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EP037: Product Success: Turning What You Ship Into Money · The Chief Customer Officer Podcast

• Jay Nathan Zoom Meeting Recording Oct 13: Most product companies don't have a problem shipping shipping software, especially today. We ship plenty of software. The real problem that we have is a lot of what we ship never turns into money. It never gets adopted, never gets sold, and never shows up as renewed revenue. so today I'm gonna talk to you about what happens and w why this happens and what we are gonna do about it. We call it product success. So welcome back to the Chief Customer Officer Podcast. My name's Jay Nathan. I'm CEO of a company called Balboa. and Jeff, my co-host, is out today. He's got you know, three little ones in the house. Sickness is rampant always. He's always got a cold these days. so we're gonna give him a break and I'm gonna walk through this idea of product success with you. so here's the plan. So for the next 20 minutes, I'm gonna give you a quick primer. On a book that I love. It's called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by a guy named Richard Romelt. I think that's how you say his name. everything sort of builds on that. So we'll start there. Then I'm gonna explain this concept of product success and the product success loop. And then I'm gonna walk through some of the methods that we use with our clients at Balboa to put this into practice. so we'll start with good strategy, bad strategy. Again, like one of my favorite books. and I think it applies up and down sort of the the layers of a company. It it can apply at the company level, and then it can apply all the way down at your team level or even an initial individual initiative that you may be working on. So Richard Rummel is a strategy professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. In 2011, he published a book. Called good strategy, bad strategy. And if you lead anything, a company or a team or a project, I would recommend it's worth your time to sort of check this book out. he has one main simple point in this book, and that is what most people call strategy is not strategy at all. And I think we've all seen bad strategy, but here's how he describes bad strategy, right? So first is like fluff. Big buzzwords, things that sound smart, but you can't really determine what they're actually saying. I know I've been guilty of this in my career, you know, using words that that nobody understands. The second is failing to face the real challenge. If you can't name the problem that you're trying to solve or the actual opportunity that you're going after, you can't solve it. So we'll dig into this more in a minute. The third is treating goals as strategy. For example, we're gonna grow revenue 30% this year. That's a goal. It does not tell us what we have to go do to grow revenue by 30%. That's a byproduct, right? I once worked for a company where our CEO rolled out a big lofty goal that we were going to be a billion dollar company by a specific date. Billion dollars in revenue. And it didn't really clarify what it was that we were supposed to go do or how we were going to go get there. And so it actually left the team. The entire company with a lot more questions than it had answers, and it was sort of frustrating. so goals are not strategies. And then the fourth sign of a bad strategy is bad objectives. So this is a long list of initiatives or targets that nobody believes are possible. So it's just a set of projects, basically. So what does good strategy look like? That we know what bad strategy is now. That's helpful. But what is good strategy? It it it consists of three things, according to to Ramel. and he calls this the kernel. So part one is a diagnosis. Like what is the actual problem we're trying to solve? What's the main obstacle in our way? If we think we have a big opportunity to grow in a specific segment of our customer base, what is the constraint to that growth? What do we have to do to go take advantage of that? So it's getting very specific on the problem that we're trying to solve or the opportunity that we're trying to go after. So that's number one. Number two is what Ramel calls a guiding policy. That's our overall approach to tackling the obstacle. a good guiding policy also rules things out. It tells people what we're not going to do, how we're going to go solve the problem. So you've got a diagnosis, you've got a guiding policy, and then you've got, and this is critical, coherent actions. That's number three. these are the specific steps that support. the goal and that work together to to push it in the same direction. So this is the coordinated actions that we're going to take as a team or as a company to go meet our, meet our objective. Okay. So I like this. Like I mentioned, this framework works at every level of the company, right? You can use it for the whole company. Like what is our strategy as a business? Or you can use it for one department or even a project inside of your customer success team or your sales team or your product team. Well, let's here's a here's an example to to make this more concrete. So let's say that your customer success team's goal is to quote unquote improve retention. That's a goal. It's not a strategy, it's also very general, right? so the first thing we have to do is diagnose why is our retention not where it needs to be? Why is it lower than it needs to be? I'm gonna talk more about how to break this down in a second, and and sort of how we break this kind of problem down into smaller parts, but So if the goal is to improve retention, maybe we came up, we did the analysis, we broke down the problem, and we found that our newer customers stall before they get to the point where they're re where they're getting