Winning as a team

Great customer experiences start with aligned go-to-market and product teams. Easier said than done—especially at scale! To give your team the best chance to achieve this outcome, I believe there are five organizational dynamics that you need to strive to create as a leader. In my experience, when all of these dynamics occur simultaneously magical things happen—teams come together, make better decisions for customers, and deliver delightful experiences to their customers.

1. Build a product that GTM believes in

The most common pitfall is a fundamental disconnect between how the product teams make prioritization decisions and what the sales and CS teams believe they can sell. Product teams dismiss feedback from individuals who are “thinking short term” just “to hit their number.” While this can be true for some, more often than not the feedback is useful, it just isn’t structured or translated into the format that is useful for a product team to act on. Product teams are flooded with requests, suggestions, and ideas every day, and finding signal through the noise can feel impossible at times. There are a few simple changes that product teams can put in place to help themselves make better decisions while building trust and confidence with their counterparts in sales and CS. When done well, you’ll have a GTM team that is fired up to sell your products, expand usage, and work as a true partner in the opportunity identification process.

• Create a structured, regular voice of customer report that summarizes all product feedback that sales and CS teams are hearing, with the customer count and impacted ARR attached.
• Build a mechanism to allow sales and CS teams to share their ideas with very little friction. Make sure that this feedback is reviewed, discussed, and responded to every week.
• Build a common language around customer segments. Making it clear who a feature or product is optimized for, both in terms of company and user persona, is just as important as describing what problem it’s intending to solve. This is the source of most disagreements.

2. Product teams who care about ARR

It’s always surprising when a product manager can’t clearly articulate how a business actually grows revenue. Understanding the different ARR levers is a critical to have, and I always encourage PMs to actually present this data back to their teams. How can you make great priority decisions without this information? These metrics are also the heartbeat of any great sales and CS team, so having empathy for their goals is incredibly important. You still must focus on product usage and engagement, but you should also feel a responsibility in impacting ARR growth.

• Build a simple, repeatable way to share win-loss analysis of deals. Better yet, include deals that are live and highlight blockers that product can influence! I’ve found using tools that share this directly to a public Slack channel to be the most effective.
• When defining a feature on the roadmap, always start with the positioning in the market and intended ARR impact (if any). Make sure this receives quick feedback from GTM teams before you write a single line of code. They speak and sell to customers every day, so use this incredibly valuable resource to make sure you get the feature marketing right!
• Make PMs responsible for the generation of internal enablement. The definition of done for a feature is not shipping it to production, it’s having an armed GTM team able to tell the world about the great work your team has done. GTM teams should never be surprised that something has shipped. In fact they should be shouting about it to everyone in the market that can hear them, even before it ships!

3. Agile teams who react together to feedback

There is plenty of product management advice around “just saying no”. Constantly changing roadmaps can create chaos and cause products to lose their way. But, always saying no is not the answer. GTM teams react every week to the product changes you are making, and at times that agility should be reciprocated. Not just for internal culture, but more importantly for customers! There is nothing more powerful than a big customer asking for a change, and having that request acted on within days. This is how you build deep customer trust and brand loyalty. Healthy cultures should be defined by how quickly and effectively they react in the face of new information, not how often they stay the course. Your sales and CS teams are constantly learning new things from the customer and market. It is critical that you plan for this and celebrate healthy deviations from the original stated plan.

• Define clear escalation paths for GTM members to take, along with the evidence needed to for the product team to make a quick decision. Usually this is a clear articulation of the customer problem (not the feature or solution) and some data of how many customers this impacts and the ARR opportunity.
• Build a culture within your product team of celebrating new information being presented to them and constantly re-evaluating how you spend your time. The ultimate goal is to ship features that create customer love, not to hit your arbitrary sprint goal. I find having an assumption that 20% of your time will be spent addressed adhoc issues is a healthy balance.
• Celebrate roadmap changes. Setting a 12-month roadmap and delivering exactly what you said you would is actually not a good outcome! Roadmaps should change because markets and customers change. Teams that celebrate roadmap evolution usually win. Also, creating a 12-month roadmap is waste of time. Focus on the rolling three months and know the broad strokes beyond that.

4. Customer support is everyone’s job

It is not just the sales, customer success, and support teams’ job to have systems in place to quickly respond to customer inquiries. Great product orgs make this part of their responsibility as well, and put tools, processes, and ownership in place to reflect that. Product managers, designers, and engineers should spend time sitting directly with support teams and joining CS teams on calls to remind themselves of who they are building for and build empathy for the challenges they are facing.

• You should only answer a product question from a customer once. Create a culture of documentation and establish internal and external knowledge bases that everyone can contribute to. Plenty of new tools exist to make this easy these days.
• Make sure your sales and CS teams know where to go with specific product questions. You’d be surprised how often I hear ICs have no clue which team owns what or which channels to go to, especially for globally distributed teams!
• Make it part of your product team’s responsibilities to spend time answering questions and have an SLA of some kind in place, even if it’s loosely managed. Everyone should have a customer service mindset!

5. Celebrate as a team

Too often customer wins are defined and celebrated in silos. Find mechanisms and spaces for teams to celebrate improved the customer experience and business together. Over time, this can bring everyone together and align incentives. We are all working together to build great products that customers love, and when someone finds the product valuable enough to purchase it, everyone should celebrate!

• One of the most impactful things I’ve done is celebrating every new customer closed by sales in a org-wide Slack channel. It creates an awareness of who the customer is, which AE deserves credit, what product features helped close the deal, and just be fun with creative gifs and kudos!
• Find a way to create weekly highlight reels of customers being “wowed” by your product. I’ve found sharing 5 minutes of video highlights from all calls that week every Friday morning is a fantastic way to end the week and improve morale.
• Make public kudos and shoutouts part of your culture. Be clear what is worthy of kudos—great product ideas from GTM, product teams reacting quickly to customer feedback, closing a big expansion thanks to a product update—and make sure everyone celebrate this together.

Improve one percent every week

It’s impossible to make these changes in a single week, let alone overnight. The best way to start is to align the leaders of each function on these principles, find pragmatic first steps, and give your teams the ability to own these outcomes. If you just try to make these things one percent better every week, you’ll have a drastically better culture and way of working a year from now.