Enhancing Product and Customer Success Alignment to Deliver Customer Value

Heather Brown

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VP of Global Commercial Sales and Customer Success

of

PagerDuty
EP
244
Heather Brown
Heather Brown

Episode Summary

Today on the show we have Heather Brown, the VP of Global Commercial Sales and Customer Success at PagerDuty.


In this episode, Heather shares her extensive experience in bridging the gap between product development and customer success to enhance company performance and customer value.

We dive into the innovative strategies PagerDuty employs to ensure these two critical areas are not just aligned but also collaboratively driving the company's growth and customer satisfaction.

Heather also discusses the evolution of her role at PagerDuty, the importance of internal collaboration, and how integrating product feedback loops can significantly impact customer retention and success.

Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

Introduction to "I Am Remarkable"00:00:37
Role at PagerDuty00:03:00
Integrating Product and Customer Success00:05:17
Launching the Ambassador Program00:09:11
Strategic Alignment Across Departments00:16:32
Developing Joint Metrics00:23:24

Transcription

[00:01.945] Andrew Michael: Hey, hello, welcome to the show.

[00:04.354] Heather Brown: Thanks, Andrew. Looking forward to the conversation.

[00:07.425] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Heather is the VP of global customer success at Pager Duty, using AI and automation to detect, diagnose, and help mobilize the right people at the right time to solve critical incidents. Heather is also an IAM remarkable facilitator at Google and prior to PagerDuty was the regional vice president of CS at Salesforce. So my first question for you is what does an IAM marketable facilitate to do?

[00:37.318] Heather Brown: Well, you're catching me off guard there, Andrew. I am remarkable. Actually, I came across our I am remarkable workshop. And the employee resource group at Google actually pulled this together as part of their women's investment in women. And I came across the workshop at a time where I was actually at a low point in my career. I was really reflecting on.

[00:39.514] Andrew Michael: Hehehe

[01:06.63] Heather Brown: all of the capabilities and how to get my mojo back, to be honest. And a dear friend of mine pulled me into attending this workshop. She said, I'm going to attend this workshop. I've never been, but I actually want to become a facilitator. And so I'm Remarkable is targeted at women and underrepresented minorities to help them find their.

voice and to help them understand that they can be their best advocates and remind them how remarkable they truly are. And talks a lot about some of the barriers that get in the way. I talk about that little small voice in your head that reminds you that maybe you shouldn't say that, maybe you aren't so remarkable. And that was exactly what I was dealing with. So it came in a timely moment at a point in time in my career where I had gone after something.

didn't get that next level promotion that I knew I was ready for and spent way too much time dwelling on it rather than just picking myself up and going, you know what, it wasn't the right time, right place, but I am still pretty damn remarkable. So I continue to play that for. Yeah.

[02:18.373] Andrew Michael: That's amazing.

Is that a, just a part of Google, which is something like, as them giving back to community, how is that set up and structured?

[02:31.178] Heather Brown: It actually started out as a part of Google. And then they recognized that they could have a larger impact if they took it outside of Google. So yeah, they opened it up. And then it became, most recently, within the last six to nine months, I believe it became its own nonprofit and its own entity. And so one of the founding women at Google actually now is leading that up and bringing it out to many more organizations. I was the first to.

[02:38.965] Andrew Michael: Open it up.

[02:59.161] Andrew Michael: Very cool.

[03:00.926] Heather Brown: overall to become certified and I continue to do it. That's great.

[03:04.481] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's a great way to spend your spare time as well. It must be super rewarding, I guess, at the same time. Nice. Um, so talking a little bit about PagerDuty then now as well today, maybe you could give us a little bit of context now about your current role there as well. PagerDuty, you're the VP of global customer success. Like what does that entail for you?

[03:25.93] Heather Brown: Yeah, and customer success, I've definitely learned, it does vary depending on the size of the company and the scope of work. So within my remit, I'm responsible for our commercial customer success team, which is that high touch motion. I'm also responsible for our digital and scale customer success. So making sure that we're engaging the entire breadth of our customer base.

In addition, recently took on the responsibility of our renewals, our support, our customer education, and then our customer success operations.

[04:02.737] Andrew Michael: Okay. Well, how big is the team, like just for context, like, page you do to maybe in total and then, um, specifically, uh, CS will

[04:13.422] Heather Brown: So across PagerDuty, we've definitely crossed over the 1100 line. I think that's full-time employees. And then within our customer success organization, we're just over 200 strong. That includes professional services as well.

