Leah’s ProducTea: Kristi Faltorusso - Aligning Customer Success and Product Management

☑ Link product to revenue impact.
▪️ Sales can see the dollar signs. Product teams need revenue metrics, too.
▪️ Quantify product issues in terms of revenue lost—understand what bugs, gaps, or failures are costing.
▪️ Celebrate revenue gained from product innovations—track how new features drive growth.

☑ Look at the “Five Points of Failure.”
▪️ If product issues prevent users from making payments, track that to show the impact.
▪️ Share real-life stories of how product experiences lead to churn or customer frustration.
▪️ Have the product team step into the user journey—experience the pain points directly.

☑ Prioritise user value over “happy scores.”
▪️ Forget vague metrics like NPS; focus on whether users are getting real, measurable value.
▪️ Set smart, achievable goals with users and track them on specific timelines.
▪️ Track “time to value” to see how quickly users get ROI from your product.

☑ Create a real partnership between product and customer success.
▪️ Customer success has unique insights on why users churn or struggle—use those insights!
▪️ Bring product leads onto user calls to hear direct feedback and see the impact first-hand. ▪️ Make joint planning the rule—not the exception.

You have to incentivize the behavior you want to see; people do what you pay them to do

Product teams struggle to understand their business impact. When I say business, put dollar signs there

I can easily tell you how much money I've lost due to product and even specifically what parts of our product, whether it's a gap, an issue, or a bug

I can't sell what doesn't exist. I also can't retain on something that's broken

Our customers buy products—they're not buying services

One of the most fundamental needs we have as people is actually, ‘What do other people think about us?'

Figure out who your customers are and where they're starting from. Have a framework, but one flexible enough to get your customers to that value—however they're defining it

If you get customers to their one thing, you'll have far more success than if you get them to your five things

There's a difference between multichannel and omnichannel... It's the ability to have that fluid data flow so everyone in the organization is seeing and hearing the same information

When we think about executive participation, we just want to know there's a senior leader in your organization that cares about the work we're doing

People continue to put their customers in buckets based on how much they spend. It tells you nothing about them or what they need

The democratization of data—actually democratizing it, making sure everyone has it, can see it, is educated on how to use it, and is empowered to put it to work—that makes a big difference

As leaders, we forget that we have to be business leaders first and then functional leaders

Everyone's so caught up in their own issues that we lose sight of working to fix even just one little thing that sucks about the way our organizations are working together

An engaged customer in the partnership tells me more about where we stand than a customer who's not engaged