Product: Your most important customer | Dustin Elliott | TDSU Ep. 49

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It loses the empathy, it loses the impact, it loses the story behind it. First, I remember when I product manager, I actually let them listen to the call after I told them the problem. And you can see them light up, they got it, they heard it, they understood it, they connected with it.

You got much lady vibes today, man, go ahead. What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value where we're trying to give you fresh new ideas about customer success and the related professions every single day. I got my man JP here who can't look at the camera.

JP, do you want to say hi? What's up lunch ladies and janitors? Which one am I? I'm a lunch lady or can I be a janitor? You can be whatever you want, that's all inclusive. It's like a resort baby, that's all inclusive. Perfect.

All right, and we got Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi? Lifers, how's my Australian? It wasn't bad, but you broke up while it happened. We're all going to act like we didn't actually hear it.

But the part I did hear wasn't bad. And we've got Dustin here. Dustin, do you want to say hi? Hi guys.

And I am your host, the Crocodile Dundee of customer success podcast. My name is Dillon Young. Dustin, thank you so much for being here.

If it's not clear to everybody yet, you are living in Australia without an Australian accent. What else would you like to say about yourself? Please introduce yourself. Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for having me on guys. So yeah, I'm Canadian living down under. Right now I am a customer and product insight analyst basically, but I'm proud to admit that I'm a recovering customer success manager as well, having spent my last 10 years in CS sales in a startups and scale ups and those sorts of things.

So a little bit about me. Right on. Well, you know why we're here.

We're going to have to ask you to put that customer success hat back on because we want to know what is on your mind when it comes to customer success. Absolutely. The biggest thing for me, and it comes from sort of having sat in both worlds, but it's really looking at how do you better empower customer success and customer success teams to work better and collaborate with product teams to really just try to get back to getting all that great insight out, getting all that great feedback out and really just better affecting and helping to create better user outcomes essentially.

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I'll tell you how you make us the boss. No, I'm just kidding. Well, so what is your idea behind that? If you had to summarize it, how do you empower CS to do just that? Yeah, absolutely.

I've had this conversation so many times and I kind of try to look at it from two lenses from customer success, right? Because I mean, I've sat there. I know you guys have probably sat there to chatting with product managers and going, hey, I've got this great feedback or, you know, what are you building? Why are you building? Who have you built this for? Like, I've sat there so many times and gone like, did you talk with a customer during this product development kind of thing? So I always try to break it down into two things. Like first thing is it's kind of funny how I feel like when customer success chats with product, we kind of just forget all of the things that make us customer success managers, right? Like we really need to treat them more like a customer, more like a user, right? Get back to what are they trying to do? What are their goals? What are their KPIs? They've got bosses.

They've got things they need to do. They've got their own timelines. And it's about how can we positively influence into that? So, so much about the time.

It's like, hang on a sec. Hey, CS person, I know you've got an agenda. I know you want to try to get this great feedback across, but it's like pump the brakes.

Just start with chatting with your product managers. What are their KPIs? What are their goals? What's keeping them up at night? And then how do you then start to shift and shape the feedback you're getting and the value that you can provide? How do you shape it a little bit more around that? So going instead of, you know, Hey Dillon, you're the product manager. Hey Rob, you're the UX designer.

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Instead of going here, you can go and, Hey, I've got this feedback. You need to listen to it. It's maybe about saying, Hey guys, I know you're trying to work towards this particular KPI this quarter.

I've got some really fantastic feedback that I think gets to the heart of a bit of feedback on a feature, which kind of maybe can help us get a little bit better engagement in a particular area. Right? So just start to think a little bit more about your product team as a customer stakeholder KPIs. What are their problems and how can you start to shape that in that way? I'm going to give Rob a chance to jump in here in a second.

Cause he lit up when you said this, but I just want to call out, we just recently had on Jay Sanchez who said something very similar around his phrasing was turning CS inward and stop telling your counterparts, your colleagues, what it is you need from them and go about it in a little bit of a more roundabout way and understanding like how can you serve them and make it more of a symbiotic relationship. And so I only call that out. I'll make sure we link that in the everywhere we publish this, but I love that.

And that was a revelation that I had kind of later in my career. But Rob, I want to give you an opportunity to jump in here and add your thoughts. There was something as one of the things that I really liked, the reason I lit up as you said, Dillon was one of the things when Dustin and I were working together was essentially trying to build better CS product relations.

And some of the advice that I shared was that, well, actually an anecdote that I shared was that the best CS product relationship I've had, and I've had a lot of bad ones, but the best one I had was where the VP of product and I, we each told our respective teams to treat the other team as if they are your manager. And our teams were like, what the hell are you talking about? I would never want them as my manager. But I was like, no, this is just a thought experiment.

