Jason Lemkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…More that their KPIs and their OKRs are essentially this much revenue, you need to drive this much revenue from your experiments, from your product launches. As you can see, I have a lot of opinions on things here that are data-driven and they're live experience. This one, I need another year in the oven, and I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. What happened in the last 18 months is, in customer success, which is, in the old days, it was related to product. Now, it's less so, which I think is unfortunate. In customer success, in the last 18 months, this happened all across the industry. 24 months ago, customer success's goal was happy customers, measured in retention, sometimes NRR, net retention with upsells, sometimes with GRR, just logos, how many logos. That was your only job, happy customers. Happy customers. Then, things got harder in many areas of B2B, and every customer success team last year, their goal was revenue. You need to bring in more revenue from existing base, and it destroyed customer relationships. There is a leading public company, I will not name them, I'm a positive guy. I will tell you, a company we all have used for years and loved, and they did this to their customer success team. And they came to us last year, we paid $299 a month for this product for our team. They asked us for $50,000 upfront or said they would turn it off that day. That week. Maybe it was that week. That's what happens when you weaponize ... So customer success, and I know this is going to trigger some people, but it is true, when I talk to leaders, customer success got weaponized and I don't like it, okay? I don't like it as a product. All founders are product people, I think. I don't like it as a product because I think it's bad for customers. That experience I got was horrific, wasn't it? That $50,000, being told. And it got walked back. And the fact that it got walked back is almost even worse because it wasn't true. It was a threat. So do I want to weaponize the product team? I want the product team aligned with revenue. These are the tough decisions for founders. But I think we're going to regret, to some extent, weaponizing teams that we don't need to weaponize. Having said that, I will tell you, and again, no knock on Adobe, but when I was a VP at Adobe, and it was a long time ago, when product was in another building, in some cases, that was not great. And I love Scott and the whole team, it was a great experience, but I can just tell you, what I learned is, that did not work for me as an agile guy, having groups that would do this work in isolation. And the problem was they would never talk to a customer. So I know I want product constantly talking to the customer. I know I want the VP of product with a lot of equity, wanting to hit the bookings number for the year. Do I want your average PM weaponized and forced to bring in revenue from an experimental feature when everyone agreed it's the test we're going to run? We only can run so many. You say, should they have revenue for new feature launches, for new product expansions, for new things? Yes, but everyone's got to make that decision. test we're going to run? We only can run so many. You say, should they have revenue for new feature launches, for new product expansions, for new things? Yes, but everyone's got to make that decision. There aren't that many of us that have 1,000 extra engineers sitting around with nothing to do. Even the smallest experiment, no matter what it says on the internet, again, that we release 100 a day, I would argue bringing any product extension to market's very expensive and risky because you're taking away from something else. These are expensive decisions, and if you punish people for the mistakes in product, this is something that big companies are actually better at than startups, which is, they don't fire you if the new initiative fails. Because then, no one at a big company would ever join the new initiative. There are exceptions, but no one at Adobe or Google would work on the new product if you got fired if it didn't hit $100 million its first year. One thing I saw that was very, and I don't know how to bring to startups in my big company experience, was it's liberating to some extent to let people fail, up to a point. It's liberating. Because the cost of failure in a startup is so high. It's just so high. I know that's not what the exact question, and ask me in a year, but my advice is, just be careful that you don't weaponize functions.…

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