[04:27.841] Andrew Michael: Okay. So it's quite a big, uh, org as well on that end. And today as well, obviously we're chatting a little bit before the show. And, uh, we recently had Tatjana Mammoot on the show who was talking a little bit about like how to create a bridge between product and customer success from the product side of things. And, uh, you mentioned as well, this is an exercise you've been working closely now with product at PagerDuty, um, to start getting more aligned and working closer together. So.

I'm keen to dive into that process a little bit today with you from the CS side of things now, so we can have both perspectives on it and maybe you could just, we could get started with sort of like, what was the relationship like maybe a year ago today and then why do you see this being the right time? And why has the organization decided that we should start to work closer together and figure this out?

[05:17.462] Heather Brown: Yeah, that's a great question. As I look at where we were a year ago, and maybe I'll go back about 18 months, our customer success organization, one of the visions that we've had as we work together both internally and with our customers is not only are we the conduit to make sure that our customers are receiving the value of the investment that they've made within PagerDuty through adoption and continued growth.

on our platform, but we also act as the voice of the customer back to pager duty to ensure that, you know, the product organization, our larger company as a whole understands what our customers needs and wants are so that we can represent that as we continue our investments. You know, and I still remember working with our product team, our customers come to us with

oftentimes a very long list of enhancements and requirements and needs to make the product even easier or conform to what they're trying to achieve with their outcomes. And, you know, there were times where we would bring that whole list over to our product team and say, here's the list of requests that I got from XYZ customer. They spend a lot of money with us. Can you let us know when we're going to do all of these? And...

I'm going to acknowledge that was not the best of experiences for our customer and our product team when we're trying to put them on the hook to deliver a list of over 100 different enhancements that may or may not align with the strategic direction that we're taking our product in. And so those posed a lot of challenges as we were trying to communicate both internally as well as back to the customer.

Because rest assured, our customers were coming to us on a weekly, if not monthly basis, and wanting to know the status of all those enhancements that they requested. So 18 months ago, that was the story. Since then, we've done a lot of investment in how we can improve those relationships and those conversations, not only internally, but with the customer itself.

[07:25.433] Andrew Michael: And yeah, I can imagine as well, like this is something that never ended badding as well between product and CS, like we need these features now, like customers are asking for them. We can, and normally it's also like, we're going to lose this one if we don't. And then as well, sometimes like you don't want to be just people in features for individual customers. You need to have data behind it, like how many are there and there's almost the backwards and forwards and products who has their own agenda or with their own vision and their own product roadmap and trying to align that. So.

What have you been working on there now as a team to come closer together so you can actually work and facilitate that voice of customer more effectively back into product?

[08:02.326] Heather Brown: Well, there's several things that we're doing. One, I will say we're reigniting what we consider our product ambassador program, and we've rebranded it within the last couple of weeks actually to be the customer success ambassador program, which is that conduit actually from our support organization, since they're the most technical and often the frontline from our customer perspective on requests and enhancements that are needed. So.

That ambassador program acts as a, as it sounds like, a, they have an ongoing conversation with our product teams. They stay closely aligned on the roadmap of enhancements and bug fixes that are going into place. And they talk openly and actively about what are the implications of rolling out those changes? They're definitely the ones that get early access and early insights into how to manage those changes. And

And that ambassador team is also not just an ambassador to our customers, but also to other functions within the organization from a customer success perspective to make sure that everybody understands the changes that are happening on the product side. So that's one area where we're investing.

[09:11.281] Andrew Michael: That's fair. It's interesting that as well. Yeah. I'd like to dive into that a little bit as well as that. Uh, so you actually have individuals on your team. They work within CS, but then are actually working also very, very closely with, uh, product themselves. Um, when you mentioned that, like in my mind as well, I was thinking like, why isn't there like PMs that live within customer success themselves? Cause I think that could be an interesting idea, but it sounds like this is sort of that in a way. Um.

Maybe you could talk a little bit like how this came about, how you set up and how like, what would like a typical day to day look like for one of these ambassadors, CS ambassadors.

