In this article, I delve into a concept that Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha discuss in their book The Start-up of You—the “permanent Beta." While initially applied to startups, this concept holds significant relevance for Customer Success professionals and their approach to product development.
Unlike ABZ planning, Permanent Beta is more challenging because it is closely related to the product development lifecycle. “Borrowing” this term and putting it into practice (as part of Customer Success) is not straightforward and should be aligned with the overall organizational mindset. Suppose the product development lifecycle is fast, and the CS team is set up to influence the product roadmap. I see significant benefits of CS adopting a “permanent beta” mindset in that case.
The book's authors concluded that a “permanent beta” mindset could help professionals (not only entrepreneurs) absorb feedback, iterate, make changes, and become more relevant while working in a fast-paced environment that changes permanently. Customer Success professionals can achieve the same level of agility and flexibility using the same approach.
This mindset should help drive better Customer Success engagement with customers and internally in their organization.
The challenge:
Most customers value an ever-evolving product roadmap that anticipates their needs and challenges. However, customers also expect stability and maturity so that the change does not disrupt their business operations. This leads to a potential conflict as CS professionals are expected to promote “beta” product features while not destabilizing the customer environment.
The other challenge for CS teams is to keep a subtle balance between seeking frequent customer feedback and respecting the stakeholder's time and effort to provide it. I am always mindful of how to solicit feedback from my customers without making them feel they “work for me.”
Presenting and promoting this process as a joined team effort, with expected positive outcomes for both vendor and customer, is the “little secret” to practicing a permanent beta mindset in the Customer Success landscape.
And what are these positive outcomes?
For the customer - they get the chance to influence the roadmap. Eventually, they align and calibrate the expected business value with the required feature set to realize that value. Specific stakeholders acquire additional skills and experience being part of such a process and getting exposure to product development best practices and related considerations.
For the vendor - a positive outcome is a better product market fit. A product that has already been tested and subjected to end-user acceptance testing (a.k.a. customer feedback). Having this feedback at an early stage saves time and organizational resources and eventually has a clear monetary value.
Implementing the Permanent Beta Mindset
This is the time to turn the concept into practice. Here are a few principles and actions which should be easy to follow and implement.
☑️“The proactive reconnaissance” as an enabler of Permanent Beta Mindset
Permanent reconnaissance is where CSMs constantly monitor their customers' landscape and challenges, continually looking at how to make their customers more successful and adding more product features and capabilities.
Proactively listening to customer feedback is the first step. Translating it to product development terminology requires additional skills. Understanding the customer’s business landscape and challenges should not only position the CSM as a trusted advisor to their customers but also allow the organization to maintain a customer-driven beta approach.
In previous articles, I gave a few examples of Customer Success being sufficiently alerted to spot changes in the customer's landscape (also during COVID-19) and liaising with their product team to address them on time. Few examples below:
🚩 Spot a different trend in how your customers serve their customers (for example, change of login/order submission patterns).
🚩 Spot external factors that impact your customer’s business environment (new industry/ government regulations).
🚩 Monitor their time to market constraints. For example, In certain circumstances, the customer may need to launch a new offering much faster. In that case, they may ask to shorten the onboarding process of your product or service and help activate product features within a limited time frame.
☑️ Drive continuous customer feedback to new feature requests and enhancements
I would not consider it regular feedback as it should contain essential and specific input for other teams (on the vendor side). This is part of the process in which Customer Success can help streamline and speed up customer feedback depending on the urgency and impact of their feedback. This will help sustain an “end-to-end” permanent beta mindset within the organization by helping the product team to have quick and effective customer feedback. Sometimes, this should lead to fast changes in the development plans and eventually allow a vendor to respond quickly.
☑️ Lead by example
Customer Success teams can be involved in certain aspects of field testing at an earlier stage. The idea is not to wait for the generally available version, only for the team to be “surprised” by new features. There are numerous benefits to this approach:
They get to know the new features.
They learn the limitations of implementing certain features (if they exist).
They practice internally before presenting the new version to customers and helping them to use it. Customers will appreciate the prior knowledge and experience, especially if this feature is new.
This early engagement can help make specific changes to existing playbooks (much better than updating after customers use the new product version).
Summary:
A permanent beta approach driven by customer feedback should allow organizations to develop and test new capabilities quickly. This assumes a mutual understanding with the customer that they will engage with the product as “early adopters.” As such, they get their hands on the product’s value-added beta features in earlier stages of the development cycle, which may influence the outcome of the final version.
A Permanent Beta mindset goes beyond the product and dev teams. Customer Success teams are in an excellent position to make the “match” between these teams and the customers who wish to engage first. The one additional skill set CSMs should possess is the ability to eventually spot customers with the right mindset (and patience) to become Permanent Beta partners.
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