How to interview for your next job product as a CSM.

Yes, your manager and the company (pay, values, etc) are core to evaluating a new job AND as a CS professional, you'll want to have an even deeper understanding of the product.As much as the core components of the opportunity are key to your decision making process - they can change and will change over time - who leads and builds the product, the competition, and the market fit, and ultimately the retention and growth of the business relies on the success of the the product.I've spent the last 5 years evaluating products - understanding their pain points and hiring and working with CS professionals in the analytics and product arena.
Your life as a CSM is significantly easier when you are being supported by a great product, engineering and support teams. You want to evaluate all of these components of your next product, and the business that supports them like you never have before.

How to interview for your next job product as a CSM.

Yes, your manager and the company (pay, values, etc) are core to evaluating a new job AND as a CS professional, you'll want to have an even deeper understanding of the product.As much as the core components of the opportunity are key to your decision making process - they can change and will change over time - who leads and builds the product, the competition, and the market fit, and ultimately the retention and growth of the business relies on the success of the the product.I've spent the last 5 years evaluating products - understanding their pain points and hiring and working with CS professionals in the analytics and product arena.
Your life as a CSM is significantly easier when you are being supported by a great product, engineering and support teams. You want to evaluate all of these components of your next product, and the business that supports them like you never have before.

What is the retention rate?

📖 Holy grail of the CSM role. How well are you serving your customers and do the customers return / repeat buy your product. Listening for how are things going this quarter, year, last few years with specific retention rates (eg. 78%, 85%, 92%). You want to understand the trend (up/down). Best in class retention rates are approximately 90%+.

What is the most common complaint from customers about your product?

📖 What type of problems are you going to be dealing with and how much of a frustration are these problems with customers? A follow up question is…does the solution require engineering to solve? or how many customer problems require engineering to solve? Engineering is awesome though, they have a core job and it tends not to be fixing the product. You will want to understand the turnaround time for engineering to get involved. The more engineering has to be involved the worse the customer experience because delays are built in to the process. There will always be a product push, an end of quarter need to hit a milestone and that means that you may have to hold on to a steaming bag of problem for weeks or months without a customer solution.

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Yes, your manager and the company (pay, values, etc) are core to evaluating a new job AND as a CS professional, you'll want to have an even deeper understanding of the product.As much as the core components of the opportunity are key to your decision making process - they can change and will change over time - who leads and builds the product, the competition, and the market fit, and ultimately the retention and growth of the business relies on the success of the the product.I've spent the last 5 years evaluating products - understanding their pain points and hiring and working with CS professionals in the analytics and product arena.
Your life as a CSM is significantly easier when you are being supported by a great product, engineering and support teams. You want to evaluate all of these components of your next product, and the business that supports them like you never have before.

Join today!

Can't decide today and would like to hear from me about the latest updates?

Free Guide

How To Prepare For Your Next Interview As A Product-Led CSM

Intro And The New Era

We are coming at this from the SaaS business perspective - software as a service. It’s the Spotify model - pay for what you use and its subscription based. This guide is focused on your ability to evaluate the product and ultimately how your role will feel day-to-day if you are able to get the job. Not ever business you interview for is going to have 90%+ gross retention or 120%+ net dollar retention and that’s OK. You may be early in your career or simply not totally be aware of the impact of these metrics on the overall business. You need to start somewhere and so that’s why I’ve built this free guide for you to nail that next interview!Times have changed for interviews - less in-person and a whole lot more Zoom. Use your technology to make your life easier, especially if you find yourself with many interviews. You will want to ensure you are making a data-informed decision about your next role! This also means that you’ll want to try to build rapport and get transparency from the organization so that you can make a solid decision about your future and how you are a great fit for the organization’s needs. Get ready to ask real questions about the product and business - be comfortable and practice with a friend or simply copy&paste the below questions and read the screen and fill in the blank when you hear the answer.