value during onboarding. And those are the accounts that we lose most. Jeff and I had a client like this years ago where they had a churn problem at year one. They had a year one churn problem. And we immediately said, Well, it's probably an onboarding issue if your customers are churning at year one, because of course they're locked in for a year. This particular company they were. And if they're turning a year one, that means they never really properly got activated. And when we were on the phone with the CEO, he was like, you know what? That's exactly what's happening. I know it's what's happening. So we actually went and got the data and proved that's what was happening and then put steps in place to solve that problem. So once you know the problem you're trying to solve, then you implement the guiding policy. So what we did in that particular example was we built an onboarding program. that that got the customers, you know, live quickly, engaged quickly. We we found that there were a number of gaps between the the customer agreeing to purchase the technology that that this company was selling and getting activated on it. And they literally were being dropped at the point of inception. And so we put a series of coherent actions in place that work together. To make sure that those customers didn't get dropped, they got communicated with, they had tools to go use, and were able to get them up and running very quickly. And it took a while to show the value of that work, of course, right? Because it doesn't show up for a year, but the retention rates went up significantly after that point. That's been several years ago now. We've checked in on this client many times and their their retention rates continue to go up. and certainly that first year conversion rate continues to go up. So this is a very simple example. And it's probably one that many of you, if you're in customer success or you're in go-to-market at all, have seen and witnessed and thought about. If you've been in SaaS or tech for any amount of time, you've you've probably run across this before. But but I think it's a really good one because it's very easy to understand. The diagnosis of the problem, the guiding principle, we're gonna build an onboarding program and make sure we don't drop these customers. And then third is the coherent actions that we're going to take inside the product, inside the engagement model, the customer lifecycle, communications, everything we've got to do to go get those customers live and activated in their first year. So keep all this in your back pocket because we'll come back to it. so that is an overview of good strategy, bad strategy. Again, highly recommend the book. It's a really good read. super helpful to clarify, you know, how you're thinking about problems you're trying to solve in your business. So Balboa, my company, started as a services firm. we do this is not meant to be an ad, but we do a lot of work on the Pendo platform. It's one of the the technology platforms that we support in sort of this product success world. But over the last two years, we've worked with over 200 clients on, we have you know a lot of product teams at our clients, but we also work with customer success teams. Go to market teams. through all of this work, the same patterns show up time and time again. mainly every department is measuring its own success, even when it sort of doesn't fit with what the the company is trying to do as a whole. so we often find that customer data is hard to get at. It's stuck inside of individual teams, it's stuck inside the product organization. Products get released and brought to market without a consistent communication process. The teams aren't enabled. Therefore, the customer is not able, not enabled. nobody truly owns product adoption. The product teams often will, you know, release software and then hand it off to somebody else to make sure it gets adopted. that's a problem. we're seeing a lot of reorganizations, shifting priorities. Everybody is off balance right now in the industry, it feels like. And in even in companies that are growing very quickly, you see a lot of this happening. so there's a lot of sort of chaos in the the product release, product development lifecycle, and the customer lifecycle. So what we're trying to do in our work and with our clients and with product companies is Bring together product and go to market and something we call product success. and that is making sure that these these processes of designing and building products, releasing them into the market through maybe an alpha beta GA type of release cadence, getting feedback along the way and incorporating that back into the product development process, making sure product adoption. Activities are coordinated. And then obviously the customer lifecycle is coordinated. Remember, we're doing all this because as a product company, we're trying to make money. That's the goal here. Whether it's top line revenue you're trying to grow or you're actually trying to be profitable, those are two different goals and two different company level strategies. But those are that's what we're trying to do. We're we're trying to actually generate money with these products. And some companies we work with, they're not actually selling the digital product. They're selling some other product, but they use the digital platforms to help sell that product faster and help service that product. And so, even in that case, these companies are here to make money, right? And we want to help do that. That makes sure we have jobs, that makes sure we're able to serve customers. That's sort of the name of the game. Okay. So bringing together the product lifecycle and the customer. Success life cycle. And I say that very generically, right? Because there's