Foundations of Adoption: Aligning Customer Success and Product Maturity
Unlocking customer value hinges on timely feature adoption tailored to their maturity. This session will explore how to forge a symbiotic relationship with customers, guiding them to adopt the right features at the right stages of their journey. Discover the concept of Product Maturity and how it diverges from traditional metrics. Learn from case studies where Product Maturity models significantly influenced product roadmaps and drove enhanced customer retention, accelerated adoption, and aligned business outcomes. Join us to see how these models can transform your customer success strategy.
I'm Paulina Rodriguez. I'm a CSM here at Gain site.
And I'm just going to go through some housekeeping items that you may have
already heard, but just as a refresher.
If you have questions throughout the session, please put that in the Slido app
for Track 2.
We'll answer those at the end.
If you like one of the questions, please just upvote those so we can prioritize
the ones that most of the people want to answer.
And we will be sending the recording and the deck at the end of polls, so be on
the lookout for that.
So without further ado, I'm excited to announce-- sorry, foundations of
adoption, aligning customer success and product maturity.
So we're going to kick it off with Save and Brab.
Let's give a round of applause, everyone.
[applause]
Thank you.
Thank you. That was a little bit of a post-lunch applause, but that's okay.
So who had the pasta? Raise your hand if you had the pasta. Okay, oh boy.
Take note of those hands that raise. They may need to be nudged a little bit as
we go through this because, you know--
Good afternoon, everybody. I am really excited to be here, and I want to start
off by asking a question.
Does anybody know what the definition of reality is?
Everyone's like, "I don't want to raise my hand and answer that."
The definition of reality is when your expectations do not meet your experience
At this point in customer success, we're at a point where reality is smacking
us in the face.
How do I know?
Many of you have seen this recent study from Bain that had seen a decline in
net revenue retention since FY22.
Well, at the same time, their customer success costs had gone up by 60%.
And to make things worse, 66% of the customers said they had not received value
from the product in the way that they expected.
Now, I don't completely agree with all of the conclusions Bain comes to in
terms of how to fix this, but those are alarming statistics.
And I think they underscore the need to take a look at how we manage customer
engagements and retention.
So, as you mentioned, my name is Saben Brab, and I'm going to be talking to you
guys today about a process methodology
that we believe, if you start to think differently and implement differently,
can radically improve those metrics.
I'm going to go through three main pieces today.
I'm going to go a little bit more into diagnosis and what some of the solutions
could possibly be.
And then I'll talk to you guys about what a product maturity model is and how
it's been implemented.
And then, of course, as we mentioned, questions. There's always a lot of
questions around this topic, so that's fantastic.
So, let's go ahead and dive in.
The lens through which customer success as an industry is viewed has been very
well established by gain site and many others in the industry.
I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this framework, but for those that aren
't, I just wanted to real quickly kind of walk through
what these individual stages mean so that we can all be on the same page to
establish where we are today.
First stage is just the initial stage you recognize as your need for customer
success, you form a team,
you begin to reactively support customers. I'm sure we're all at least there
since we're sitting in this room.
From there, the organization matures into more proactive touches, QBRs, things
like that,
and begins to explore health scores and MPS and that sort of thing.
The next level is taking customer journey and the associated handoffs and very
clearly defining them from sales to onboarding,
onboarding to customer success and so on. And most of those touches are very
proactive.
And then finally, we get to a level of optimization where we have very scalable
and accurate metrics that are built into all of the processes.
And that allows us to have very flexible cadences and likely there's also a
very robust digital customer success motion.
Now, those are very basic definitions and there's variation from company to
company, but I hope that sets the stage for us taking a look at where we are
today as an industry.
If you look at studies from Gainsite, Bain, TSA, and pretty much anybody else I
've seen that has studied the industry,
the majority of customer success organizations are towards the lower end of
this spectrum.
They're very rarely are they reaching the established level and even rare are
still getting to that level of optimization.
This is echoed in my experience working with customers, different companies.
I'm sure it's echoed in your experience as well.
Maybe for lucky, one in 100 are reaching level of optimization, but
unfortunately it's probably closer to one in a thousand.
So we need to break this stagnation.
There's something that's missing.
There's a critical missing piece, bless you, a critical missing piece that is
keeping us from getting to this level of optimization and predictability that
we want to get to.
