Liz Kao

Why does understanding your PS org’s charter matter? Because it shapes your day-to-day decisions. Take a disputed invoice, for example: If your Professional Services team exists to drive product adoption, you might handle the dispute flexibly to maintain customer goodwill. But if your team is a key contributor to margin, you’ll likely take a firmer approach. When you know the bigger picture, it’s easier to make decisions that align with your company’s goals. It’s not just about solving problems, it’s about solving them in a way that moves the business forward.

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🚀 Should Customer Success Managers be Technical? 🤔 In the ever-evolving landscape of customer success, there's an ongoing debate: should Customer Success Managers (CSMs) be technical? On the latest podcast with Lizzy Rosen, we dive into this topic and explore the value of technical expertise in driving exceptional customer experiences. 💼💡 Lizzy and I worked together managing a very technical team at Brightcove, and we drew upon our time together and learnings through the years. According to the AI, we discussed: The delicate balance between technical expertise and soft skills, the significance of understanding customer needs, and the potential of hiring internally. Here, we highlight the key topics discussed in this enlightening episode. 1. Understanding both the product and the customer's needs and challenges: CSMs are critical in bridging the gap between the product and the customer. They must possess a deep understanding of the product's features and benefits, while also empathizing with the challenges and objectives of the customer. By aligning these two aspects, CSMs can provide effective solutions and drive customer success. 2. Leveraging technical experts for complex customer queries: Rather than expecting CSMs to possess a wide range of technical and customer service skills, the podcast explores the potential of employing technical experts to handle more complex customer queries. This approach allows CSMs to focus on building strong relationships and ensuring overall customer satisfaction. 3. Building a "farm team" of future CSMs from within: The conversation delves into the idea of hiring from within the organization, particularly from the support team, to create a "farm team" of individuals who have a deep understanding of the product and its customers. By nurturing and developing talent internally, companies can cultivate a pool of future CSMs who are already acquainted with the organization's values and processes. 4. Balancing immediate premium staff hiring with long-term training: The podcast explores whether to hire premium staff immediately or invest in long-term training for existing employees. While immediate hiring may bring in external expertise, investing in the training and development of current employees can foster loyalty and a deeper understanding of the organization's goals. The conversation between us sheds light on the multifaceted skills necessary for Customer Success Managers. By understanding both the product and customer needs, leveraging technical expertise when needed, considering internal hiring strategies, and balancing immediate hiring with long-term training, organizations can empower their CSMs to drive customer success and achieve sustainable growth. Listen here: https://buff.ly/3QNuzJk And how technical should they be? Let me know in the comments?

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Human's are really bad at self reporting. Asking someone what was difficult for them and why will return suspect data. When you watch someone attempt to do something, like we do when we perform usability testing, you get valid feedback and actionable information.

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How insights data revolutionizes B2B sales prospecting Stuck chasing marketing's bad leads? Data finds ideal accounts and connects you to decision-makers. Boost sales, ditch frustration. Learn more.

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If you're trying to create a more inclusive culture focused on D+I, here's a great place to start: 1. Compliance-audit - are your processes EEOC compliant? Audit to ensure you're not committing adverse impact. 2. Strengthen internal culture: start with leadership. Get them on board. Then empower managers to take and assign trainings out.* Empower and support ERGs. *If you don't have bandwidth to create trainings from scratch, use a trusted (and engaging) content provider. 3. Define inclusive hiring practices: Anonymize resume/LinkedIn data when screening resumes. Create a structured interview process. Ensure hiring panels are diverse. 4. Use long-term data: Consider where you're sponsoring career fairs. Leverage employee surveys and internal feedback. It's not rocket science. But it does take effort. #davidsdiary

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Sometimes there's a regular cadence in place, sometimes they're required unexpectedly and sometimes you may not even know that you're in need of one! No matter the reason behind your next audit, it is essential that you have a good grip on what you need to prepare and how to make your next audit as stress free and cost efficient as possible! With this said, join Tifanis Eu from Carta and Wanyi Wong from PwC Singapore on August 22nd at 2pm SGT/4pm AEST/11.30 am IST/10am GulfST as they dive into: •Understanding key stages and milestones in the audit process •Efficient pre-audit preparation, including documentation and internal reviews •Overcoming common audit challenges •Selecting the right auditor for your organization •Best practices for communicating with auditors See you there!