a lot that goes into that is sort of the goal. so there's an old business book. It was written in in 1984. It's called The Goal by a guy named Eliehu Goldrat. I think I said that right. it's about a guy who runs a manufacturing plant, and his manufacturing plant is in danger of being shut down. The division leader is looking at the profitability and the metrics and the numbers and he's he's ready to shut this plant down because it's not actually making money for the company. and I think there's a a bunch of you know it is manufacturing right that is different than what we do in the software world to some degree, but I think there's a lot of lessons in here that that product teams can learn from. So the idea is that every system has at least one constraint that limits everything else happening. in that system. So any improvement that isn't aimed at that one constraint, all it does is give us the illusion of of progress, right? So for example, you know, the sales team hits its booking numbers, but somehow the company still doesn't hit its revenue and profitability targets, right? We see that kind of thing all the time. Marketing hits its lead development goals, but sales doesn't hit its booking number, right? Sales hits its goal, but revenue numbers are not being met and retention numbers aren't being met because we're selling to the wrong customers. So there's all kinds of places where this happens in our companies. But back to this book. So my favorite part of the book is a very simple illustration of how this works. So there's a a part in the book where the main character is actually a sort of reads like a novel, which is the most geeky thing ever. It's like a business novel. But there's a part of of the book where the the person who's running this plant, his name's Alex, is leading a Boy Scout hike and they're just having a tough time. It's a 10-mile hike through the woods. He's got all these kids. He ends up, you know, leading this hike alone because the other Boy Scout leader doesn't show up. But what he's finding is that he can't keep the Boy Scout troop together on this hike, they're getting all spread out. They're having a hard time. He's having a hard time keeping an eye on the kids in the front. They're moving really fast. but the moral here is that the the troop could only move as fast as the slowest member of the Boy Scouts troop. And so there's this kid named Herbie. Herbie's a heavyset kid. He's you know, he's got this crazy backpack on with way too much stuff in it. And essentially it doesn't matter where he is in the line, he's holding things up, right? He's he's holding that you know the people behind him up. and it isn't until he puts Herbie at the front of the line and lightens his load, meaning they take everything out of his pack and hand it to other kids to carry that he can actually keep the the troop together on the trail, which is good. It's like think about work in progress, the process. The the the wider the spread is between the first person and the last person on this hike, that's That represents the work in process, the inventory cost, the, you know, the the overall cost of of you know what a process looks like. So this this Boy Scout troop tracing through the woods is a really, a really good illustration. Now think about that for what we do in our product companies. If your real constraint is adoption or onboarding or your sales team's ability to to explain. What the product does to prospects, shipping more features is not actually going to help. It just piles up more software that nobody can adopt and get value from it. So, and we have that happening in spades right now. So we have removed a constraint. The constraint used to be engineering, right? We used to, we used to wait for weeks and weeks and months to get features that were important to. our customers, but now that's not the case anymore. The constraints have moved thanks to AI, right? And agentic coding. So now we can pump out features faster than we ever have. We can pump out brand new products faster than we ever have, but it's harder for the customer to adopt all that technology. Cause remember the customer's day job hasn't changed, right? It's harder for the sales team and the customer success team to know how to support all of that product. it's harder for the marketing team to go, you know, Talk about those products in in the real world. So shipping more product isn't the goal. Remember, we got to go back to what we talked about a minute ago. The goal is to make money. The goal is for our companies to make money. And to do that, of course, we have to ship product, but we have to also relieve ourselves of all those other constraints. So that brings me to this idea of product success. So product success is the work of getting people who build the product. and the people who sell and grow it to work from one song sheet and work work together. when when when we're able to achieve this, what gets built, launched, adopted, renewed, it adds up to more sales and and better retention, right? That's the whole thesis behind this. So to put it simply, product success is making sure that what a company builds actually turns into money. That's it. Okay. I've been inspired about this for my entire career. I used to work for another company that, you know, it was it was a big software company and it was so siloed. We would, you know, the support team didn't really, they had their own processes and their own metrics and their own excellence that they pursued. The product team was pumping features and releases out the door on their schedule. The services team was trying to hit a revenue number. the the account management team and the sales team were trying to, you know, sell the product, but it was just all disparate and it was all siloed. Operationally, each