In the world of software as a service (SaaS), the distance between the Product team and the Customer Success team may appear to stem from competing priorities. However, a close-up look reveals that the interests of the two teams are very similar.

A productive relationship between CS and product teams

When companies are just starting, the responsibilities of the teams overlap. Product speaks with customers. CS helps with product testing. As a result, it's easy for teams to be collaborative and agile. But when organisations scale, teams find it more challenging to stay in sync. Product and CS teams may seldom interact, leading to misaligned goals, misunderstanding priorities, and miscommunication with customers.

Rapid scale cause silos

The poor communication caused by siloed teams is frustrating for internal teams and impacts your product experience. The product teams rely on the conversations CSMs have with customers to inform their roadmap and inspire innovation. But if the CS team doesn't have a forum for sharing customer feedback with Product, product teams are unable to build functionality to address the customer challenges. Similarly, if the product team doesn't inform the CS team about the latest product decisions and developments, CS can't advise customers about the product.

Poor communication

CSMs spend their time talking to customers about the business challenges they're trying to solve. Product teams don't get one-on-one time with customers. Instead, they use analytics to try and understand the customer experience. Analytics is vital but lacks the qualitative and emotional aspects of sentiment and satisfaction. Understanding both quantitative analytics and qualitative user feedback is essential to understanding the customer experience fully.

Varied understandings of the customer experience

<ul><li>Both teams focus on the customer experience: Product focus on the "why" of customer needs. CS drives the experience throughout the customer journey. It builds loyalty, drives expansion, and cause retention.</li><li>Both teams need to be agile and adaptable: Product needs to respond quickly to competitive developments, bugs or feature requests. CS needs to be available to customers to respond to issues.</li><li>Both teams thrive with a product-led mindset: Product teams play an ongoing role in the business's success. CSMs leverage the product to drive loyalty and competitive advantage.</li></ul>

Similarities between Product and CS

Product and CS often fail to work together because of three key issues.

Part one of this three-part series explores key challenges that have prevented Product and Customer Success from collaborating at their best.

Discover the world of business and economics.

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Economics

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Marketing & Sales

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Business

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Startups

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Product & Design

Three challenges that hinder CSM and PM collaboration | Pendo Blog

As product leaders, it is your task to build a great product culture.
This prevents ineffective product management and helps to reduce churn. Generally, it gives the people you work with the opportunity to grow.

Building a product culture

Product teams need to understand human motivation and psychology. Entrepreneurs Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor state that there are three pillars of motivation: <ul><li>Play: The number of tasks, projects, and priorities can feel overwhelming. But keeping a sense of fun brings innovation and creates value to customers.</li><li>Purpose: A person wants to feel like their work is meaningful and builds a better world.</li><li>Potential: A person needs to know that there is an opportunity for growth and advancement.</li></ul>

Three pillars of motivation

This eBook includes tips product leaders can put into action to help motivate PMs, reduce churn, and establish a great product culture.

The 3 P's of a Great Product Culture: Play, Purpose, & Potential

The product-led flywheel is a framework that promotes product-led growth. It focuses on the user experience at the various stages of the user's journey. <ul><li>On the inner circle of your flywheel, imagine the different segments of your users based on where they are in their product journey. For example, product qualified leads, customers, active customers, loyal customers.</li><li>On the outer layer of your flywheel are the different stages of product growth: Onboarding, adoption, retention, and growth.</li></ul>

The product-led flywheel

<ul><li>It's a better fit in the modern SaaS market that depends on recurring revenue to succeed. The flywheel assists in proving immediate product value.</li><li>It leads to higher NDR. It delivers excellent experiences to both the new and existing users.</li><li>It speeds up over time. The growth stages feed on one another to produce faster growth.</li></ul>

The benefits of a product-led flywheel

<ul><li>Understand the customer experience through tools such as in-product analytics, in-product engagements, and surveys.</li><li>Use a smarter approach to segmentation. Do surveys and customer feedback loops to develop different user segments. Identify user pain points and user's objectives, then plan to deal with the pain points.</li><li>Focus on product qualified leads.</li><li>Make onboarding easy.</li><li>Use in-product analytics to power your product-led growth flywheel.</li></ul> Improving your product-led flywheel will lay the groundwork for faster growth and a user-first product.

