsell $ amount to them.

Aggregate these and present them monthly to your xfunctional partners: Product, Marketing, Cs.

Guy Galon

Hi Liam, 
My view is that CS should understand customers challenges and requirements. Product will then capture the requirements, clarify the use case and work with engineering to design the technical solution.  I encourage product teams to join customer QBRs and customer feedback sessions. The other aspect is the monitoring of product usage and feature adoption which should be a joined task for both product and CS to plan and develop an excellent onboarding and adoption processes.

I also wrote an article about CS and Product and you are welcome to read it: 
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-cs-teams-paint-pave-roadmap-guy-galon/