Date & Time
Thursday, June 6, 2024, 12:00 PM - 12:30 PM
Location Name
Seminar 4
Name
Velocity Through Customer Success Prototypes
Description

An experience report about challenging the industry paradigm for the Solution Engineering and Customer Success roles, by extending product functions into these domains. The result is improvement in: overall business velocity, product utility, team culture, and customer [revenue] retention. Background: the relationship with a key customer had deteriorated significantly because there had been no tangible progress made on their high priority enhancement requests, for over 15 months. Entering into the Customer Success role I had to handle this situation directly to mitigate financial consequences. I took the initiative to perform product discovery activities, undertake meaningful effort to assess the technical risks of their requests, and build a prototype. The goal was to gather information and build a high fidelity prototype to both speed up the product discovery phase, and speed up the dev cycle time. An MVP was shipped in a single Sprint after the work was prioritized. Following the principles of making early contact with the problem, the trust principle and the inactivity principle; decentralising product discovery activities, allowing others to take initiative to model customer value based on the feedback they manage, you improve velocity on high impact and high value backlog items without heavy planning cycles.

Christopher Pola
Track
Process Innovation
Keywords
Fast feedback loops, Customer driven development, Principle of Early Contact with the problem, Product Discovery, Velocity, Systems Thinking, Principle of Trust