"Customer vs. Business Goals: A False Dichotomy in Product Management"

Your customer churn isn't a product problem. It's a team problem. Monday: Customer complains about slow support response  Tuesday: Engineering says it's a priority issue Wednesday: Product argues it's working as designed.  Thursday: Customer success escalates to leadership. Friday: Customer cancels their contract This isn't a product-market fit failure. It's a team-coordination failure. Behind every "product issue" that loses customers: → Unclear ownership between teams  → Misaligned priorities across departments → Poor communication handoffs → Reactive rather than proactive coordination Your customer doesn't care that engineering and product had different assumptions. They care that their problem took five days and four departments to get solved. One SaaS company reduced churn by 40% without changing a single product feature. They fixed their internal coordination systems. 👉 Clear escalation paths.  👉 Defined ownership matrices.  👉 Proactive communication protocols. Customer issues started getting resolved in hours instead of days. Your product roadmap gets quarterly reviews. When did you last review your team coordination systems? The best customer experience comes from the best internal expertise. DM "COORDINATION" for the framework that turns internal chaos into customer success. What customer issue this week was really a team coordination issue? #CustomerSuccess #TeamCoordination #InternalSystems #FractionalCLO

If your CS team is only delivering tasks, you’re losing revenue! 21 years of working with startups and enterprises taught me this: Customer Success is a strategic lever for growth! This series of posts doesn’t offer lofty wisdom from Mount Olympus (the photo is from the climb), but field-tested lessons shaped by meetings, conversations, wins, and mistakes. When Customer Success aligns customer business goals, market context, and product value into a unified strategy, it drives expansion, retention, and real revenue, not just adoption and usage. So how do you know if your CS team is truly driving growth? – Does the CS team have time to build a strategy with your customers?   – Do they have a real seat at the executive table?   – Can they prove product value in customers’ business terms?   – Do they have the skills to shape strategy, not just execute it? If even one answer is no, your CS function is missing the core capabilities that turn adoption into expansion and customers into advocates.

Why Customers Don’t Care About Your Org Chart   A customer once told me, “The hardest part isn’t your product—it’s when I get bounced between teams.” That really stuck with me. Our product requires work from 2–3 different internal teams. Naturally, issues come up that sit outside my direct scope. But here’s the thing: the customer doesn’t care about our org chart. They just want someone they can trust to own their success. That means I can’t point fingers or say, “That’s another team’s job.” Even if it is. My role is to gather the information, coordinate with the right people internally, and make sure the customer has one clear, confident answer. It’s fine for them to know multiple teams are involved. What matters is that they always feel there’s one person guiding them to go-live. Because at the end of the day, customers don’t remember which team solved the problem. They remember who stood by them until it was solved.

I let go of a prosperous business before it would churn ⬇️ Recently, I had to do just that. A key customer in the learning space came to us with a critical feature request that was essential for their business, but it wasn’t on our immediate product roadmap⌛ After setting clear and honest expectations with our champion, they ultimately chose another tool that could solve their problem immediately. It felt like a significant loss 🚫 a missed opportunity and a testament to a gap in our product. But that "loss" became the catalyst for a much bigger win. Instead of accepting the outcome, I collated feedback on that same feature request from other customers. I built a business case, highlighting the potential revenue and the strategic value of the feature 📝 The result? The feature was prioritised, and it's now on its way to release sooner than expected. This experience taught me a powerful lesson: customer feedback is not just data—it’s a roadmap for growth. When we truly listen to our customers, even the painful conversations about their immediate needs can lead to a more mature product and a stronger long-term strategy. Now, we have a more robust offering to re-engage with that initial business and approach new opportunities with confidence. #CustomerSuccess #ProductManagement #ProductLedGrowth #FeedbackLoop #BusinessStrategy #LearningFromLosses

Most teams obsess over surface-level KPIs like Average Handle Time or even CSAT scores. But faster isn’t always better, and a smiley face survey doesn’t tell the whole story. If you really want to measure the impact of support, look deeper: • Resolution rate – Did the customer actually get their problem solved the first time? • Customer effort score – How easy was the process for them? A smooth experience matters more than speed. • Retention and expansion – Do customers who open tickets stay longer or churn faster? Support should protect revenue, not just close cases. • Repeat contact rate – Are people coming back with the same issue, or did your team resolve it fully? • Quality of interaction – Was the answer clear, empathetic, and complete? Why this matters: • Low handle time with poor resolution is a false win. • High CSAT today doesn’t guarantee retention tomorrow. • Metrics should reflect the customer’s journey, not just internal efficiency. The best support teams design their dashboards around outcomes, not vanity metrics. Want help creating a KPI framework that proves support drives growth, not just ticket closure? DM us.