[09:49.91] Heather Brown: Yeah, no, and it's great that you actually mentioned that PM role. For PagerDuty, a company of our size and magnitude, we don't have the capacity to dedicate resources to this, but at Salesforce, there were full-time dedicated PMs on the customer success side that actually engaged full-time with the product team, made sure that they were staying locked up. And I would say that this is an early version of this that's right sized for the size of company that we are and the investment.

we made. And I'm certainly not going to take credit for it. Our support organization has been doing iterations of this ambassador role over the course of time, but we've definitely doubled down on making sure that we, as the product team changes, that we're staying closely aligned with where they're making their investments. So it is one of, it's a part of the growth trajectory within our support organization. So it's considered a stretch role.

and an opportunity for our support team members to continue to grow in their depth of understanding of the product, which is critically important to them as they serve their customers, but also for them to see other parts of the organization and understand how that functions as a whole. And so they attend the triage meetings as they review bugs, they attend roadmap reviews and help to provide input on

what they're seeing. There's also a partnership with other parts of the customer success organization as we do get those enhancement requests from our customers to ensure that they're helping to augment the business value and the impact to the customer of the types of enhancement requests that we're seeing. Because it's not just that the customer wants their widget to be blue or green or in a certain place within

you know, their customer experience, they want to make sure that it's actually delivering an outcome that they're looking for.

[12:04.085] Andrew Michael: yeah, I like that actually as well, as you mentioned in terms of like it's a part of their stretch, uh, portion of their work as well, like enabling them to grow in different areas and then, uh, really giving them more visibility into how the organization works, but also because they're at the front lines. And typically what I found as well is like some of the best people in support have normally been some of the most technical as well, and, uh, they would also be the ones that come up with interesting solutions for the product.

be able to solve problems for customers and give them ways that the product maybe wasn't even built for, but had these really interesting workarounds and always found them to be an actually like, I was literally talking today to an ex-colleague of mine who, when I think about this type of role, this is the person. And since then he's now moved into product and is a product manager and his new current role as well. So I think it's, it's an excellent way as well to dip your feet into product. If you're in like CS for support, if that's the direction you want to take. So.

I like that you've created this role in this bridge. And as you said, maybe with large organizations, there's this dedicated function as a product manager in support and in CS. That's one area. What's the next thing that you're doing?

[13:16.438] Heather Brown: So the other thing that we're doing and we are in the throes of planning, of course. So for us, we're on the typical SAS fiscal year calendar. So we're on FY 25 planning, which seems so far away. And granted, it is a year and three months away. So for our fiscal year planning, what we have started to do is actually...

Historically, we planned within our own functions, right? Customer success has a plan, sales, go to market has a plan, product teams develop their roadmaps and their investments. And one of the things that we have been working on across the organization is breaking down the silos and making sure that we have a more integrated plan. Reflecting on the investments that we're making in customer success, what does that mean from a product perspective?

great example is that we're continuing to see how we can improve the long tail engagement with our customers. Those that spend a little with us but, and cannot have dedicated resources but we still want to make sure that they're successful on our platform. How do we better serve those? When we were talking before this discussion, we're talking about that analogy of...

you know, how many users do you have to have engaged or the Facebook analogy of seven friends makes translates to strong adoption. And I look at that, that strike zone or the bowling alley strike zone from a product led growth perspective, there's also a strike zone for product led adoption. And so, we've been partnering with the product team to help identify what are those key areas that we may have identified in the success side that we would love to bring back into the product.

so that the customers can discover it and self-serve it on their own, rather than trying to do it from a one-to-one engagement. One-to-one is not scalable, never was, never will be. And so how do we bring that back into the product? And a great example of that is making sure that we're surfacing consistent metrics from a value perspective to our customers, regardless of their size. And so we're partnering with the product team to talk about the metrics that we do.

[15:34.598] Heather Brown: fine resonate the most with our customers and how we can ensure that they're embedded in the analytics that are available in the tool. And then vice versa, the analytics that are available in the tool that demonstrate maturity, how do we make sure that we're surfacing those consistently and when we're doing business reviews with our customer and driving that one-to-one engagement. So a lot of the prioritization and the conversation right now I'm planning is.

what needs to be true as we go into next year on laying those foundations. And that's actually restacking some of the investments that we're making on both sides when it comes to both customer success prioritization and product roadmap prioritization. So it's been a great conversation so far and a debate, a healthy debate as well.

[16:32.205] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think it is, it's very interesting as well when we think about like different types of business and different stages. So like normally I think product is the one that owns activation and adoption and figuring that out in more of like a high volume, lower LTV sort of product, because really it is like an a PLG motion activation is like the be all and end all. But when you have this higher touch model, maybe larger clients like

CS is doing a lot of that onboarding and activation experience. But as you say, there's a lot of stuff that can be done in products as well. And more and more people actually want to spend less time speaking to people and more time just getting on with their work. So, it almost feels again, like that's like one component in these types of business where it makes more sense to have like this product team focusing on productizing what you're doing as part of the adoption and activation flow when the high touch place and bringing that more to be able to make it.

