Episode 140: When Product Meets Customer Success, Miracles Happen with Bryan House, Chief Experience Officer at Elastic Path

In this episode of Product Thinking, Bryan House, Chief Experience Officer at Elastic Path, joins Melissa Perri to explore the close collaboration between product and customer success in building a customer-centric organization.

Bryan is an accomplished product and GTM executive with a proven track record of scaling companies from inception to over $170M in annual recurring revenue. His expertise lies primarily in the realm of venture-backed startups. Bryan has adeptly built and executed inaugural products and market-entry strategies and led expansive growth initiatives for businesses with recurring revenue models.

Before his tenure at Elastic Path, Bryan held the position of Chief Commercial Officer at Neural Magic, served as Entrepreneur In Residence at Underscore VC, and held multiple pivotal roles at Acquia over nine years.

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You’ll hear them talk about:

[01:27] - As the Chief Experience Officer at Elastic Path, Bryan has a unique role that extends beyond product and UX design. He now oversees sales components, account management, and the entirety of customer success, which includes renewals, expansion, global services, and onboarding. Before his arrival, the company's product and engineering teams rarely engaged with customers. So Bryan introduced a more customer-centric approach to meetings and product strategies, and realigned the R&D department.
[06:09] - Under his leadership as Chief Experience Officer at Elastic Path, Bryan introduced key strategic transformations by unifying the product and sales teams, ensuring engineers were focused on building valuable, real-world features. This union gave engineers a clearer sense of their end users, allowing them to see customers as distinct individuals within specific companies. To further embed the customer's perspective, the annual R&D offsite incorporated insights from the customer success leadership, ensuring product development was truly customer-centric. Moreover, Bryan facilitated direct interactions between customers and product managers, building trust and nurturing a proactive rather than reactive relationship. Finally, by adopting Amazon's six-page process, Bryan ensured the company's strategic narratives were clear and grounded in real business outcomes.
[17:54] - For a Chief Product Officer unfamiliar with overseeing customer success, here's a streamlined approach: First, secure a proven Customer Success Leader, someone experienced in relationship-building and project management. Next, it's essential to prioritize metrics like NPS (Net Promoter Score) and expansion, understanding that CS uniquely combines relationship-building with the art of selling. Highlighting natural sales intuition within your team is key as it promotes organic growth by addressing customer needs. If current roles seem misaligned with your objectives, don't hesitate to recalibrate to meet company goals. Lastly, work to reframe the perception of sales. It's less about pushing products and more about influence and service, offering personalized solutions to customers.
[22:15] - Bryan believes that product managers should enhance their storytelling skills. Embrace your role as the subject matter expert for the product you're building. While the customer might know their business well, you possess expertise in your domain. Don't hesitate to showcase that expertise. A common misconception among product managers is that selling the problem a product solves is solely the responsibility of product marketing. But in reality, a product manager should be intimately familiar with the problem and its solution, often knowing more than anyone else in the organization.

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Previous guests include: Shruti Patel of US Bank, Steve Wilson of Contrast Security, Bethany Lyons of KAWA Analytics, Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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