Now, I believe we have a unique opportunity at this moment in the history of
our very young industry to reframe how we approach customers and the customer
journey.
I believe that we need a process methodology that is fully collaborative with
the customer that has a shared view, a shared roadmap with goals and milestones
that we both agree to and are aligned on.
And the outcomes are associated with those goals.
There has been some studies recently that have shown that 85% of customers buy
a product without a strong understanding of what their own organizational
maturity should look like.
85% is a big number.
Of course, customers are going to buy your product with specific, bless you,
allergic customer success.
Customers are going to buy your product with a specific need in mind.
And of course, we want to meet that need and exceed their expectations in doing
that.
But at the same time, I think we really do ourselves as a company and the
customer a disservice if we're not providing them with a view of what great
organizational maturity can look like and how using the totality of our product
can help them to get there.
Now, I'm sure we all have that person at our company, maybe it's you, who knows
the product just inside and out.
Maybe it's a senior customer success manager, sales engineer, somebody like
that, who knows all the features.
They know how everything integrates together. They know all the use cases.
They can talk to customers about it in a way that's very organic and helps the
customer to see a vision of what can be with the product.
Now, if we could clone that person 100 times over, we'd have the best customer
success organization in the industry and our attention rates would go through
the roof.
But of course, we know in the real world that's not possible.
And so we need a way to share that knowledge in a way that's very easy to
consume and easy to communicate with all of our customer success managers,
regardless of how long they've been with the company.
It'd be great, too, if we could share that knowledge directly with the
customers in a way that's easy for them to consume and to put some actions
against.
It's not just about customer success managers, though. It's also about customer
success leadership.
Customer success leadership, of course, needs to be able to allocate resources
very efficiently and effectively in this just maelstrom of competing priorities
and tasks and changes to the product and the ever-present pressure ofization.
So what we really need is we need to put it simply the ability to communicate,
measure, and share the customer journey and the plan to improve with everyone
that needs to know from the customer all the way up to our own internal
executive leadership team.
That sounds easy, right?
No, it's not easy.
But it is possible through product maturity models.
So what is product maturity?
So this is kind of the high-level definition.
I'm going to break a speaker rule, and I'm going to read my own slide.
Product maturity is the degree to which a customer fully leverages a product's
features and capabilities, driving both their intended outcomes and uncovering
new opportunities for value they may not have been aware of.
It's essentially measuring a customer from a customer not using it all, all the
way up to mastery of the product and the brilliant outcomes that they achieve
by being at that level of mastery, and then the levels in between.
Now, I want to pause for a minute here, because oftentimes I start talking
about product maturity models.
There's the inevitable confusion between that and product usage.
So product usage, in general, is a measurement that's a lot more binary.
You're measuring if a customer is using a specific feature, or how many people
are logging in, or are they using all of the licenses they purchase, that sort
of thing.
Product maturity is looking at how they're using the features.
It is the quality of interactions, not just quantities and checking boxes.
So there's an example I show from that we built at SolarWinds that kind of
further illustrates this that I'll get to in a few minutes, but I at least
wanted to kind of put a pin in that, so that's separate in everybody's minds as
we go through this.
So let's go ahead and start talking about what a product maturity model is here
So the first step, and this is really the cornerstone of building a product
maturity model, is this is as the cornerstone is incredibly important.
If you do this well, the rest of the pieces start to really flow.
We score the best and highest level of five.
Not that could be a four, it could be a different number, so don't get too hung
up on that specifically, but this is what we've done historically.
So we're going to define what great looks like, what does it look like for a
customer to use our product in an amazing way.
You don't want to hold yourself back based on current telemetry and reporting
you have today, although that will be important when we get to talking about KP
Is.
And you also don't want to get too tied up into how the customers are using the
product today.
This might be aspirational, but you want to take a step back and really
understand what a great usage of the product could look like.
You want to take a look at the depth of their usage.
Are they using the very advanced features to do very complex tasks?
You want to cross-functional teams that should be using it.
Do they have integrations with third parties and potentially even customers?
You want to look at the maturity of their implementation.
Are they using the features, all of the features in very advanced ways?
And then fidelity of engagement, which is the data very accurate.
Are they consistently using best practices and that sort of thing?
Now, stepping outside the product maturity model, this one step actually has a
trinal company should do,
is to have a very clear view of what this looks like.
It can be used outside of this process methodology for instant sales and
marketing to create the ideal customer profile.