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👀 Did you know? 75% of industry leaders cite poor collaboration between commercial and product teams, leading to disjointed customer experiences. Now, there's a gamechanger. As Tom Shoemaker details in his latest blog post, Propel Software introduced a breakthrough capability in our Winter '23 Release that links item revisions directly to customer assets. This is a leap forward in how manufacturing companies can operate, offering: ✔️ Direct improvements in product quality & customer satisfaction. ✔️ Efficient recall & compliance management. ✔️ Enhanced after-sales service & support. ✔️ Acceleration in innovation. ✔️ Operational efficiency & cost reduction. This capability transforms discrete manufacturing, ensuring product enhancements align with customer needs and driving innovation with real-world feedback. Read all about it here: https://lnkd.in/gFh4_z8N

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Leverage your on-premise clientele to shape your #SaaS evolution strategy by utilizing anonymized telemetry insights to uncover your standout features. Explore the guide >>>

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How do you keep engineering teams aligned with business goals while embracing innovation? Ada, the world’s leading customer service automation company, found the answer with Jellyfish. When pivoting to a generative-first strategy, Ada faced a key challenge: balancing innovation with supporting existing customers. They needed clarity on how their teams worked and invested their time. With Jellyfish, they achieved: 🚀 A 14% improvement in cycle times 🎯 Ranked in the top 97th percentile for “days with commits” 📈 Over 10% growth in technical investments “Jellyfish has become our go-to dashboard to understand how we’re operating as a team at a glance,” says William Mora, Head of Engineering at Ada. Now, Ada’s team is striking the perfect balance—focusing on reliability, experimentation, and investments that drive their business forward. Read the full story. Link in comments👇

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🧠 The mindset of highlighting weakness in product messaging may have been useful in the past, but it doesn't land like it used to.  Let me explain... A shift I’m making in messaging: Going from “highlighting the customer’s weakness” to “empathizing with the customer’s challenge.” Here’s what I mean: 🚫 “Highlight Weakness” Example: “IT departments often resort to reactive responses to issues. This is how our product will fix your weakness…” ✅ “Empathize with Challenge” Example: “IT departments are often overwhelmed, therefore, all they’re able to do is react. This is how our product can help…” 🤔 The difference between these two messages is subtle, but important: ❌ The “Highlight Weakness” example isn’t useful to the customer. They often know their weaknesses and don’t need help identifying them. What you’re saying is, “you’ve got a glaring weakness, and you need us.” ✔️ The “Empathize with Challenge” example is more purposeful. When you connect to the customer’s challenge, it puts your product shoulder-to-shoulder with them. What you’re saying is, “Together, we can overcome this challenge.” 🤝 #ProductMarketing #Messaging

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“I believe that design can be an orchestration layer across the company, unifying disparate groups that touch the customer experience [...] The biggest challenge is breaking the traditional mold that cybersecurity can’t be user-friendly or visually appealing." — Deb Kawamoto I had the pleasure of speaking with Deb Kawamoto today. I'm continually inspired by the work they're doing at Vanta, and the similar challenges we seek to solve in security, privacy, and accessibility (at Stark) as a company's compliance pillars. Great writeup on Deb by Gordon Ching for the Design Executive Council! https://lnkd.in/e26iQ5Ps

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The question of how to choose between Ops vs Product as a career path came up recently in a discussion thread I am in. I wanted to share my thoughts here in case others are struggling with this decision. The first thing I try to consider is what tradeoffs you're making in either role, i.e. what are the problems you're solving in each respective role? What does that mean about the problems you don’t get to solve? Product: 1️⃣ My biggest gripe with product is that you are in control of a lot more and simultaneously a lot less. 2️⃣ You have to worry about the entirety of the product from top to bottom, not just the features/problems that are fun to solve. 3️⃣ You're at the behest of customers/end-users and the business and are torn at the seams in that way. Ops: 1️⃣ It’s really easy to feel like you don’t have any outcomes or impact because all you do is help other people do their jobs better or more efficiently and may often not get credit or public recognition for that. 2️⃣ If your solution is remotely dependent on buy-in and consistent effort from other teams just doing things the right way it will almost certainly fade/fail. 3️⃣ You are your own BDR and kind of have to be on the hunt for new problems to solve all the time. That is fun for someone like me but could be draining and ambiguous for others. Ops is more like solving specific problems from start to finish vs product is like solving pieces of a big problem a little at a time, in my experience. Curious what other PMs and Ops folks in my network think! S/O to Out-Of-Pocket for the discussion thread — super looking forward to Knowledgefest next weekend! ❤️

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𝗣𝘂𝗹𝘀𝗲 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰: 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗦 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗣𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 After an inspiring two days at Gainsight Pulse 2024, I'm amazed at but not surprise by the rapid pace of innovation happening in the Customer Success space. This wasn't just about new tactics or efficiencies - the content pushed us to entirely reimagine how we drive value, empowerment, and human potential in CS. A few themes resonated deeply: 𝗔𝗜 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗠𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗿 AI was easily one of the hottest topics at Pulse. The AI roadmap session by Shantan Reddy spotlighted Gainsight's vision for an AI-enabled knowledge layer and intelligent assistants to automate workflows and surface insights. IBM's Janine Sneed and her team showcased how generative AI can power meeting assistants to prep for meetings, automate notes, action items, follow-ups, and more. The consistent refrain: This AI transformation will be human-first, not human-free. As the Kobiton team outlined, the power will come from human-AI collaboration where we leverage technology to augment our strategic abilities. 𝗛𝘆𝗽𝗲𝗿-𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆𝘀 The most effective organizations mapped out intelligent, hyper-personalized journeys tailored to specific roles, industries, and desired outcomes. Rather than generic messaging, they used predictive intelligence to construct self-guided experiences attuned to each user's current context. Autonomous journeys meet people where they are. 𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀, 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗧𝘄𝗲𝗮𝗸𝘀 To truly transform, organizations must move beyond incremental CS changes to holistic transformations. They redesigned entire engagement models, created centralized workflow engines, and made CS a catalyst for broader organizational changes around customer obsession. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗙𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 Transformations aren't just about datasets and impressive technology - they are about leading and inspiring people to be open to change and to use their skills to transform together. Kate Peter and Nikki Bishop did a fantastic job of detailing how implementing a human-first culture drives both employee and customer satisfaction, leading to collaboration and business excellence. The challenge for many organizations is achieving the clean datasets needed for these transformations. If you've navigated this journey, I'd love to connect. Reflecting on Pulse 2024, I'm excited about the immense opportunities we as an industry have at this time to shape the future of Customer Success. We're in the midst of a CS renaissance, catalyzed by the convergence of human ingenuity and AI. I'm leaning into this era of collaboration, eager to harness the transformative potential of technologies like generative AI while cultivating extraordinary relationships with our customers. #Gainsightpulse2024 #AI #HumanFirst #CustomerSuccess #Leadership