Pretend that, you know, if you're a CSM, pretend the product team's your manager. How do you treat your manager? You treat them by asking them what they need from you, for starters, right? And ideally, you're sharing with them your goals, your blockers, your vision, whatever. But I actually like Dustin's adaptation of that much better, which is to treat product the way you treat your customers, right? If you treat them like they're your best customers, your enterprise customers, then yeah, you're asking like, what is success to you? What are the obstacles you're facing? How do we build a success plan to get you to the outcomes that you're looking for? And what role can I play in that? So I thought that was a really brilliant modification of the way I've previously been thinking about it.

So cool stuff. Well said, Rob. JP, how about you and your role and how you guys do things over there? How is it that you interact with product and what's it look like? Do you have to cater to their every whim? No, definitely not.

This is something I do have experience with in, I think, my previous company. The head of product was known as a grizzly dude. I thought he was a nice guy, you know? Did you never ask him for anything though? You never asked him.

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I mean, I did talk to him sometimes, but like... So let me get away from the reputation of... I think that product, they are clearly... They have priorities. They have deadlines, right? What have they been told to do, right? I think you talked about this, Dustin. What have their managers... What have they been scheduled to work on? Their time is finite.

Just like in CS, if we had an infinite amount of time, we would love to give white glove service to every customer, but we cannot. And so in the same way, product cannot give white glove service to every product request we have on behalf of the customer. And so I think that one of the things I've seen is definitely being able to gather things, being able to quantify things, I think is important because you can build stronger use cases.

So how many customers is it affecting is something that's good. If it's affecting multiple customers in a significant amount, then there's one sort of use case. And then the other is, and how does that affect their business? Because if there's business to be gained, money to be won, those things tend to get pushed towards the top of the priority list.

And so my take would be trying to make sure that before I come to the table, really valuing product's time so that they know when I come to the table, I've already done a lot of work on my end. I'm not just coming with a customer request. I'm coming with something that I've seen, I've done due diligence on, and that could actually have a good impact for the company.

Can I jump in? I was just going to say, just to pick up on something, because I think across the toolbox of how CS can do this better, I loved your point, JP, around being prepared, not just sort of being that I had this feedback and you're sort of just handing it off one by one, but collecting, I kind of refer to it as just assets, right? So what are those testimonials? What are the trainings? What are the calls? And kind of arming yourself with that little package, because I've seen this so much, and this is what I do in my job now, is I collect that. And it's such a radically different conversation going, hey, Rob, you're my product manager, I want to give you this bit of feedback, and I'm going to synthesize it through my professional verbal aspect. And it loses the empathy, it loses the impact, it loses the story behind it.

First, I actually let them listen to the call after I told them the problem, and you can see them light up. They got it, they heard it, they understood it, they connected with it. And so that's a huge part.

I'm not taking that humanity out of those conversations, but absolutely being prepared, getting all that stuff ready is just absolutely integral. So love what you said. What's up, guys? It's Dillon here, and you know why I'm here, hat in hand.

I got a favor to ask of you. If you like what we're doing, give us a like on whatever platform that you find us on. And if you want to know when we're dropping new stuff, give us a follow, give us a subscribe.

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I'll let you get back to the show. Rob, take us home. I think the underpinning theme of all of this for me is it's about getting to why the customers are asking for what they're asking for, and then getting to why the product team needs what they need.

We talked about the latter part, but I think that the other thing I learned is anytime you're sharing feedback with product, the better you can identify trends and the why beneath those trends, the better you're going to fare with your product team. The product team will often love their CSMs who can do part of their work for them, but they don't typically care for the CSMs who just say, this button's supposed to move, but there's no discussion of why the button's supposed to move, or why the button should be green instead of red, or whatever. The revelation I referred to earlier was when I finally thought to ask my product manager for a specific SKU, to ask them what they're being measured on, how do they get bonused out, because almost guaranteed that is going to be related to how do you make the product as sticky as possible, and are they creating tools that are being used to their utmost ability, which usually should overlap very heavily with how it is you should be training your customers to use the product.

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Now, that's assuming a lot of things. It's assuming that they did their research right, and that the product has a certain level of maturity, but assuming all of those things, you guys should really be in lockstep in trying to achieve the same things, and to your point, Rob, they will love you if you are out there juicing the stats that help them get a bonus at the end of the quarter, at the end of the year, whatever it ends up being. That's our time, Dustin.

Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention and allowing us to talk about this even more. It was a pleasure to have you. I know it's, what, 7.20 AM for you, so top of the morning to you, and stay away from those Huntsman spiders.

Until we talk to you next time. Cheerio, whatever they say. 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. 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.