Jumpstarting a successful flywheel

The SaaS industry can tap into a growth plan that gains momentum over time.

Discover our top tips and tricks for building a product-led flywheel that fosters real growth for your SaaS business.

softwareengineering

Software Engineering

Tips and Tricks for Building a Product-led Flywheel | Customer Success and Product Experience Software | Gainsight

There’s no need to go into this too much as for any business owner, this is 101 - but it is always the foundation of getting your pricing strategy right. Ensure you understand how much your product has cost to develop, how much it will cost to deliver and how that cost will scale as more clients come on board (more servers, more support staff etc).

Understand your costs

Now, just because you're in the same market as your competition, it doesn't mean you have to copy their pricing strategy, nor should you look at competing on price. However, you should leverage the work that they've done to understand their buyers, and the psychology behind it. Look at how they've segmented their customers (small, medium, enterprise ...). Understand how their pricing scales. Do they increase pricing based on:<ul><li>features</li><li>users</li><li>business size</li><li>other consumption-based metrics</li></ul>If there's a well understood theme across your market, you should probably consider adopting it.

Understand the market

So many technology companies go to market competing on price rather than value.You definitely don’t have to be the cheapest, however, you also don't need to be the most expensive. This largely comes down the phrase "If it's that cheap, it must be rubbish" - I've seen it time and time again, where SaaS companies have struggled by going to market with a super cheap pricing model, then had massive success by raising their prices considerably! Who knew?!

Perceived Value

I got a call from a large global business that liked the product, and wanted an unlimited license for their 10,000 employees and £500k/mo wasn't the budget they had in mind! Nor should it have been!Our pricing model needed to adapt to allow businesses of different sizes to pay more, but scale relative to the value the solution was delivering them. We implemented a system where you had Up to 5 users, Up to 15 users, Up to 50 users and More. The price ceiling is about understanding the amount of money you're saving the client. Most B2B SaaS solutions top out at about £10k/month/problem solved.

The Price Ceiling

Think of this as putting yourself in the shoes of the company exec pitching their budget - what saving or benefit will they need to demonstrate to win the approval of the CFO? Importantly, which exec will be the one to best position your product to get the green light on budget?The top tip here is to work out where the money will come from in your target clients - which line item in which budget is going to give you the revenue you need, and who is in charge of signing it off - you'll sometimes be surprised, because it's not always the person you think it is.

The Existing Budget

If you're about to launch a SaaS platform, you can't really go wrong by analysing how some of the most successful businesses have approached their pricing matrix. I know it's cliché, but they will have spent a lot of time and money in understanding the customer, their psychology, the market, the budgets and many other factors.SalesForce are masters for pricing; at first glance you might think that their pricing model is simplistic - fundamentally it boils down to a bronze, silver, gold style model. However, the way they've constructed the matrix heavily encourages you into the next level.

Taking inspiration

After saying all of this, you don't have to, and probably won't get it right first time. When you first go to market, irrespective of how well prepped you are, how well understood the market is, the chances are your pricing model will need to adapt as you grow and the market changes. The top tip that I would advise to here is that it's a lot simpler to reduce your prices than it is to increase them!

Test and Adapt

When you first take your product to market, beyond the price, clients also want to see proof points and case studies. If they're the first customer, this will always make them nervous, particularly if there's a lot of money on the line. This is where the old adage of "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" comes in. Choosing the ‘safe’, known option as opposed to the challenger is a defensible position for the person signing off the budget.Don't be afraid to battle and do deals to get your first 20 clients in and using your product. The information you'll get from them will be invaluable.

Don't be afraid to deal to get going

Peter Rossi, Co-Founder and Strategy Director at Equals Collective


Yet when they actually go to market with their product, their pricing strategy has had very little thought and is always a mad scramble to get in place.

