How to win friends and influence product

Customer success managers should focus on understanding customer problems deeply before suggesting solutions. Communicating these problems effectively through empathetic stories, backed with revenue data, can become a superpower and the foundation for a healthy relationship between customer success and product management. Opening up a continuous two-way communication channel is the key to delivering a delightful customer experience and driving ARR growth.

Mining for gold

A big part of your role as a CSM is to harness the power of customer insights to influence product development. Start by focusing on the customer’s problem, rather than jumping straight to potential solutions. Remember, product managers have a deep understanding of the technical possibilities and all other product experience changes currently in development. It’s always better received if you equip them with a deep understanding of the customer’s needs instead of merely suggesting solutions. When diving into product feedback with your customers, try approaching it with a researcher’s mindset rather than a commercial one. Be inquisitive, ask questions, have an open mind, don’t lead the witness and just let them speak freely and emotionally about the problems they are dealing with. You’ll know you did a great job if you can understand the underlying motivations behind the customer’s desire to solve the problem and the impact it will have on their team. The best interviews get to a point of emotion in the customer’s voice when describing the pain or prospective joy a better way. Get to this point of understanding and you’ll quickly become your product team’s bestie. The best customer success managers are invaluable resources to brainstorm new ideas rather than contributors to the noise of requests product managers have to sift through every day.

Show, don’t tell

Once you understand the deeper, emotional problem of the customer, the next challenge is communicating it effectively. To make your case, always tell empathetic stories backed with data. A two-minute highlight reel of customers expressing visible pain with the problem they have is far more effective than several blog posts, pages, or slides. Capture those key moments during your conversations and lead with them, followed by deep background about the customer—what’s their role, what is their biggest challenge, what happens for them personally if this problem is solved. Make it real.

Provide the full picture

The inevitable next question in a product manager’s head is—well this is just a handful of customers, how big is this problem relative to all of the other noise I’m bombarded with every day? This is where the other side of the coin comes in and it’s best to also have a holistic view of problems ranked by revenue opportunity. What are the biggest issues across each customer segment that will impact retention and expansion? Yours might not be the highest, but that’s ok, there’s more to prioritization than just that. But, you’ll if you can work with your team to provide that full picture to the product team it will greatly improve the value of the conversation and move past the surface level back and forth or confusion. Explain the problem in human terms, back it up with rigorous analysis. Keep in mind that it’s best to express these as thematic problem areas, not specific feature requests. If your entire team is taking the same thoughtful approach to conversations, the reporting you can do to aggregate what you’re hearing can be so powerful.

Two-way street

The key to a long-term healthy CS-PM relationship is to have continuous two-way communication. While sharing the voice of customer with them is likely the most common discussion point, it’s important to always see how you can help them. What questions can you ask your customers about features currently being designed? What upcoming betas can you help them with? What is the best way to position the upcoming feature by segment and persona? What new product areas are you thinking about? Do we need to start building relationships with a new person within our existing customer base? Working as a team is ultimately what leads to the best experiences for customers and it’s important to not forget that and become solely focused on your book of customers. An aligned customer success and product management will increase the likelihood of delivering a delightful experience, which is the leading indicator of ARR growth.