How is customer success ownership being shared across teams and what are the implications as PLG and SLG boundaries blur?

It really depends on the product. I think the role of customer success is a function of the product, more so than a distinct role. As an example, say your product is a relatively simple utility product, like Dropbox. We're talking about product-led growth here -- Dropbox is one of the original product-led growth companies. In that world, customer success is a quasi-support function. The deal is signed and then the customer success team is there to make sure that everybody answers questions quickly and that people are getting the most out of the product. They're probably tracking things like presumed NPS across the accounts. Maybe they're onboarding some new users every once in a while. I'm not exactly sure -- I haven't been in the bowels of Dropbox's customer success department. But it's relatively simple. It's probably exclusively post-sales. They're probably also focused on helping with expansion and renegotiating deals year after year.

Then there are products out there that are much more complex and open-ended, that aren't just like pure utilities. In those cases, I think customer success ends up playing a much more expansive role because they often have to do a lot of work: everything from onboarding to product education, to services like actual product services, implementation services, and so on.

The other thing I'll note is how much this can change over time. Early on, when a company is just starting, it might be the case that it's not even a successful team at this point, but it's the first go to market person, a generalist type person, maybe it's a salesperson, maybe it's a success person, whatever the title is. They're going to end up doing all the above: they'll end up being the educator, implementer, and maybe they also design the first contract in Word and send it over and get it signed. They're going to do it all. The trick is, how do you figure out what the right structure is for your company based on your product, the way that people adopt your product, and the way that people deepen their usage with your product?

Will that deepening of usage mainly be driven by product education or implementation help? Or will it happen as a direct reaction to a sales deal being closed? Dropbox might be an example here: once you sign a deal with Dropbox and people have Dropbox on their computers, that's the end of it. There isn't anything else to do. Whereas with a company like Figma, you care a lot about how people are engaging with the product, and you might want to do education sessions where you show off things that other people have built with the product and invite people to a community. There's all this other stuff that you might do to deepen people's usage of the product.

I don't know how much that answers your question. I think, ultimately, the reality is that success is a reflection of the needs of the product in a way that sales is not. There are always going to be some deals that just need somebody who can help usher something through security review and procurement and close a deal. That's always going to be the case for a software company. Success leads us in between worlds, where, depending on the product, they have to figure out the right leverage point for them to provide the most value.