Historic maps are familiar for their illustrations of monsters, sirens and lost cities in the sea. The imagery signifies the pitfalls and dangers of the unknown, but also provides limited guidance for explorers hoping to navigate safely to new shores.
Product roadmaps can feel equally full of unknowns. Are the scope and timeline accurate? Is there alignment among all stakeholders on a cross-functional team? Can everything be adjusted if testing reveals something unexpected?
At FloQast, Foursquare and TigerConnect, product and customer success teams are working together to solve one crucial concern: Are teams building the tools that customers actually need?
“To achieve true customer-centricity in building a roadmap, you must embrace the mentality that it is a team effort. There can be no ego in determining the path of the product,” TigerConnect Vice President of Client Success and Support Mark Thompson said. “We need to allow our customers to determine the path more than the business.”
Diana Olympia, part of Foursquare’s enterprise customer success team, sees the customer voice and business needs as inseparable.
“It’s our approach to being a customer-centric company where each and every function of our business understands the customer, not just customer success,” Olympia said.
At Floqast, being transparent across the customer and product journeys leads to success for every stakeholder, according to Associate Product Manager Edson Rodriguez. Floqast’s robust feedback process means that teams across the organization are engaged in product feedback, which requires coordination and communication in order for the product and customer success teams to achieve their goals.
“Internally, we navigate this by being transparent about stages of product development and being clear on what is ready and what is not ready to be communicated,” he said.
While your product roadmap may not be caught between Scylla and Charybdis, integrating customer voice can lead to improved outcomes for all. Built In LA heard from Thompson, Olympia and Rodriguez to learn more about how their product and customer success teams collaborate to navigate complex product roadmaps.
FloQast builds automation solutions for accountants — built by accountants. When co-founder Chris Sluty moved from leading customer success to the product team, he built an environment ripe for close collaboration between the teams. Associate Product Manager Edson Rodriguez told Built In that he initially joined the company as part of the customer success team and continues to bring customer insights and data to his role.
Describe the process your team uses for funneling customer requests to the product team.
We really try to prioritize connection to customers and maintain a couple of avenues for feedback. The customer success (CS) department is committed to listening for any pain points experienced with app functionality during client calls or in emails, and we have a systematic feedback loop. Once the CS team identifies a client need, the feedback is shared at an organizational level via chat so that anyone can add to the conversation. Org-wide chats also ensure that we’re aware of all customers that have voiced similar needs. We have a process to collect the feedback from the chat so that the product team can categorize, quantify and prioritize the customer feedback. Lastly, most departments at the organization also have their routine check-ins with customers in the form of surveys, often around themes of functionality or overall satisfaction with our services.
From your perspective, what are the main challenges that arise when customer success teams take greater ownership over the product roadmap, and how do you navigate them?
Putting together an ecosystem of visibility whilst controlling messaging on timing is probably the biggest challenge. We want customers to feel heard, and we also want our internal CS team members to feel empowered by our feedback loops and feel that their communication efforts become product efforts. However, the nature of iterative product improvement requires ongoing reprioritization — there are always new use cases and new problem statements that are added to the list when features are introduced.
Understanding and communicating the pain points to the product team helps them build more holistic features and functionality.”
What tips would you offer to a customer success manager or leader looking for greater influence over the product roadmap?
As redundant as it may seem, any communicated client pain point is impactful to what we work on next. If five different customers have communicated a need throughout a week, there is a huge benefit to documenting the feedback five times. Knowing that a certain item has come up a certain amount of times allows the product team to prioritize the roadmap with quantitative data. The biggest tip is to continue being the channel for your customers to express their needs, even when a need may seem unique or previously shared.
Another tip is really digging into the “why” behind a customer’s ask and trying to understand their pain points as if they were your own. You may have five clients that have the same underlying pain point with a feature. If you are only focused on the feature or functionality they are requesting and not digging into the “why,” you can end up with five different product requests. Understanding and communicating the pain points to the product team helps them build more holistic features and functionality that serve the right customer needs.
Foursquare has evolved significantly from its origins in the consumer app world, but that doesn’t mean their focus on the customer has become less important. Their team builds the tech behind location-based apps and services and geolocated marketing efforts to better connect brands and consumers. “‘Creating connection’ is one of our core values,” Diana Olympia, part of their enterprise customer success team, said.
