Improving feedback loops | Leah Moorhead | TDSU Ep. 34

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It was interesting, though, I found that a lot of times I would go to that subject matter expert with a question, assuming that they would definitely have the answer. And they'd say, oh, no, you actually have to go ask the product manager that. So I always thought like, well, how much is this really a subject matter expert? All right, here we go.

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What's up, lifers, and welcome to the Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new ideas every day in the customer success and adjacent spaces. I got my man, Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up, gamers? And we've got Leah here.

Leah, do you want to say hi? Yeah, hi, everyone. Great to have you. I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Leah, thank you so much for being here. Would you please introduce yourself? Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for having me. I am a customer success staff leader. So my most recent gig was the director of product in customer success at a startup organization.

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Did a lot of kind of wearing two hats as you do as a startup organization. I like to say I'm like a limited collection right now, limited wine on the market, looking for my next gig. I've been called a bit of a masochist.

I love the startup life. So looking to... I know it's a laugh. But looking to jump back into that in a director role.

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So that's just a little bit about myself. Been in customer success, came from the sales arena, like so many of us do, directly from sales. And it was just a natural transition because building those relationships is my favorite part or was my favorite part of being in sales.

So it's super natural transition and have not looked back. Very cool. Yes, masochist is the right word, I would say.

The highs are high and the lows are low, right? Thank you so much for being here. You know what we do here. We ask one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So why don't you hit us with that? Yeah, absolutely.

So right now I am speaking to a lot of startups, like I mentioned. And with my role as product success and customer success, I am talking so much about aligning customer success and product teams. So really just aligning client facing teams with a product a little bit more.

And honestly, I think startup organizations do that really well. At least in my experience, I think startups are really hungry, right? And that feedback, they can live or die by that feedback. And getting that feedback to products to make enhancements is so important at a startup organization.

We tend to, I think, lose that, at least in my experience when I've worked for larger organizations, kind of tend to lose that. And I feel like product, there's a divide between product and customer success. In my experience, my last organization, a larger organization, Fortune 500 company I worked at, definitely big divide.

We would have product join our customer success meetings once a month. And honestly, about five minutes of that hour meeting was spent on feedback. So I think that just you're wasting one of the biggest gifts, in my opinion, a customer can give you.

It's not enough time. You're wasting the feedback. The gift of feedback from your customers is huge.

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And to just throw that out the door is you're just really not doing justice to your organization. And I've started to see a lot of startups hire not only customer success and product managers, but also hiring what they're calling a product specialist. So I really love this idea.

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And it's somebody who is really working between the two teams. Because when you're a product manager, a lot of times, you don't have the type of personality that wants to have that client facing role. So those product managers don't want to be client facing.

And the customer success managers don't want to do the product job. They don't want to manage the deployment. But if you get somebody that can kind of be a liaison between those two.

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And when I mean being a liaison, I mean really meeting with that product team. So you're regularly meeting with a product team. And then you're also joining client facing calls with your customer success partner.

And you're getting that direct feedback. And then you're bringing it to the product team. So I'm starting to see a lot of startups have this product specialist role.

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That's really being that liaison and that person. And I think larger organizations could really take a page out of that book and start to have that same role. Because think about the value that you're bringing to your customers when you bring a product person on that call with you.

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It's also going to increase the quality of the call. Anytime you bring more people on a call with a customer, it increases the quality. So it's going to increase that quality.

You're going to get that feedback. And you're going to be able to make changes to your product or even identify why a customer is not renewing. The bigger thing.

The product's not working because of this. So that's really what's on my mind is how we can better align those client facing teams with products. In a previous life, we called this the technical account manager.

Because they were more technically minded. And they understood what was going on under the hood of the product in a way that we did not design for the CSMs to have. And they essentially were the product specialists.

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They could, in theory, manage their own customers. But what we actually had them do instead was manage the implementations. So they were sort of like half implementations, half this product liaison.

I've also in less sassy technical companies, it's been called like a business relationship manager. It's the liaison between these two departments. So still wearing multiple hats, but ultimately filling the gap where the CSM is not as product minded, not as technically minded.

But Rob, you've got a ton more experience, obviously more exposure to more organizations at once. What's your theory on this? And have you seen this? Yeah, I have in different ways. And some better, some worse.