🤦♀️ 𝗧𝗿𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝘅 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗷𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗮𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗲 𝗮 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲. Do you know why? While your organization works to overhaul the whole path, the customer has already made their decision at 3 or 4 critical turns. These are the moments that define whether they keep buying from you or walk away dissatisfied: ➡ A delayed order. ➡ A support interaction that doesn’t solve. ➡ A contract that confuses more than it clarifies. I’ve seen companies cut churn by more than 30% just by addressing these stretches. No full restructuring. No new hires. Just by stopping the waste of energy on what doesn’t move the needle. Want an example? Think about any journey you’ve had as a customer: Did you stay because everything was flawless? Or because, when the problem came, someone solved it quickly? What I’m proposing here is simple — but it requires focus and prioritization: 💡 Stop trying to fix everything at once. 💡 Focus first where it truly hurts — and resolve those process gaps. Address the pain where it’s sharpest. Don’t just theorize about pain points; live them — and solve them! Companies that fix real problems through customer feedback, performance indicators, and process reengineering operate faster and more precisely. That’s how we turn customer experience into a strategic decision — not just a feel-good “delight” project. Because at the end of the day, the customer doesn’t remember everything. They remember what stood out — for better or for worse. #CustomerJourney #Management #CES

Customer Success doesn’t come with an off-switch. Over the years, I’ve had customers reach out at: 📞11 PM, the night before a critical board meeting 🌅6 AM, after a campaign failed overnight 🏖️ Even during vacation, with a renewal at risk And honestly? I took the calls — Not because it was in the job description, But because I believe trust doesn’t operate on business hours. Customer Success is more than a role — it’s a commitment. A commitment to: ✔ Building relationships based on reliability and care ✔ Being present when it matters most ✔ Turning challenges into trust-building moments ✔ Remembering that behind every account is a real person, counting on you Yes — tools, dashboards, and metrics are important. But what customers remember most is how you showed up — especially when it wasn’t easy. 💬 I’d love to hear from others in the CS space: What’s one moment you went the extra mile for a customer — and they never forgot it? Let’s keep championing the human side of Customer Success. Because that’s where the real impact begins. #CustomerSuccess #CustomerExperience #Leadership #Trust #RelationshipBuilding #AboveAndBeyond #CSMindset

Product discovery hinges on knowing your customer, yet 26% of product managers report spending too little time on market and customer discovery. Learn more today: https://gtnr.it/4fMxUCu #GartnerHT #ProductDiscovery #ProductManagement

One big responsibility of a product or business leader is not just setting the vision or roadmap but ensuring that everyone from engineers to sales to operations feels true ownership of product outcomes.   When ownership is shared, customer satisfaction stops being a “product team metric” and becomes a company-wide commitment. Here are a few suggestions: Co-create goals, don’t just cascade them. Bring development and business teams into the goal-setting process. When done well, teams are positioned to more easily move from the big organisational goals to trackable projects, initiatives and results.   Why? When teams contribute to defining success, they are more invested in achieving it Translate customer value into every team’s language. An engineer might resonate with performance metrics, while sales and marketing may care about adoption and conversion while support cares about resolution time. Tie each team’s contributions to the same north star or goal: E.g., “% of active customers rating their experience 8/10 or higher within 30 days of using the product.” Make outcomes visible, not just outputs. Celebrate when customer satisfaction rises, churn drops, or adoption spikes. Share these wins with everyone who contributed, whether they wrote code, closed deals, or resolved a customer issue. Suggestions like these written in posts or slides may appear simple but the truth is that they require some level of effort and coordination. But one good news is that, when there’s a will, there’s a way.

Learned this through years of customer discovery: What people "do" signals as much as what they "say". - When people circle the same point again and again, that loop marks the anchor. - Hidden costs (training time, integration, opportunity costs) are often omitted, while direct costs are emphasized. - The actual budget approval process frequently diverges from the stated one. - Short phrases like “we’ll see” or “that’s fine” often mark unresolved risks. Effective discovery means tracking words and patterns together. The true insight shows up in what is repeated, avoided, or minimized, alongside what is spoken directly.