Um, a low touch model and facilitating a large audience. So, uh, it's interesting, like how close you're starting to work together on that front and, uh, do you work together and like, what does it look like in terms of these larger projects and pieces of work? So you're obviously planning for that's also another crazy thing like FYI 25, but, um, how do you sit then together and like decide on these projects? Like how are they prioritized? Is there like equal weight given to both sides? Um, yeah.

[18:01.954] Heather Brown: No, definitely not equal rate given to both sides. I'll talk a little bit about how it manifested this year. Our product organization went through their roadmap exercise and their investment exercise. We always talk about drawing the line. There's limited capacity and investments that we can make in any given fiscal year. And so what...

The product team did is that they went through the stack rank of the investments that they had on their roadmap, prioritizing and going one through 10. I think ultimately their list was about one through 15. And then they invited key stakeholders that collaborate with them over the course of just doing business. So that included GoToMarket, marketing, and our customer success organization.

And we came into the room with, they asked us to come with our top five requests. And then we looked at their list, their stock ranking, and they asked us to slot them where we think that it was appropriate. Uh, the great news is that, um, of our top five, several of them were already prioritized through the product team. And so, um, that was a nice aha moment. We didn't have to really.

[19:04.495] Andrew Michael: Yeah.

[19:24.262] Heather Brown: arm wrestle for ranking and rating and slotting it into the investment. But we were able to add more color to what they were already planning to do. And they uncovered the fact that they needed to collaborate with us a little bit more to truly address the customer needs that were coming up. And then there were a handful that we had to all agree that if we slotted our requests into their list, that some of the things would drop down off below the line.

[19:40.401] Andrew Michael: Hmm.

[19:52.19] Heather Brown: So something that they had in their top 10 now became number 11 or 12 or 13. And so we were talking about the implications of why they were making the investments and why we were asking for that. And then we would mutually agree upon, is this the right stack ranking for our customers? So it was eight hours in a conference room coming together. Obviously a lot of prep work going into that in advance to make sure that we understood it. But the outcome was definitely feeling like

The organization as a whole felt heard, which is important, right? When you think about the customers, being the voice of the customer back to page your duty for us, it's critically important that we feel like we can go back with confidence to our customers and say, we are listening. We are making these investments, and we've slotted them on the roadmap. Or there's valid reasons. So we saw the puts and takes that need to happen.

as well, which is when we talked about the earlier discussion with the product team, you can't do everything. You have to prioritize it. And so being able to go back to our customer with confidence as to why we're not investing in that area, but let's talk about what we are investing in. Let's talk about what we are gonna be able to bring to you from a value perspective. It was a great motion and we're gonna continue to do that.

[20:48.805] Andrew Michael: Hmm.

[20:55.726] Andrew Michael: Yeah.

[21:12.805] Andrew Michael: Nice. It sounds as well like the evangelism programs working and enablement side of things, if the alignment was there coming in with your top five already being within their, their top 10 as well, which is great. Two areas now we've covered the program and now working closer through the planning side are the areas where you've started to bridge the gap a little bit better.

[21:39.054] Heather Brown: I think the third one, and full transparency, this one is newer in its development, is the alignment on metrics. And you mentioned this earlier, right? From a PLG perspective, activation is certainly a core part of the product's responsibility in terms of ensuring that the customers are engaging with the features and functionality that they develop.

but we don't always make it to the top line metrics. When we're talking about turn and downgrade in particular, we've been talking about what are the early indicators that we know hold true to help us predict whether or not a customer is at risk and how can we jointly manage those metrics and those early inputs to help to reduce the outcomes on the other side, which are the negative consequences of potential turn or downgrade.

And so we've been working together to align on activations. What do we do in product? And then what have we been doing in a one-to-one engagement to help increase those activations? How do we drive a healthier deployment metric? And then what other metrics from an input perspective should we jointly align on and measure ourselves and hold ourselves accountable for to know whether we're on track or not? And so...

Right now, we're working on aligning on what are those three to five metrics that we jointly own and don't wrestle so much about like, oh, that was influenced by the one-to-one engagement versus a product engagement, but actually truly own them together and try to improve it across the organization as a whole. And so that is the conversations.

[23:22.543] Andrew Michael: Hmm.

[23:24.01] Heather Brown: that we're having as we set our priorities, as we set our goals and objectives for the year, we also set our metrics and how do we know that we're on track to achieve those? And so that is that next order of prioritization. And it's the first time we're coming together on shared metrics.