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NEW: Internal Threads Internal threads allow you to spin up conversations in Slack from Pylon. It's great when you want to start a conversation with someone, but they primarily use Slack (e.g. engineers, product people or anyone who isn't living out of the support system). Common internal threads we are creating at Pylon: 1/ #bugs to report a potential bug 2/ #project channels to ask a team a question about a specific feature 3/ #feedback to report product feedback to the team It's been one of the most game-changing features we've released and we're so excited to share it with everyone. Enjoy!

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AgTech Ecosystem - the Acquired podcast on the Slack DPO had a great line from David Rosenthal as he was talking about Slack and HipChat: "I think what we’ve seen in our last couple of episodes here on Acquired and we’re going to see here, the really truly huge great companies get built at the Venn diagram intersection of a technology shift, a cultural shift, and a business model shift." I have heard similar Venn diagram comments on other Acquired episodes as well as the BG2 podcast. The largest opportunity for value creation is when multiple things are in flux at the same time and opportunities can be identified before things are fully formed (i.e. when the concrete is being poured but has not yet dried). Let's think about two of these: 1) In 1999, portals and browse methodologies of discovery were still dominant and search was just emerging. eBay had a full team, including a lot of CPG MBA types, that were optimizing for browse (75% browse, 25% search for view item page traffic). The emergence of search created an entire value creation opportunity around a new and better e-commerce discovery process. By 2006, the ratio was 80:20 search:browse. AdWords became a more effective way for e-commerce sellers to acquire traffic based on the growth of search traffic and the better customer experience. Technology (page rank), culture (browse to search), and business model (listing and final value fees transitioning to AdWords click-based fees) combined to create massive value in the search segment, the lion's share of which was captured by Google. 2) As search matured, social media emerged as the next great platform play. Facebook became the dominant player in the space and began commanding huge user, activity, and engagement growth. Technology (LAMP stack for cheap, fast open source development), cultural (from search result to news feed for discovery), and business model shift (ads next to search results moving to ads in feeds) once again provided a huge opportunity, the lion's share of which was captured by Facebook. 3) Now on to today's skirmish - search results getting challenged by generative AI contextual search results. The 10 blue links that were (are) one of the best economic models ever are getting displaced in a growing % of discovery processes (I'm probably at 20% AI v 80% search and AI is gaining monthly while getting better at understanding my discovery process). Once again, technology (high-end GPUs to enable adequate AI performance), cultural (shifting from search results to contextual search), and economic model (from per-click revenue model to subscription and other AI models) shifts create a huge value creation opportunity. Will Open AI, Anthropic, or some other player be able to capture this value? Time will tell. The AgTech question is whether there are comparable shifts happening that create value creation opportunities? Sachi Desai Rhishi P. AgTech Alchemy Rob Trice Danny Bernstein Rob Dongoski

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Your most important outcomes as a PM will not be driven by you. At least, not entirely. For outcomes that truly matter to the business (revenue, retention, CAC...), your work needs to work in symphony with all the other departments to have impact. This was my key takeaway from Nick Boccone's Outputs vs. Outcomes workshop at #ProductTO last night. Outcomes are events. They can happen without your involvement. Outputs are actions you and your team take. Sometimes, they inform outcomes — but never on their own. It led me to revisit this recent podcast from Leah Tharin featuring Kyle Poyar; this might sound like "just GTM stuff" that doesn't impact you... but until you realize how the business engine works, and the role each department plays in that engine, you're very limited in the outcomes you can drive as a Product Manager. https://lnkd.in/gg3s28-R #growth #productmanagement

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So you sold the benefit, not the features. Did the customer actually get the benefit? How do you know — are you measuring it and optimizing for more benefit, as opposed to more ARR or more NRR or more "activity?" How to have goals on multiple levels:

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Freemium vs free trial tradeoffs by Slack's VP of Product and GM, Jaime DeLanghe #TheProductPodcast #productmanagement

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Our partnership with Brex now gives us unparalleled insight and breadth in SaaS purchasing reports

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