Onboarding Therapy #5: Rethinking the Customer Success Function

Look, something's broken in customer success. When CS teams report to revenue, their entire day becomes about hitting renewal numbers and activity quotas instead of actually helping customers succeed. After watching countless CSMs struggle with this - and living it from the customer side - it's got me thinking: What if we've got the whole org structure wrong?

Why Traditional Customer Success Structures Fall Short

In most SaaS organizations, customer success sits under revenue leadership - either a Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Customer Officer. This creates an environment where CSMs focus heavily on renewal metrics and activity quotas. Many manage hundreds of accounts, making it nearly impossible to deliver real value beyond routine check-ins.

"CS has become a dumping ground in a lot of organizations," notes Shareil Nariman, Head of Customer Success at Arrows. "Ten, fifteen years ago, when the term started in SaaS, we were trying to make it new and exciting... The reality is it has become a catch-all for everything."

The impact of this structure shows up in daily customer interactions. CSMs often lack deep product knowledge or authority to influence product decisions. They feel pressured to make promises about features they can't guarantee will be built. Customer feedback gets lost in overcrowded channels or diluted through multiple layers of communication.

Why Product Teams Get It Right

Now here's where it gets interesting. When product managers talk to customers, everything changes. They're not racing through eight back-to-back calls or copying and pasting follow-up emails. They bring technical depth, decision-making authority, and direct connections to engineering teams. When product managers engage customers, they can:

1. Speak candidly about product direction
2. Translate feedback into concrete features
3. Offer meaningful opportunities like beta testing
4. Make direct product improvements
5. Focus deeply on specific use cases

What If CS Reported Into Product?

Moving customer success under product leadership could reshape how both teams operate. Instead of focusing primarily on renewal metrics, CSMs could prioritize:

1. Deep product expertise
2. Customer use case optimization
3. Technical problem resolution
4. Direct feedback implementation
5. Advanced feature adoption

This alignment would enable CSMs to participate in product planning, provide direct input on feature prioritization, and maintain closer connections with technical teams. Product teams would benefit from consistent, qualified feedback through CSMs who deeply understand both the product and customer needs.

Baby Steps Toward Better CS Teams

Okay, not every organization is going to be able to restructure entirely.

For those that are looking for smaller ways to get CS and product more closely aligned, Shareil shared a great example from his time at Sprout Social. They created an "onboarding guild" - bringing together leaders from every department to discuss customer challenges and product improvements.

"Although none of us were reporting into each other, there were such strong dotted lines to everybody," he explained.

Other practical steps might include:

• Creating regular forums between CS and product teams
• Including CSMs in product planning sessions
• Shifting metrics toward product adoption rather than just activity tracking
• Building direct feedback channels between CS and engineering
• Having engineers and product managers join more customer calls

Looking Forward

Let's be real - moving CS under product would be a big change. But watching CSMs get stuck in endless check-in cycles while product teams drive actual customer value feels broken. Something needs to change.

The goal here isn't to blow up customer success - the relationship building and customer advocacy that great CSMs bring is invaluable. But right now, we're asking CSMs to maintain deep customer relationships while keeping them at arm's length from product decisions. It's like asking someone to be a trusted advisor while only letting them read the public website.

For CS leaders reading this: Take a hard look at how your team operates today. Can your CSMs give straight answers about product direction? Do they spend more time logging activities or actually helping customers succeed? Even if restructuring isn't on the table, these questions might point to places where you can make positive changes.

And hey - maybe this whole idea of CS reporting to product is completely wrong. But the current model clearly isn't working for many teams. It's time to think differently about how we structure customer success.