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Problem Solving

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Entrepreneurship

8 tips on setting the right price for your tech service

The key to a successful product is a cross-functional team that supports every aspect of the Complete Product Experience (CPE). They understand their role in making the product successful and work towards fulfilling that role. However, many companies do not understand the concept of a formal product team. Each group operates in a bubble. It may cause multiple difficulties such as:<ul><li>Duplicate processes and tasks.</li><li>Teams are unwilling to accept others' solutions.</li><li>Not thinking how one action impacts the whole.</li><li>Tasks take forever.</li></ul> This could lead to a product no one really wants.

Creating winning products

Delays are caused when people are unclear on what is a priority. Value for the company and customers come when you are able to prioritise what is most important. Product team members become ambassadors of strategy and champion alignment in their functional groups and together.

Strategy alignment

Product teams are organised around a specific customer need or value, not individual projects. When problems arise, you can refocus people to the common objective and away from competing interests.

Customer focus

Breakthrough ideas seldom come from individuals. Bringing together a different and diverse group of people from multiple disciplines can lead to creative solutions.

Opportunity for innovation

Teams in an organisation have different priorities, causing multiple efforts to happen in parallel. However, product teams share a purpose, making it easier to resolve bottlenecks or pivot.

Iteration speed

People with a different skill set may view a challenge from a new angle and offer solutions you might never have considered. While few people want to attend a meeting they are not directly involved in, there is value in all groups hearing the same information.

Problem solving

Making a case for the necessity of a formal product team.

Product teams are organized around a specific customer need or value stream — not individual projects. Learn about the core benefits of formal product team structure and how you can advocate for one in your company.

The Benefits of a Cross-Functional Product Team

The average person experiences 6,000 to 10,000 ads per day.
Many brands believe that a more and louder approach to communication will get the customers attention. However, this self-centred approach just contributes to the noise.
Any compelling brand doesn't just sell a product. They create a culture and engage a community that drives that culture. Their brand is a live experience that their consumers feel part of.

Sharing your brands message

Traditional models of marketing relied on a top-down approach. It starts with an external goal, and you direct your efforts at getting the goal to impact individuals. However, most consumer's have become desensitised to these efforts. The bottom-up business growth is built on the belief that a concept evolves into a culture and a community. The brand grows through participation. If done successfully, it creates a bold enough brand that will support business throughout evolution and changes in the industry.

The shift towards consumer-centered experiences

The world is accustomed to taking the top-down approach. It is usually fast, inexpensive and low-risk. But it is doesn't compel or elicit the consumer to action. To become emotionally invested and connected to our consumers, we need to change to an experience-based effort. However, it requires you to stand for something and invite people to become part of it.

Cutting through the noise

<ul><li>Shift from "me" to "we". Embrace becoming accessible to your community and consumers.</li><li>Lead with empathy. Don't entice.</li><li>Call people in to create belonging, so that people feel part of something bigger than themselves.</li><li>Instead of solving a problem, consider how to make people feel heard at every part of their journey.</li></ul>

Building a customer-centric business

There is a difference between the traditional top-down and the bottom-up business approaches. One creates unwanted noise; the other leads to a community of invested consumers.

Get a clear understanding of the differences between the top-down and bottom-up business approaches.

How to Cultivate a Customer-Centric Approach to Brand Building

Today’s venture capitalists look more like bankers, and the entrepreneurs they fund look more like M.B.A.’s.The U.S. venture-capital industry is envied throughout the world as an engine of economic growth.

Modern Day Cowboys

Venture money plays an important role is in the next stage of the innovation life cycle—the period in a company’s life when it begins to commercialize its innovation. We estimate that more than 80% of the money invested by venture capitalists goes into building the infrastructure required to grow the business—in expense investments (manufacturing, marketing, and sales) and the balance sheet (providing fixed assets and working capital).

Venture Capital Fills a Void

The idea is to invest in a company’s balance sheet and infrastructure until it reaches a sufficient size and credibility so that it can be sold to a corporation or so that the institutional public-equity markets can step in and provide liquidity. In essence, the venture capitalist buys a stake in an entrepreneur’s idea, nurtures it for a short period of time, and then exits with the help of an investment banker.