It can be used to create sales and marketing plays, potentially for your own
internal onboarding for employees,
for product to understand the scope of the product and are there features
either that aren't there or features that maybe are not necessary for investors
and many, many other things.
So this one step has a huge amount of value even outside of the model, but let
's go ahead and move on with kind of building out the rest of the scale here.
So once we've got that level five, that just truly brilliant, amazing mastery
level definition,
from there we start to reverse engineer less mature, three is kind of middle
maturity, two lower maturity,
one maybe one or two features being used, and zero being they're not using at
all,
which hopefully is just a customer that hasn't been onboarded yet.
This takes some time and it takes some iterating kind of massaging these back
and forth till you really get to a point where you feel like it's solid,
or about that towards the end, but you really want to make sure that you work
hard to kind of get this right,
and once you feel like it's solid, it's a good idea to pressure test it cross
functionally, potentially even with customers,
because again this is going to be shared, it is going to be a shared roadmap
with them.
But once you feel like you've got that pretty solid, the next step is to
extract the outcomes that customers will see
by actually having conversations with customers and looking at whatever data
you can gather,
and start to understand what those outcomes are, make them very crisp, make
them very concise,
and in some cases as you're doing this part of it, it starts to inform changes
to the actual level definitions again backwards,
and it can kind of do where you feel like you've got this pretty solid, you've
got great product level definitions,
you feel good about those, and you've got the accompanying outcomes, and you
feel good about those.
Once you've got to that point, you have created your shared roadmap that we're
talking about,
that we're envisioning for what we can use with customers, but this is actually
just where the fun starts.
So after you've got all of those, to each one of those levels, and that's going
to be again,
hopefully you have good telemetry reporting, I would say that if you don't,
this is a great opportunity to have a very clear idea
of what telemetry would be important that product can then take and go and use,
but hopefully you're looking for even distribution, right? We've got
definitions, and so part of what the learning is going to be here
is what is our distribution? Maybe 3% of your customers are at level 5, that's
great to know.
It may be also just across, as they fall across, there may be some interesting
things you can learn about
what customer segments fit and differ. That can be really helpful as well.
So you've got the customers mapped out in this way, and now you can start to
get into some really amazing data analysis,
and get some incredible context. You can apply these levels.
Again, we're talking about customer segments. You see certain customer segments
come up a lot more in certain levels than others.
There's a lot of different pieces that you can begin to extract, and I think
that's fantastic as well.
Now, when I first built this seven years ago, there wasn't really a lot of AI
available, and so that makes this really powerful, right?
So you get to a point where you can start to do machine learning to help
customers to be assigned to levels
and consistently reviewed to see if they're shifting or adjusting, which is
going to become very important
as we start to talk about some of the use cases.
So this is the SolarWinds example I wanted to give you that kind of lays this
out to kind of help to understand
in a very simple way what we're talking about and we're talking about maturity.
So this is their IT service management suite, and you can see I've got a yellow
box around the incident's portions.
So this is, we'll talk through kind of what these different levels are. You
start with obviously starting, which is a zero.
They haven't started to use it yet. The first level is ticketing, which is just
real simple.
The ability to do ticketing and logging incidents. From there it goes up to
level two, which is incident management,
which takes that ticketing concept and builds on kind of managing the overall
life cycle of it,
which is helping to look at figuring out where there's trends and things like
that and gets even more sophisticated.
And then finally at the level four, the highest level, it's incident prevention
So it's all those other things, but then it's also looking to actually prevent
incidents from taking place.
Now you can see that as a customer moves up, they shall maturity.
So an IT director who buys this product to do ticketing and only does ticketing
with it is going to be a lot less successful as an organization
than somebody that buys this and goes all the way to incident management is
actually preventing incidents from happening.
That's a very important piece to this. The other thing I would note is if as a
CSM, we're very focused on working with that IT director
on being brilliant at that first step of yet to share with them that they can
do incident management,
we are at risk of churn for a couple of reasons. One being there may be some
very lean product that just does ticketing
that comes along and they're a lot less expensive. And if they don't understand
, this may feel like a very expensive tool for doing ticketing.
The other side is a competitor could come along and talk about incident
understanding they've got that as an option within what they already own.
Then that can be churned as well.
So just kind of pause for a moment with kind of how this is all built out.