So I've seen it labeled with different things. The product specialist, I think is one way to label it. I've seen it labeled as a solutions engineer, a solutions architect.

Well, and it's interesting, too, because sales often knows what their sales engineer does. But it's not often that we have someone who's like a customer success engineer. So I think that it's interesting.

So I've seen these roles built in different ways. One way is to try to charge their implementation as quickly and smoothly as possible, you know, handling all the technical details, while the onboarding manager is responsible for project management. I've seen that a lot, especially I like more enterprise environments.

Like if you're selling to a top 50 lender in the country or a healthcare institution, that might be necessary because they have such complex implementations. Yeah, I've also seen it as someone who can step in with just more ongoing product knowledge when needed to assist the CSM with things like renewals and expansion. So in that sense, it often looks like a sales engineer.

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And then the other thing I've seen, and the way that I've built it out, I actually called it a product liaison. In my past, when I first did it, it came out of place because I was frustrated with the product team not getting back to me. So I said, I've got an idea.

I'll designate somebody on my team to constantly work with basically like a product manager facing CSM. So who does talk to the customers, but their main audience that they're trying to keep happy and essentially, quote unquote, renewing is the product team, renewing on their engagement with the customer success team. I think their ability to solicit feedback, identify trends, and work with data to give products really meaningful information that products wouldn't get otherwise, is how I've seen the role manifest.

The question I usually run into is, how do you afford this type of thing? That's what I'm thinking. Sounds really nice to have people that do a single job. Yeah.

It's great in concept, right? Yeah. And it's funny you say about the technical engineering, because we had similar to that kind of like your subject matter expert. And it was somebody on the customer success team.

It was really a sub, you know, expert at a particular product that you could go to. And this was at the larger organizations that I worked with, that you could go to and ask that question. And they are on the customer success team.

So they are client facing. They wouldn't work as closely with a product team as maybe kind of like a liaison would, but they still had that, you had that person to go for expert. It was interesting though, I found that a lot of times I would go to that subject matter expert with a question, assuming that they would definitely have the answer.

And they'd say, Oh no, you actually have to go ask the product manager that. So I always thought like, well, how much is this really a subject matter expert? Or they're just kind of like a title that is kind of thrown on extra to a CSM because it's like they have their book of business, but they're also a subject matter expert. So I think that that can definitely work.

I didn't have great experience myself with the SMEs and organizations that I've worked with. It is kind of a luxury, right? To have that person working between. I mean, it really can.

I've actually seen it from larger organizations where the product manager will be more client facing, but you really have to hire for that. So if you're hiring a product manager and you want them to be client facing, that needs to be part of the recruitment process because I have met a lot of product managers that wouldn't really be comfortable in a client facing role. So you're right.

It's a luxury. I've taken a lot of product managers, ones that were not necessarily great with customers, but I throw them in a room, me, them, and the customer, and I'll just facilitate. And in a lot of ways, I'm translating or interpreting what the customer... Typically what the customer says, it's easier for a product manager to understand, but it can be very difficult for a product manager sometimes to communicate back with a customer.

And so I did a lot of interpreting or translating between the two and found that I actually could provide a ton of value for a product manager who was not good with customers because I jacked up the amount of feedback they could get compared to what they could do on their own or what they were ready to do on their own. It made them better at their job. It gave them better job security because if you're noticing that they're not good with customers, well, then their supervisor knows they're not good with customers.

So I actually found a lot of success with those folks. But yeah, it's a great topic. That is our time, but this is a great call-out.

What I would actually encourage folks to do maybe is think about how does this new landscape where we're all scrapping for dollars, we're looking for coins in the couch cushions, what would we do? How does everything we just said maybe change, right? Because we're talking from experience, things that we've seen before, but in the last 18 months, things have shifted pretty dramatically to how can we still accomplish those things without necessarily, Rob, I'm looking at you, having an individual that gets to do that thing, that's their day job, the only job in their job description. And so that's an interesting riddle, I think, to take away. Leah, I really appreciate you being here.

It was great for you to bring this topic to us, and we hope to have you back soon. But until then, we'll say goodbye. Thanks, Leah.

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Thanks, guys. You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers.

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For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value, and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.