[23:43.721] Andrew Michael: I like that. Like I'm a big personal fan of like KPI trees and each team understanding like how they influence their work directly influences the final output metric, whether it's acquisition, retention, monetization, but in special cases, I think there are certain metrics that definitely need to be owned by a couple of teams. And I think in this case, as you say, when it comes to activation and there's certain inputs that you need your customers to be taking, there's other self-serve mode or these, the high touch like...

influence from a CS rep. And coming together, I think you can probably craft also a lot more interesting and meaningful interactions for customers that way as well, rather than working in isolation, which they typically are. We've had interesting conversations as well, like actually a conversation with Ziv Pellet from AppsFly comes to mind around this where they're a customer success team at some point they evolved a compensation to be around.

activation metrics itself. So really focusing on what are the inputs and how they can, as a team, drive their customers to take action. How are you working on this together then with products? Like what does that look like in terms of prioritizing and figuring this out together?

[24:54.722] Heather Brown: So we've definitely talked about, on the compensation side, we also look at deployment, which is not as much focused on activation. It's the foundational indicator that we know that a customer is using the products that they purchase, but it hasn't been as robust of an early indicator when it comes to turn and downgrade. And so we're starting to look at the inputs to when it comes to activation and...

in terms of for PagerDuty, it's are we getting more responders involved in looking at the tool during peacetime as we talk about it versus wartime. Certainly there's a case to be had that you really, if you're managing the usage well, that you don't have all of your responders actively engaged with the product. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there's not an opportunity for them to learn.

about what's been going on, especially from an executive perspective, the insights that they can glean. Executives typically don't go into our tool. And we are an API first solution. And so folks may not ever go into our tool because they don't need to because they're using it in other front end experiences. But what is critically important is that executives do understand the value that they are getting out of their investment.

we're working on is how do we know that we're engaging some of those decision-makers in to pull them in from a insights perspective and provide them with the analytics and the tooling to have better perspective on what's impacting their teams work-life balance. Because we're talking about a solution that literally wakes them up in the middle of the night or stops them from investing in innovation. So

providing executives with that insight, pulling them in is one of the key areas that we're talking about. And so customer success is critically important to that conversation as we're talking to the product team about what does an executive care about when we're engaging with them in a business review? What questions are they trying to answer? What do they wanna know? And then how do we productize that? And then let the customer know that it's in the product that they can come and see it at any time.

[27:15.918] Heather Brown: point in time, and they can use it to help improve their own usage of the tool. And so that's one of the key areas that we're talking about, the give and take on what metrics are the right metrics and how do we know that the right people are using the tool in the way that we all want them to.

[27:34.717] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Yeah. I think that's definitely one of the areas like as CS orgs mature is like really making that switch from like deployment to actually, um, activation and engagement metrics as well slowly over time, as you also get more resources and a larger surface team to be able to service that. The, the other thing that I'm interested in, obviously, like you spent a large amount of time now in leadership positions within CS, um, what are some of the areas where you see like.

customer success, really getting it wrong with building relationship with products. Like what is probably some of the most common mistakes you've seen happen.

[28:13.918] Heather Brown: not talking frequently enough. About nine months ago, we started bringing product into our Red Account process. And it was almost like, why hadn't we done this when we rolled out the Red Account process to begin with? And for those of you, I'm sure many in the CS function know Red Account is effectively a high risk situation with a customer that is identified hopefully outside of the renewal.

framework and it's something that needs to be proactively managed and typically needs to be managed cross-functionally. And we were talking about our red accounts in a vacuum, in full transparency. I mean, we were admiring our problems and saying, we're hitting these roadblocks, but we need help. And the most common help that we needed was product. And so, you know, not such a bold move, but a bold enough move to say, why aren't we bringing product into these conversations?

We meet on a weekly basis. We talk about our high risk accounts and the hurdles that they're running into that we know we can mitigate. And product is sitting in the room saying, well, we care about our customers too. Let's talk about how we can get engaged. And so we've had some early successes when we did that, starting at the beginning of this fiscal year and product team showing their customer devotion certainly helped.

to move the needle and increase the collaboration as well. So the number one thing that I think that we don't do well is the communication. It's breaking down those silos of understanding the perspectives. And we all care passionately about the customer, everything that we do, whether it's the product team or the customer success organization or the sales team, the customer success is our success. And so remembering that as our North Star has been one of those.

aha moments and I think that every organization would benefit from increasing the communication and keeping the customer, you know, we always talk about the empty chair at the table that should be occupied by the customer when you're having these types of conversations. Just keeping them at the center of everything that you're doing is critical.