It is hard. It is hard to build a product maturity model. It takes some work.
It takes a lot of cross functional cooperation.
But once you've built that, there are some amazing was when we built this seven
years ago, this one insight was like my aha, mind-blower moment
that has led me to where I'm standing on a stage about half the earth away from
where I live to talk about it.
So this first step, and I found this in every single time I built this, a
golden step has existed.
So these numbers are actual, actual numbers from the first product I built this
for, although they're rounded so they're easier to read.
But these numbers have been pretty similar with the other products I've built
this for.
So we have a technical jump from one level to the next where the retention rate
goes from unacceptable to exceptional in one step.
It's one big jump.
Now you can see here that level two, we had an 84% gross retention, which was
well below our target.
Our target I think was 92%.
And level three was above that, obviously, at 96%.
The brilliance in this is that we know who the customers are, they're level two
We also know, because of our definitions, what would make them a level three.
And so what we were able to do is to apply a very focused message to those
level two customers that was directing them towards moving up in maturity to a
level.
And then we went in product, we did marketing support for it, we did our normal
customer success touches through the phone and email, and webinars and
everything.
And the result of that was a 7% jump in our gross retention rate in our biggest
quarter, which was mind blowing.
So that was incredible.
So I want to talk about earning for us was worth doing the project, as you can
tell.
But we've started to figure out some other ways to use product maturity model.
And so I'm going to talk about four, probably, the more critical things that we
deal with in customer success today.
First off, I'll talk about resource allocation and how that can be much more
efficient using product maturity model.
We'll deal with the effort within a company.
How, when combined with some of this AI sentiment analysis, the risk remed
iation can be vastly earlier in terms of how we're seeing red flags.
And then some ways that this can help to structure digital.
So the folks resource allocation is amazing.
One of the first principles of growth that we teach at high achiever is to
apply your resources on the most critical growth path.
And this is absolutely one of the best tools I found to do this.
So we know that getting somebody to a one is very manageable.
We also get somebody to a five is going to be pretty challenging.
The irony is that while a level five customer is almost guaranteed to renew,
the amount of effort it is worth.
It is getting to a level three, which is much more manageable.
And you get almost the same return there.
So to kind of think through how I would, this is a very simple model, grant you
, of potential resource allocation here.
It's going to take my onboarding staff and I'm going to apply them to level
zero customers.
And their goal is going to be to get them to a level two.
Great KPI for onboarding, by the way.
Now we know that as they go through that process, there's going to be a number
of customers only make it to level one as they go through the onboarding
process.
And so I'm going to apply my junior CSMs to moving level one customer to level
two.
And my seniors from moving customer to level two to level three.
And then we'll build KPIs around all of those activities.
Now the level four and five customers, I'm going to do some standard kind of
cadence interactions, but I'm not going to put a lot of cycles into them.
I'm going to apply a lot of different very low touch, tech touch kind of VIP
motions.
One of my favorites is creating a gated part of the community for very mature
customers to be able to interact with each other.
That feels like a VIP kind of experience.
Skipping up to a higher level of technical support because they're going to be
able to operate at a higher level and that saves time.
Some specialized digital customer success touches that are built towards mature
customers, that sort of thing.
In doing this, we are going to have a large impact on retention, but we're
going to be very efficient and very effective in how we do it.
So that's kind of a high level of some focused resource allocation thoughts.
Now there has been a challenge since the dawn of time, or maybe it would be
less melodramatic since customer success became a practice,
which is quantifying the impact of the customer success organization on the
overall company.
This has always been huge.
We believe that in using the product maturity model, we've come up, we show the
value of customer success in any company that's using this.
It's called the maturity growth score.
So we established with the golden step that there is that jump.
So this creates an organic cut line between the maturity levels where the
retention rates are unacceptable and too low,
and the maturity rates that are almost up at 100% are exceptional.
And so what we do to create the maturity growth, figure out the percentage of
our revenue that's above that cut line.
In doing that, we then create a baseline and see where we're at from there.
And then we know that if we increase the maturity growth score, we're going to
increase our retention rates.
And that is to measure the overall customer base.
You can use it to measure individual teams, customer success managers, and
their specific accounts, customer segments, whatever you want to measure.
But you know that you're going to be measuring exactly what we do in customer
success,
the way that the customer is using the product to actually get them to become
more mature in the product and to get to a better place.