Venture money is not long-term money.

It exists because of the structure and rules of capital markets. Someone with an idea or a new technology often has no other institution to turn to.Historically, a company could not access the public market without sales of about $15 million, assets of $10 million, and a reasonable profit history. To put this in perspective, less than 2% of the more than 5 million corporations in the United States have more than $10 million in revenues.

Venture capital’s niche

Venture capital fills the void between sources of funds for innovation (chiefly corporations, government bodies, and the entrepreneur’s friends and family) and traditional, lower-cost sources of capital available to ongoing concerns.Filling that void successfully requires the venture capital industry to provide a sufficient return on capital to attract private equity funds, attractive returns for its own participants, and sufficient upside potential to entrepreneurs to attract high-quality ideas that will generate high returns.

Venture Capital is the missing link

Investors in venture capital funds are typically very large institutions such as pension funds, financial firms, insurance companies, and university endowments—all of which put a small percentage of their total funds into high-risk investments. They expect a return of between 25% and 35% per year over the lifetime of the investment. Because these investments represent such a tiny part of the institutional investors’ portfolios, venture capitalists have a lot of latitude.

Sufficient Returns at Acceptable Risk

One myth is that venture capitalists invest in good people and good ideas. The reality is that they invest in good industries—that is, industries that are more competitively forgiving than the market as a whole. Now, more than 25% of disbursements are devoted to the Internet “space.” The apparent randomness of these shifts among technologies and industry segments is misleading; the targeted segment in each case was growing fast, and its capacity promised to be constrained in the next five years.

The Investment Profile.

More than 80% of the money invested by venture capitalists goes into the adolescent phase of a company’s life cycle. In this period of accelerated growth, the financials of both the eventual winners and losers look strikingly similar.Picking the wrong industry or betting on a technology risk in an unproven market segment is something VCs avoid.

Timing Is Everything

I am passionate about Investment and most importantly investing in businesses directly. Had a conversation with the VC Lab on the formation of my new Venture Capital firm and I needed to compare my fundraising strategy with what I can find on the internet, and that led me to this article by Harvard Business Review (One of my favourite places to go lol)

Before you can understand the industry, you must first separate myth from reality.

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Money & Investments

How Venture Capital Works

It’s possible to be a great manager and not a great leader, or vice versa. Rarely, individuals are both at the same time. The minute a process needs to be changed, either because of internal or external forces, the manager who lacks leadership ability often struggles to “rally the troops” to a new normal. Similarly, a great leader who has little managerial skills can pull a team in several directions with too much vision, creating a lot of noise but little in the way of results. It’s critical that great managers either learn leadership skills or align themselves with good leaders.

Myth: Management and Leadership are the Same Things

The title “manager” implies exactly this. The Oxford Dictionary defines “manage” as to “be in charge of (a company, establishment, or undertaking).” Surely that means, as a manager, you command and people jump? If only it were that simple. No matter the title, you don’t inspire people by pointing at something and saying, “Do that!” Rather, you bring them along by giving them a reason to “do that.” What sort of reason? It just needs to make sense; it needs to tie the work to some end objective.

Myth: Managers Can Make People Do Things

This myth may be a bit surprising. You’ve likely known or read about someone who seems to have the golden touch when it comes to management. The reason for such success is often misunderstood. Usually, it’s attributed to the manager’s ability to organize people, institute processes, and adapt as new information becomes available. There’s little doubt that these skills matter. But the other, less discussed aspect of a successful manager’s behavior is this: They hire and nurture the right people and get rid of those who don’t perform.

Myth: Good Managers Can Manage Anything

Harvard Business School Online Executive Director Patrick Mullane debunks three myths about management he's heard throughout his career.

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Leadership & Management

3 Common Myths About Management | HBS Online

Product engineers are experts at identifying, understanding and solving problems. But the problems you tackle – and therefore the impact that you have – don’t have to be limited to the work you do within a text editor or integrated development environment.
Having an impact outside the code editor is about finding ways to shape your company’s culture as much as you build the product. That way, your positive impact will be felt far and wide.