team was very, very excellent in their own in their own silo. But as a whole, the company was starting to sort of grind down to a slower growth rate because the the the parts weren't all working together to go drive new business, to go ensure customer success. And so that's that's that's why we're We're talking about this product success concept because all this stuff has to work together. So successful product companies do three or four things really, really well. And we think of them as a as a loop. Okay. So We'll we'll start with each one. We'll I'll talk through each one, but but know that this is a cyclical process. Okay. So the first stage is really understanding market needs. this is sort of where we listen to the voice of the customer. what do they need us to build for them? How can we leverage our unique knowledge in this industry and this market to to build, you know, to develop a roadmap and build products that actually just solve problems for the customer? So that's stage one. Stage two, the second thing is launch and release. Once you build something, you have to figure out how to get it into the market. So you do that through early release programs, you know, alpha beta programs that have criteria around them for how we like stage gates. Is this good enough to release to the entire customer population or GA general availability? how do you recruit customers to Test, right? You have to have people that are willing to give you feedback, customers that are willing to invest time in helping you learn. You have to go recruit those. So there's some some steps there. Okay. So that's the second component of product success. The third component is adoption. How deeply and broadly are customers using what it is that we shipped? Are they using all the features? Are they getting value? Have we enabled them appropriately? This is where I think. The throw it over the wall mentality starts to happen, even in early adopter kind of programs, right? The product team finishes something, they get it out the door, and then they expect the customer experience teams, CS, services, whatever, to go make it happen for the client. They expect the sales team to be able to sell it, right? But product adoption is key here. And by the way, like this is not about departments. I actually think departments are the problem, but we'll we'll come back to that in a second. And then The fourth component is what I would call the customer lifecycle. And this is really more the commercial lifecycle of the accounts. It covers retention, renewal, expansion, like where we prove the value of the product and so much so that the customer is willing to pay for it again and again and again, right? Or buy more of it over time. So this is a looping process. Market needs, development of the product, launch and release. Product adoption and then the customer lifecycle around it. And so we're learning throughout all of this, right? And and by the way, like you've probably if you're in product marketing or product management or engineering or customer success or support, you've probably heard your job as I've described this, but this is not really about these departments, right? This is about a holistic process of getting product into the hands of customers, making it useful and valuable to them. And having it, you know, return money to you in exchange. Okay. So it starts with the customer and works backwards, and that shapes what the company builds, how it delivers it, and it's a cyclical process. So in practice, here's what it looks like. So for big accounts with an account manager, market needs, identifying the market needs might mean, you know, rolling up information at the account level, verbatim from customer calls. in in the long tail of customers, meaning, you know, maybe your smaller accounts, it might mean. running surveys or elicit looking for usage patterns across those accounts. Okay. In the launch and release phase, it means identifying those design partners that you're going to work with, your product teams are going to work with very hands-on. And even today it's like four deployed engineering teams working directly with those larger accounts to deploy the product for them and then bring back enhancements to the core product to to make it meet the needs that those those customers have. The adoption component is literally looking at the metrics of where the customer fails to do what you thought they were going to do. And this takes some foresight in how the product was designed, right? We have to design these products, these capabilities to be measured so that we can see if they're adding value to the customer, if they stall and drop off, how long it takes them to get to value, so on and so forth. And then finally, in the lifecycle stage, it's the ability to measure the account health. You know, based on all these factors, usage, you know, call data, support cases, even core product data, using the raw data from the product to measure how well the customer is doing a thing that they're supposed to be doing. Okay. Every single one of these components needs sort of data and to and to show that the the product itself is working for the customer, driving value for the customer. That might be By you fit by segment, how many customers pass the stage gates that we've set up for the release process? It might be how fast we get to first value. or how ultimately, ultimately the best way to measure it is by how much the customers spend and whether they keep spending it with you over time. But that's a that's a long tail indicator, right? It's a it's a lagging indicator because it takes time for renewals to come through, for growth to come through. Okay, so The part that most teams get wrong is they treat all these things, launch and release, adoption, market