And so in doing that, that has a direct impact on retention, which has a direct
impact on revenue.
Therefore, the maturity growth score is a direct correlation between what we're
doing and the actual revenue that we're driving within the company.
Without it being, we're in charge of renewals and expansion.
Right? So, a math equation, essentially.
And anybody who knows math knows, if you can take an equation one way, you can
take it the other way.
So the other thing that we've done is when you're handed a retention rate
target,
you then just can reverse engineer that and understand what your maturity
growth score needs to be in order to hit that new target.
And you also know that since you have the ability, what have you, on moving
customers up that golden step to get there,
that you have a very tactical way to go after that retention rate that actually
makes a difference for the customers and makes a difference for you guys.
Another thing I'd mention on this, just overall, is this is very powerful at
the executive level as well.
I've seen the maturity growth score go up.
Then you can apply that to next year's expirations and next year's ARR and
understand with a lot better solidity what that revenue is going to look like,
and therefore you can budget against that and make other plans.
So that's been really powerful as well.
So risk remediation, so this is one where we talked about product usage, health
score,
we've got the meme for a reason that the customer is green and they churn.
So there's all these things that it happens too late.
And what we've seen is we talked about product usage being very binary.
They're using the feature, they're not.
I'm sure you've all seen the customer who's, that's all great until all of a
sudden they flip over and they move to your competitor.
The product maturity model allows for a view into a nuance of how they're using
the product.
And that changes way earlier than anything else.
So they might be still using all the features, but the way they're using them
starts to change very early on.
And that then impacts, now of course as I mentioned before, you combine this
with like what Staircase does and customer sentiment analysis
and all of a sudden you're in a world where you are able to see that there's a
shift in the customer long before you ever would have before
and actually have a chance to remediate it instead of it being just too far
over the cliff.
Finally, digital self-serve.
So you've built this amazing roadmap, this structure, you've got this product
maturity model.
There's no reason to share with them.
We want to show them what they can achieve.
And so if you've got this product maturity model built, you can put it in
product in portal.
AI is a big piece of this where you're making sure that through machine
learning and that sort of thing that they are being placed there.
You explain to them what the product maturity model is and where they are at,
where they can be, the outcomes they can get from that.
And then with LLMs and that sort of thing, you can then guide them up through
the maturity journey that way.
This also, by the way, is a great onboarding tool for your teams as they're
coming on.
And it also going to be used as an onboarding tool in general for your
customers.
So that's pretty powerful as well.
So we're really at a crossroads.
I think that we're hearing this message over and over again.
We all recognize it, we feel it.
There are some things that we've done in the past that are not going to work
going forward.
And I think that some are current.
I would suggest that you have an opportunity to go back to your company to
influence the building of a product maturity model
and to have a chance to have your company start to be on the leading edge of
this as you go forward.
Now, I've seen a lot of nods and a lot of recognition that this makes sense.
And so the next step is kind of like, well, how do we get started?
So this is not rocket science, but you need a cross-functional team of subject
matter experts.
It's going to be product, it's going to be customer success, sales, sales
engineering, BI, some of your best AIP.
In general, depending on what your telemetry is like, the complexity of your
product, all those sorts of things,
it can take as much as nine to 15 months to build, which can feel a little bit
daunting.
But to really build something out that is exceptional and has the opportunity
to change the company in the way that this can,
I have seen it be worth it for sure.
All of who works at the company, who may know something about how to do this,
consultants or contractors or people that can help, that can really shorten
that timeframe quite a bit.
I'm going to get to questions in just a second here.
But before I go, I'm going to throw a QR code up on here.
This is just a little freebie for putting up with me.
You can choose to bookmark or kind of introducing the concept of a customer
success operating system,
which I think is not completely unknown to folks, but to really make sure that
you have an understanding of how to build out a customer operating system,
what it looks like, how it provides efficiency.
And then I've got a little brief module on there about building risk-reason
codes out of your churn-reason codes and some things around that.
So if you're interested, that's the QR code for that.
And with that, I...
Give me a go back. Did everybody get...
Oh, okay.
All right.
Okay, sorry, it's top here.
How would you leverage the product maturity model in a low-touch, tech-touch
approach?
The steps they have to pursue to get to the next level.
So this is a great question. I think there's two things in here.
One is that there can be a hesitance to show the customer, here's how immature
you are.