Describe the process your team uses for funneling customer requests to the product team.
Our customers really benefit from the collaboration between our sales and product teams. Beyond having an automated process for submitting customer tickets to product teams, Foursquare’s customer success and product teams meet regularly in one-on-one conversations and group forums to discuss customer needs more broadly. We also take a more strategic approach to solving customer challenges, these discussions drill in deeper to identify the core business challenges customers are facing. Foursquare sets ourselves apart from competitors because we are laser-focused on truly understanding the business impact that drives customer needs.
A great team will anticipate a customer’s needs before they’re even aware of them.”
From your perspective, what are the main challenges that arise when customer success teams take greater ownership over the product roadmap, and how do you navigate them?
Prioritization is always a challenge because it’s not possible for any engineering or product organization to build out every single request that comes through. A strength of our team is being able to identify themes across our customer requests and creating solutions that tackle the real issues at the core.
A good team may be able to execute and react to customer challenges, but a great team will anticipate a customer’s needs before they’re even aware of them. One of our highest priorities in working with our customers is to understand their business and what the important ingredients are to their success, so we can translate that into our product offerings.
What tips would you offer to a customer success manager or leader looking for greater influence over the product roadmap?
Knowledge is wealth and our teams are proponents of ensuring that everyone benefits from that wealth. While we serve as the liaison between our customers and the organization, our goal is that everyone within Foursquare can represent the voice of the customer. We accomplish this by closely involving product in conversations with customers and encouraging a culture where everyone is brought into and excited to make customers successful.
TigerConnect helps doctors, nurses, care teams and patients come together on a user-friendly platform serving both clinical and patient needs. Their customer-centric vision starts with CEO Brad Brooks. “During our weekly all-hands, we spend a lot of time talking about customer examples and use cases so people can understand that there is a direct correlation between their work and people’s lives,” he told Built In LA in 2021.
Describe the process your team uses for funneling customer requests to the product team.
TigerConnect has made significant strides in collecting customer feedback and integrating it into roadmap planning. However, as with any strong process, we are continuing to iterate and refine it.
In our current state, customer success managers (CSM) engage, collect, direct, advocate and educate. We engage with our customers on a regular cadence to collect product feedback, among other things. We direct this feedback to the product team and advocate on our customers behalf when evaluating and ranking the requests. Finally, we educate our customers on the decisions and roadmap path chosen to minimize ambiguity and manage expectations. We are also able to assist our customers with their planning around the roadmap to enable adoption and drive value.
We have multiple inflow mechanisms for requests at the top of the funnel including direct to CSM customer feedback, web-based form submissions, feedback via support and soon customer community feedback.
From your perspective, what are the main challenges that arise when customer success teams take greater ownership over the product roadmap, and how do you navigate them?
I would be cautious in saying CS takes ownership of the roadmap, rather product and CS are collaborators or even co-owners. CS can and should have significant impact and influence over the roadmap by advocating for the customers’ outcomes and assisting the business in understanding how customers are actually using our product.
I believe the largest challenges we experience are competing priorities across a diverse product offering and resource constraints to address the volume of requests. Customer feedback lists can become unwieldy if not managed and pruned. The primary method for navigating these challenges may seem cliché — transparency and managing expectations of what submitting feedback or requests means are essential. Additionally, enabling the CSMs to respond to customers when their request did not make the roadmap is key and the ability to have difficult conversations is a must.
It is better to hear requests straight from the source and to experience the customer’s sentiment first hand.”
What tips would you offer to a customer success manager or leader looking for greater influence over the product roadmap?
We could build what we believe to be the greatest feature ever, however, if the customers do not see the value, the feature will have consumed valuable time and resources which could have been invested toward working on something the customer directly requested. The feedback must be relayed to the product team in a manner in which is not simply adding to a list of requests. Simply tossing another rock onto the pile is not sufficient.
Encourage active participation of the product team in direct conversation with customers. I believe it is better to hear requests straight from the source and to experience the customer’s sentiment first hand.
Finally, educate your CSMs on techniques to elicit more detail and gain a clearer understanding of what the customer is really requesting.