analysis, customer commercial lifecycle. We treat those as departments, right? Product owns the first stage, marketing owns the second stage, customer success owns the post-sale. But this this product success loop really, really works when when these teams share the same view of the customer, have a have a shared strategy, and frankly, it comes down to leadership. It really comes down to leadership. Okay. all right. So now that we know what this whole idea of, you know, product success is, which is all these different capabilities working together, despite what a department is named, but getting these capabilities right for the customer, how do we how do we put this into action? So we developed a a a a methodology called Insights to Impact at Balbaugh. Okay. A lot of this is not new. We pull from existing methodologies like Richard Rommel's, like I'm and from our experience, you know, decades and decades of I shouldn't say decades and decades, but combined like decades of experience living this stuff, right? Living with product release and leading go to market and customer success teams. So it takes everything we know from from that experience and and everything that you know we we We help our our clients take everything they know about their customers and turn it into a clear set of problems, a plan to solve them, and a way to measure whether the plan is working. It's pretty, pretty simple. Okay, so there are five five steps to this process. step number one is segmentation. Step number two is prioritization. I'm gonna walk through each one of these. Step number three is strategy definition, and you know what strategy is now based on on Romelts. definition. Number four is how do we measure it? Setting a baseline and then figuring out what our metrics are going be. And then five is deploy, measure, iterate. Okay. So those those three chunks are number are number five. So step one is segmentation. Like I talked about earlier, we don't ever use a general problem statement to try to to to solve a problem, right? We build essentially a grid and you should do this too. and the grid should be your customer segments or your market segments that you're looking at. And typically that would include something like a customer size. So enterprise, mid-market, SMB. some people call SMB emerging, some have international markets, but who are the who are the chunks of your customers by common characteristics? Okay. a lot of companies have multiple products now. And so maybe you list a products. across the top. And then within that grid, okay. So you've got the size of customer, the products across the top, or maybe the industries across the top. What however you think about your customer base, what are the customer, what do the individual customer segments look like? Where are your real opportunities for growth? We're all in this for growth, right? We're looking for where we're going to get the next, you know, chunk of explosive growth for for our our teams. Not every cell in that grid Is going to have the same growth opportunities as another. Some are going to be empty. You're not even going to service those customers and you're going to make that a decision intentionally. Okay. So, but what you want to do is find the sales with real opportunity for growth, whether that's, you know, addressable retention opportunity or new sales opportunity. But let me let me give you an example. so assume you have a an like an advertising platform, and this advertising platform has small Customers, they, you know, minimally use one of their products, right? And so if you split that cell of small customers that uses product A by how long the customer has been a customer, what you might find is that the customers that are in their first six months of being a customer only use the product at 6%, right? Whatever that means. But the ones who have been around for more than 18 months use it at 18%. So that gap is the opportunity. The question is: what does it take to get more of those existing customers from 6% to 18%? Okay. So if new customers match the older ones, then how many more would be using the product? And how much more, how many more dollars would be flowing through the the system? So Segmenting the problem or segmenting your customer base, I should say, turns, you know, a generic statement like adoption is low, retention is low, into like, hey, these specific customers using this specific product are stuck and we think there's an opportunity to solve that problem. Okay. So first you have to sort of understand the grid. We we've done these segmentation exercises across every every company I've worked in over the over the past 20 years. I've I've done these segmentation exercises. Sometimes you have to pull the data yourself. Sometimes you have to go create the data. I had a I worked at one company back in the mid-20 teens where we had 500 customers when I walked in the door on day one. I had no data about those customers. We had all their contracts, right? We knew what they signed, but we didn't have any of that data in the CRM. The CRM was purely a pipeline tool. So we had to, man, I wish we had had AI back then, but we had to go through every single one of those contracts, pull out the vital details of those contracts, and actually put them into a table so that we can analyze the customer base and the data. And then when we did that, it made life a lot better. It gave us a structure to work with. So it actually was a great exercise because we learned a ton about those 500 customers as we were walking through that process. Not only did we learn about those customers, we learned about our relationship with those customers through the contract. all right, so where am I? so once you do sort of this segmentation exercise, then you have to