So I understand that.
So I think that really what you want this to be is...
Part of how you're communicating this to them is you're getting from that.
Here's where you can be, and you do want to share that with them.
There's something that's laid out between you two that you're both working
through, so it's eyes wide open.
So yes, you want it to be shared.
And in terms of, from a digital perspective, a digital low-touch perspective,
I think, you know, kind of talking through that at a high level with the
digital customer success slide
is ranting themselves to it and understanding where they're at and where they
can be
and understanding that the outcomes they'll get from that.
And then the help along the way could be low-touch.
It could be, you know, fully LLM with AI,
or it could be through other types of tech-touch motions.
Ideally, I think probably low-touch of a little bit more known,
and then a lot of customers start to be able to self-serve better from there.
What are leading adoption metrics you recommend tracking,
and do you recommend focusing on golden features to track only adoption of high
value functionality?
So there is a lot under the covers of this question
because this really gets to what is your product, right?
It's the IT service management suite product maturity model at SolarWinds.
There's a lot of features in there.
And so we had to make some choices about kind of some tier one, tier two
features,
and you kind of saw where we got to in terms of understanding
here are the main functions of what the product is doing.
What are all the features that lead to that main function?
It's because it's, you really have to be, you have to think through that.
If you have features in there that you feel like it doesn't really matter
if they're using this or not, that's a different conversation
that probably needs to be had with product,
which probably won't be a fun conversation, depending on who put that in.
But I think it definitely can be difficult to really dial in and narrow down
what are the key features and how to track them and stuff.
There's a lot that has to be done in that.
This is really the hard work of this, I think.
Can you give more concrete examples of activities that took customers from
step two over the golden step?
What messaging are specific touches resonated best?
Yeah, so the product we were using was a student assessment tool,
and there was a, basically the main difference.
And I try not to get two in the weeds on that as a specific thing,
but it was essentially that there was a secondary kind of like after quiz
that level three customers are using, that level two weren't.
And there's a lot more to it, so I don't want to bore you the details.
So essentially all we had to do was we went in with messaging that was based
on that specific feature that was, you know, we have found that schools
and school districts that leverage this, see a rise in their growth scores by X
, Y, and Z.
And here's how you can start to implement that, and we can help you with
a more detailed plan if you want to.
So it was that kind of messaging, but it really was, for that product,
there was literally one specific feature within the product that they needed to
use to get to level three, and there's other things to get to level four and five
that were more in depth, but that's basically what it was.
It can happen that some customers only need to use part of our product features
so they'll never get to the highest level.
Would that mean they're not a good fit with our product, or how do they fit in
this logic? So that's usually the first question I get, because I'll have the customer
who, going back to the IT service management option,
they just want to use ticketing, they just want to log tickets,
they don't want to do anything else.
They're super happy, they've been with us for ten years, it's all great.
What I would say is it's a choice, right?
It's a choice that you have to make.
Obviously, you don't need to necessarily jettison them, and fire them as a
customer,
but you also have to understand that that is going to be a constant source of
risk,
because as we talked about, somebody else is going to come along that just does
the thing they want to do cheaper, or somebody else is going to come along
and it's going to provide them a vision that they may have not really thought
through before that you can also do.
So I think there's always a risk of churn, and there's always going to be a
lack of
growth there because they're probably not going to expand,
and they're probably not going to buy anything else.
So you could accept that risk, but within the model, they're still going to sit
probably in level one, and so you're always going to have that as a drag to
your maturity growth score, but again, it's a choice to make,
you just have to accept that, that that's the risk you're going to face.
The concept key considerations that hold true no matter what
when you're assessing building maturity.
So that, again, that's a great question.
I think that it really is holding yourself, this is not as specific as you
probably want, but holding yourself to a really high standard in terms of that
highest level definition.
The challenge we always have in building this is we want to pull back.
It's like, there's, boy, there's not going to be many, that's, or this is like
a really robust use of the product.
But I think that's kind of the key thing is I'd always challenge you is, again,
to be aspirational at that level five, and just know you're going to reverse
engineer your way down.
But really, it's thinking in terms of the logical progression of how a customer
would generally work through becoming more mature is going to be really
important.
So you obviously, you're not going to stick some feature in level two that's a
very advanced feature that requires other features to work, you know, that kind of
thing.
But aside from that, it is so vast that it is difficult for me to say always do
it this way.