Why It’s Important To Ask Product Specific Questions

The focus of this section as a product-led CSM is to inquire about the customer experience. I have included a list of 10 questions that really helps you develop an understanding of the customer experience. The customer experience is the #1 way you will understand how your day-to-day job will be outside of any internal leadership challenges of the business. Basically, if the product is great your life tends to be easier and that means you can work on solving different and more interesting problems and generally means your company is probably experiencing high growth of some sort. If the customer’s are finding it challenging to use the product then you twill experience this challenge in your role. You can’t separate the a poor performing product for customers and a poor life for a CSM. The CSM responds to the challenges of the business on the front lines with the customer. This is the most crucial evaluation of the whole process - even if you have the best manager in the world they will not stick around if the product sucks and the organization is challenged with the inability to solve customer pain.

Watch Out For Vanity Metrics

Sometimes the answers to your questions, specifically data points, will sound impactful even though they are not, especially if you are new to product analytics. MAUs are great but not in isolation. Does the product have a leaky bucket? Vanity Metrics are not real for your customer, this is the organization either a) not aware of the falsehoods of these metrics and b) inexperienced with product analytics user behaviour metrics for their product success.

Making A Data Informed Decision

Do you know the answers to all these questions for your current product? Is the grass greener? You will want to run a comparative analysis of these questions or go out and get the answers to the questions so you can properly compare the customer and product experience.

Top 10 Product-Led Questions To Ask At Your Next Interview

1. What is your retention rate?

Holy grail of the CSM role. How well are you serving your customers and do the customers return / repeat buy your product. Best in class retention rates are approximately 90%+.If you want to go deeper on the topic to include expansion you can ask about NDR or Next Dollar Retention. NDR is a crucial and foundational metric for a growing SaaS business with 120%+ marking best in class rates. Ultimately this means that the business is growing and retaining customers at a high rate. These are rare so count yourself lucky if you work for an organization today achieving 120%+ NDR.Listening for... how are things going this quarter, year, last few years with specific retention rates (eg. 78%, 85%, 92%). You want to understand the trend (up/down).Follow up question: How has the product hurt or helped this metric in the past 12 months? This question flows nicely into the next question.

2. What product features from last year did you release that customer’s absolutely love?

This is a game changer for a manager and a CSM. For a CSM you will want to know what you can show off to your customers that really solves their pain so that you can show value and continue to develop a relationship with your customer.

3. What product feature would you deprecate if you were made CPO for the day?

Listening for...
a) how attached/invested the person you are interviewing with is to the product / customer experience and
b) the structure of decisioning at the organization. The latter is about how they first respond to the exercise in holding the power over the product and how this is a keen reflection of how the organization makes decisions about the product roadmap (eg. HIPPO or customer obsessed).

4. What is your customer's #1 complaint about your product?

What type of problems are you going to be dealing with and how much of a frustration are these problems with customers?Follow up question: Does the solution require engineering to solve? or how many customer problems require engineering to solve? Engineering is awesome though, they have a core job and it tends not to be fixing the product. You will want to understand the turnaround time for engineering to get involved. The more engineering has to be involved the worse the customer experience because delays are built in to the process. There will always be a product push, an end of quarter need to hit a milestone and that means that you may have to hold on to a steaming bag of problem for weeks or months without a customer solution.

5. What is your support SLA?

SLA or service level agreement is the #1 metric for Support organizations in SaaS businesses. Best in class.

6. What is your product's North Star metric?

A north star metric helps to drive your company's growth by highlighting a number that best demonstrates how your product is delivering value to customers.Listening for... Revenue is a lagging indicator of success and not a fit for customer value and how an organization can rally around a single metric - plus it is is terribly demotivating to only work for a revenue goal.How is the organization rallying around delivering customer outcomes? There is a maturity curve to having a North Star metric and frankly, there's a lot of organizations operating without this metric. As a product-led CSM it's important you are aware of this topic...

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- what is the support experience like?
- SLA %?
- what do customers say?
- What is your growth rate?
- What’s on the product roadmap?
- What determines the work that product and engineering teams work on?
- a lack of product growth means little excitement or career opportunity growth for csms. how can your business expect to thrive if its not changing to reflect the needs of your customers