prioritize. Okay, so step two is prioritization. you're definitely gonna find more problems that you want to solve than you have time to solve, right? We're all under the gun. We all need to solve problems quickly. So the real question is for each one of those problems that you spot in each one of those cells of the segmentation, the qu the question to ask yourself is what would it mean if we solve this problem for the business? So that's number one. What's the impact? The other question is do we think we can actually solve this problem? Okay. But the first question is what would it mean to the business? So if it's a big opportunity to go sell more into a Specific tier or segment or to drive retention significantly up in a particular segment, then it's probably worth going to do the next layer of work, which is okay, is that even feasible? How would we go make that happen? Okay. And that is step number three. So this is defining a strategy. Once we define a set of problems that are worth solving in a particular set of cells, then we just then we start to decide how we can do that. in project management, there's a there's a there's a risk analysis methodology that we use. And it's basically, you know, when I when I look at a risk, how how how likely is that risk to turn into a real issue for us in in a project? And then if it does, if that if it does go awry, what is the impact to the business? And you multiply those two things together. And you basically get a score that helps you prioritize risks that you need to manage. Like what's the most important thing? Because something that is very likely to become an issue that has a low impact is probably not worth focusing on as much as something that has a medium likelihood of occurring and has a very high impact. Okay. So that'll end up with a higher score. That's just one example. Anyway, we we want to look at our opportunities the same way impact versus likelihood or effort to implement, okay? Likelihood of us being able to make it happen. So if we say, hey, this particular segment has a very low retention rate, once we do the analysis, do we think we can actually move that retention rate? We have to be very clear-eyed about that, right? We have to be very honest with ourselves because otherwise we're gonna throw good effort at a bad segment. Okay. So that's why prioritization and this strategy development is really important. Okay. So now we have a set of segments. we have a set of problems we want to go solve. We're gonna go define the strategies for for solving it. So this is where the the rumel remote stuff comes back in, the good strategy, bad strategy. So there's there are three steps to defining a strategy. Number one is we're gonna diagnose the root cause. So why do we believe that those customers are not retaining at a high level? Right. We talked about the onboarding piece a minute ago. That's a great example. The second step to defining a strategy is choose an overall approach. Okay. Remelk calls that a guiding principle. What are we going to do differently to solve the problem? This is general. This is not specific. It's just like what is our approach to solving the problem? We're going to take care of our customers during onboarding. Okay. We're going to we're going to rally around them for the first six months of their of their life cycle with us. Execution steps. It's probably a better way to think of that. That we're going to use to support that guiding principle. So we might do in-app guidance, we might do email campaigns, we might call every customer, we might make certain steps in the product easier to use, but they are coherent actions that all are going to work together to really hone in on that problem that we diagnosed and the root cause. Okay. So A lot of times what teams will do is they'll jump straight from the vague problem like retention is low to a set of fixes that they're not sure are gonna fix it. They never really figure out which customers are specifically stuck or why they're stuck, most importantly, and whether or not they can actually fix that problem. Okay. So a lot of times you'll see a lot of effort being put in, a lot of generalized effort being put into solving these problems, and it won't actually do it. So This the strategy is the bridge between, you know, the the the problem you identified, how you're going to solve it, and the result that we want to get. Okay. All right. So that's strategy definition. Number four is measurement. So we've got to to understand the metrics that we're trying to move and how we want to measure success before we go change anything. Okay. So that often that often involves setting a baseline. So we actually think about this in four different tiers. I've given you some of your lists. I hope this is not overwhelming. But there are four different components to measurement, right? You have a lot of we the bottom level of measurement is just signal, right? That's all the raw data that we get about kind of things that we're trying to measure. Okay. So the next is leading indicators. How do we put those signals together to say you know, What what are the what are the leading indicators that tell us we're getting closer to our goal? Then you've got lagging indicators. These are the things that take longer to to show up in the process. and then ultimately you have KPIs at the top of the ladder. And KPRs that KPIs, that's the money piece, right? That's ultimately something that probably ties back to your your PL statement or your balance sheet, something that shows that's that's the out the business outcome that you're looking for. Okay. So the strategy is going to connect those two, those the bottom rungs from the top rungs of the ladder. It's going to connect the actions we're taking down in the product, down in the