And I apologize for that.
I wish I could say do it this way, it will always work.
But it is difficult.
It requires a lot of thought and definitely some pressure testing.
So that was probably the worst answer that you're going to get from any one of
these sessions today.
How do you recommend evolving a product maturity model as a product itself
evolves and new features are added over time?
Who are the internal stakeholders you've seen take ownership of this process?
So that is an excellent question.
So I'm going to cover two things in this question that I think are important to
note. So number one is when we think about the golden step, that's going to occur in
different places depending on the company and a lot of other things, right?
So to give you kind of extreme examples, imagine a new startup that's been
around for a year and a half.
Most of their customers are not going to be very advanced to the product yet,
right? They're going to be probably most of you where that occurs.
And then as we get five, six, seven years down the line, it's a great start up.
I recommend investing in it.
Then that will start to change and that golden step will move.
In terms of adding features, absolutely, that's going to change the model.
That's going to have to impact and have you go back and redraw that.
My recommendation is that there is somebody in the bowl for this because they
're the
ones that are going to be knowing ahead of time what we're adding and what
pieces need to be in there.
But there should be like a review that includes whatever the cross-functional
members that need to be a part of that.
But yeah, but that is great.
The other side of the -- I'm sorry, I gave you the first example, but not the
other
side of that being like imagine a -- like cybersecurity suite, for example,
where
there's a -- the risk of not being mature is so high that it may push the
golden
step up because customers are adopting so many of the features at a high level.
So just to kind of give you that side, I'm sorry, I forgot to give you the
second part of that.
But yeah, so that's the stakeholders.
I'm going to do, I think, one more.
Maybe two.
We'll see how we get through this.
Would you say it's desirable for every customer to reach the highest level of
product maturity or does this differ per segment to customer profile?
So I think that what we really want is for customers to get above the golden
step, right?
And I think that there is a -- and that's not just for us.
It's not -- because the -- what that's -- so, again, love to reverse engineer.
So think about it this way.
If a customer is -- if you've got a group of customers that have a gross
retention rate of over 96%, they must be going good, right?
They must be happy with what's happening.
So if you are getting them to those levels, you're essentially getting them
into a
level where they're seeing the value out of the product that we want them to
see
and because of that, they're staying.
So I would say obviously getting everybody up to five would be brilliant.
That'd be amazing.
But probably looking at getting them up into those levels where we see that
level of retention suggests customers are happy when they get to that level.
So I think probably just this one, then we'll go.
What about feature releases?
How do you align these with customer maturity or are they treated independently
So that's kind of like the other question.
The real quick version is I just say, again, we want to make sure product is
heavily involved in the ongoing iterations of this because they're going to
have a sense of what those things are going to be and how the roadmap could
potentially
change.
One more.
How much focus should be put on the product maturity model from a risk
mitigation point of view compared to other risk signals?
I don't want as many risk signals as I can get, assuming that they're accurate.
Personally, I think that using a really good customer sentiment tool with the
product maturity model and kind of combining those efforts into early warning
is going to give you the best leading indicator of risk.
You also don't want to go, you know, you want to focus in on the things that
are, I would say that part of this too is understanding what are you seeing in terms
of the predictability of that metric?
Is it actually like truly predicting churn?
And that's a way that we've seen, again, going back to the drawing board with
the
product maturity model before is making a few adjustments in there.
Although that was, ended up actually putting us right back to where we were,
so that didn't change anything.
The golden step actually held true in that one too.
But yeah, so one more, one minute, quick.
Okay, I want to be causing the time.
How do you approach a client company with users that are on different product
maturity levels?
Ooh, that's different organizations that are all using the product and they
have
different product maturity levels.
My impression generally is to look at this by breaking this down.
And this is, this is something I didn't have a chance to talk about today.
But the real quick high level view is you may have, like in that, in the suite,
there may be different product maturity levels that a customer may have within
that suite.
The same thing would apply for multiple different organizations within the
customer with different product maturity levels.
You'd have to kind of work with them and kind of figure that out.
But you have the understanding, you know what's happening there, and that's
really probably the most important thing.
So, good.
Okay, I better stop there.
16 seconds.
Thank you guys so, so much.
I really appreciate it.
It's been awesome.
If you see me around, feel free to ask me more questions.
But thank you.
Appreciate it.
[applause]