Problem-solving outside the code editor

Encourage engineers to share their knowledge with others in ways that enrich the community. If they've solved a problem that others have struggled with, they should be able to share those solutions. These are great opportunities to build your own engineering culture, learn from other engineers, and foster innovation in the wider community. It’s important that engineers are given the support to feel comfortable doing this.

Being a brand ambassador

Getting involved in interviewing candidates is perhaps the most obvious and direct way a product engineer can help out with hiring. As your team grows, the two biggest challenges are ensuring the quality of candidates is high enough and that broader alignment is maintained. The interview process gives you a chance to gauge both quality and alignment or identify the risk of misalignment, so it is a crucial opportunity for any engineer to contribute to the long-term health of the engineering team.

Interviewing

Onboarding is often treated as a one or two-day interlude before we get to our “real” work. It’s focused on meeting a bunch of people, setting up our computer, walking through benefits, etc.
While these steps are important, this type of onboarding is generic and shallow and leaves huge gaps. When high-impact engineers invest in helping a new person become impactful themselves, it acts as a force multiplier and will pay dividends for the team and company.

Onboarding

The world’s best products are built by teams, not singularly brilliant and lone engineers. A defining characteristic of a product engineer is that they spend the time making sure that newer or more junior engineers that may be unfamiliar with the tech or processes not only understand what they are doing, but also why they are doing it.
In practice, this means a product engineer demonstrates technical leadership by creating processes that other people can follow, thereby enabling delegation and multiplying their effectiveness.

Knowledge sharing

A shared set of values that your whole team buys into will help maintain the elements of company culture you hold dear. Defining and iterating on values bottom-up as well as top-down means our values are something engineers have a sense of ownership of. In this way, they are not just empty words, but something we all have the opportunity to shape.

Defining values

High performing product engineers should look for opportunities beyond writing code to increase their impact and become a force multiplier.

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Computer Science

5 ways engineers can make a positive impact outside the code editor

Like investors, reporters crave proof that your story is worthy of their attention. If you’re solving the next big problem in fintech, martech, or fill-in-the-blank-tech, you need to pony up with the statistics that show why this problem needs your solution. You don’t need to invest all your money into market research to get this kind of data. Many times, it’s just a matter of looking at your pitch deck and selecting the stats that will stand out.

Data and stats are your allies

Founders who experience success in the media are often the ones who have a strong perspective on the market their business is competing in.While every founder undoubtedly has a company story they wish to share, it’s imperative to be able to address the bigger market picture.

Market point of view is critical

Every leader has a personal story in addition to the problem their company is solving. The savviest founders understand that showing their human side will help them be more relatable to others. Whether it’s highlighting lessons learned along the way, or a particular challenge overcome, showing vulnerability and connectedness can help persuade reporters that you have something important to share—beyond just the business case.

Don't be afraid to highlight the personal

It’s critical for founders to be able to explain their technology in simple terms. Sticking to easy-to-understand terminology and delivering focused messages can go a long way in attracting the attention of reporters. As tech becomes more complicated, reporters can’t possibly have an in-depth understanding of every product or service; it’s up to founders to make this information easily accessible and engaging.

Dial-up the simplicity

Make sure that your story is actually newsworthy and ties in with the current news cycle. By connecting your point of view to the stories that already have the public’s attention, your point of view will automatically become more relevant and interesting.

Refresh to the news cycle

Every founder likely dreams of being featured in global news publications. But the savviest companies know that this kind of coverage doesn’t happen overnight. It requires time to form relationships with reporters and build up to it.
They know that there are a variety of outlets and channels that provide important audiences for their story. By including smaller, target media outlets and leveraging platforms like blogs and LinkedIn, or self-publishing in Medium, companies can build momentum and credibility, which will help convince the bigger outlets that they are worth covering.

Look across multiple channels

communication

Communication

Ways to tell a good business story

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