[30:27.977] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I like that and bringing product into sort of those red alerts sessions, I think is, is another way as well, another channel, just for them to be able to build more empathy as well, uh, with the problems and also empathy with the CS team is all understanding like what you're dealing with. So there's like that double, uh, it's not really double-edged sword, but like there's two pathways in for them to, uh, build empathy. The, what does the flip side of that look like? What did you say? Like the best team and.

best, like a collaboration you've seen between product and success. What was the magic source that really drove that?

[31:05.506] Heather Brown: I am starting to see a definitely, I wouldn't even call them green shoots. I haven't seen a maturing of that within our organization, which is fun because, you know, I'm at a conference this week where I'm engaging with a lot of customers at any given point in time. And what has been made this week incredibly rewarding is being able to talk to the customers about the investments that we're making and seeing them say, we've been,

we've been asking for this or we, you know, this is exactly what we've been wanting to do. Or quite frankly, we've invested in other tooling to do this. And somebody just asked me the other day, why do we have multiple tools that are solving the same problems? So thank you. And that's what great looks like, is that you have an organization that's listening actively to the customers and that you're getting a tighter market.

you know, product fit as a result of it, because the voice of the customer is resonating throughout the organization. And I'm certainly seeing it real time in many of these conversations with our customers. Yeah.

[32:08.213] Andrew Michael: Sorry, Gavin. Very nice. So really making sure that voice of customer, like when you really start to see that come through into product decisions, what gets shipped and the experience you deliver to your customers is when it's working. What's one thing that you know today about channel retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[32:30.958] Heather Brown: Hmm. Well, I will say that you can't take for granted that our customer experience is consistent. Even with the best of standardized methodologies, I started my career in consulting and consulting companies do something really well, which is that they standardize a methodology and approach, right? And how do you gather requirements and go through the entire life cycle?

And everybody knows what that looks like. Customer success is still, I can't say that it's young, it's I'll say it's in its teenage years or at least it's adolescent years of development, but you can't take for granted that the approach is consistent with your customers. And that's one of the lessons that I learned when I went to Salesforce was that I...

learned that Salesforce was as great at customer success as they were because they hired some really smart people that understood the importance of listening to the customers and being consultative. But I also witnessed that the customer experience was wildly different, depending on the background of the individuals that were engaging with them. And so one thing that I have learned now, and this is true, not just for success, but for sales and for

[33:46.65] Andrew Michael: Hmm.

[33:55.634] Heather Brown: product, what gets measured consistently gets done consistently. And so you have to be mindful of what measurements you're driving through your processes, but you also have to be mindful of how consistently are you looking at those measures and how are you reinforcing them and learning and adapting so that your customers have the best possible outcomes, but you're also delivering a consistent experience for them.

[34:02.053] Andrew Michael: Hmm.

[34:23.217] Andrew Michael: across the board. Yeah. It's interesting as well. Like obviously you mentioned like customer success really in its infancy to really like adolescent years. If any place it is probably that's most mature is gonna be at Salesforce as well. And still at that place, you still see like a difference in the type of experience being delivered. So very interesting takeaway. I see we're up on time today. So is there any sort of final thoughts you wanna leave the listeners with before we drop off? Like how can they keep up to speed with your work or?

[34:25.324] Heather Brown: Yeah.

[34:52.921] Andrew Michael: stay connected with what you're up to.

[34:57.314] Heather Brown: I always try my best to stay on top of sharing some insights on LinkedIn. So definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. I love that. And I stay connected with the success community. So I value the opportunities of just having these conversations with other CS leaders, because in our growth as leaders, we learn from each other. And that's what I love about the success community is that we're not so territorial. We're all tackling the same types of problems.

Our products that we support may be different, but the challenges are not new. And so, definitely love sharing and connecting with other leaders across the organization and learning from each other. So I welcome.

[35:40.093] Andrew Michael: Awesome. Yeah, so for the listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes and your references as well, so you can catch up there. And I just wanna say thanks again, Heather, for joining. I really, really appreciate your time and wish you best of luck now going into the new year.

[35:54.498] Heather Brown: Thanks so much, Andrea. It was a great conversation. Appreciate it.

[35:57.925]

Andrew Michael: is cool.

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Heather Brown
Heather Brown
About

The show

My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.

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