customer life cycle and customer success and experience teams, all the way up to the to the PL at the top. But that's more of a story than it is a direct correlation in most cases. So So the actions that we pick in the strategy section should really move the leading indicators first. Leading indicators should tell us that we're we're getting more throughput and that we're ultimately going to hit our our KPIs. So we'll go back to the onboarding example, right? a good leading indicator might be how many customers out of all those that bought, what percentage are activating their individual. user accounts within the first 30 days, you could start to measure that, right? That's a that's a leading indicator because we believe that that is going to move retention. Or it's one of the things that will move retention. There may be three or four other things as well. Retention is the lagging indicator, right? If you just try to measure retention, you're not going to know until it's too late. But if you believe that having them activate their accounts, your part of your strategy is to have them activate their accounts earlier. Then that is going to lead to an improvement in the lagging indicator, which is gonna lead to an improvement in your KPI, which is retained revenue, right? Or revenue on your PL. Okay. And then, okay, so that's that's sort of developing our strategy. And then number number five, step five, is deploy, measure, and iterate. This is this is taking the action, right? This is go building the product features that you need to build and getting them deployed. It's it's building the onboarding sequence, it's putting the in-app guidance. And it's putting the measurements and dashboards in place and then starting to watch it and measure it and learning from what you're seeing and continuing to iterate. Okay. So that's the process. I'll go back over it real quick. Step one is to segment customers or your market opportunity. Step two is to prioritize within the cells, within that grid of your segmentation. What's a problem we're solving? That we believe we can actually move the needle on. Step three, define your strategy for solving the problem. That's this is Ramelt's, you know, diagnose root cause, choose an approach, and then pick actions that are that are coordinated and work together. Okay. Number four is choose your measurement strategy. And then number five is deploy, measure, and iterate. Okay. So that that is the methodology. That's insights to action. And that is what supports this whole idea of the product success loop and the product success. approach that we are trying to condone, like get everybody working on together under a shared vision for what the outcome should be and how you wanna how you want to go after it. Okay. All right. So I'm gonna close this down. I feel like I'm talking for three hours here. I know it hasn't been that long, but appreciate if you've stuck with me this long. Appreciate you listening. I'll close with this. So product analytics tools are really important. We spend a lot of time On these kind of tools. They show what the customers do inside the product. They let you guide customers in the moment. There's there's this component of guides that are that are part of like a platform like Pendo. and it's a great place for all this to start, this this work to start, but the usage data is only part of the story. Okay. and so you know, my my company started its life as a Pendo business, but what we're what we're really leaning into now is What you all know to be true already, which is there's a much bigger story, and there's a lot more data here, right? The bigger story is how the company builds, launches, sells, grows the product, the customer base. But that means we need more data sets, right? So you've got usage data, you've got CRM data where you keep track of your customers and your contacts and your interactions with them. Billing data is important is important. Call recordings are important, support tickets, surveys. even the feedback. Anecdotal feedback from your front line, all critically important. So, you know, you'll see a lot of platforms out there these days that are that are that are claiming to bring all this data together in one shared view and center of action for you to work with. And I think that's great. Those, those, they are on the right track. I actually don't think you need to buy a platform to do this kind of stuff. Most companies have these tools laying around. We're talking about a shared data warehouse environment. We're talking about core systems of record like the CRM. we are talking about an agent platform. And I guarantee you your company has probably two or three of all of those sitting around right now. Okay. So I don't think you actually need to buy more software to implement these. But here here's here's here's my challenge for you. Despite the despite the technology choices you make. Here's the challenge this week. Go out, pick a segment of customers. Try to find one core issue that you have with that segment of customers and ask a question: what would it mean to the business to solve this problem? And if you can answer that question, then you can start to build a strategy around it, go find a measurement approach, and start to build and test some of your. Of your solutions that you want to solve that problem. So think about the book I told you about the goal. Go find your Herbie in that process, right? What's the constraining factor in the in that process? Herbie is the slow kid in the in the Boy Scout troop, if I didn't mention that earlier. so what's one constraint slowing down that particular segment's progress? I'd love to hear about it. Shoot me a note, J at customer success.io. thanks for listening. Hope all this made sense and we'll talk to you soon.