177: Fireside with Chris Taylor

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 177 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today I welcome Chris Taylor for a fireside chat. I'd like to welcome back to the podcast today, Chris Taylor. Chris, it's been a while, but it's lovely to have you back again, this time for a fireside. First of all, let's have a quick check-in with how are you doing in 2021? It's um I'm not sure where the year is going, but it's just been a bit crazy so far. Um, and then once you've told me how you are, then tell me what you'd like to talk about.

Chris Taylor: 0:58

Okay, cool. Um, yeah, I'm doing okay, I must say. Uh I'm lucky enough to have been able to buy my own house last year. So irrespective of lockdown, I've been able to spend a lot of time doing house stuff, which is nice. Um, so yeah, that's good. Also can't believe it's already March. Where has that time gone? It's going to be summer before we know it, um, which I'm really looking forward to. It'd be nice to get out of the house a bit, do some walks and stuff. Um, yeah. In terms of what we can talk about, um, start of this year, I took over. Well, we have a team at Tite called Consulting, um, which is our version of customer success. Um, they came into my team. I've got a new role now, head of customer operations where I used to be, customer support manager. So I've not only got support, I've got customer success now, technical documentation and content as well. So we can talk about that.

Charlotte Ward: 1:52

That'd be awesome. Taking on sort of related but different business functions and expanding that sort of customer, that customer uh remit, right? So so how did this start then? Where did I mean obviously you were doing very well, they loved you, they said, Chris, look after more stuff. Is that how it went?

Chris Taylor: 2:14

Pretty much, um, essentially. Uh well, uh as customer support manager, I was the first person to come and work at like in a customer-facing kind of function. Um, we had consulting engineers at that point, but they were kind of dotted into commercial people or in some cases technical directors. It was kind of um split out amongst various folks. I wrote a proposal back in May of 2020 to essentially bring the two teams under one umbrella so we could benefit from sharing our processes, all of our assets, content, documentation, etc. etc. And the idea of the long run is to get kind of mini pods working in each region. So you'd have a success engineer tagged to a support engineer sharing the same group of client accounts where possible, um, so that they work more collaboratively as two separate functions together, you know.

Charlotte Ward: 3:06

I really like that idea. I came across, I think it's prodpad doing a similar thing on maybe a slightly smaller scale because they're a bit uh a bit earlier stage. But yeah, sorry, prodpad if I've I've got that wrong, but I think but they have that like really close alignment between success and actually in their in their case, success support and product, which makes sense given given their platform, right?

Chris Taylor: 3:32

Yeah, I think um I was kind of inspired by SUSE, they're an open source technology company. I saw their CEO, her name's Melissa Di Donato, speaking at a um like a venture capital event, and she was talking about her commercial organization and customer success, how they operate as pods. So I kind of took a bit of inspiration from that. Um, alongside it, we've got a commercial leader within Tyke, who's our VP of uh Global Sales, who's implementing a similar model in commercial. So you've got a pod for new business, a pod for account management, and they all kind of piece together with the customer ones that we're going to eventually get to. I think we're in a position now where we're just starting the ramp up on headcount so we can make them possible. But that's a long-term ambition for it anyway. Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 4:18

It does need a minimum headcount, doesn't it, to be able to split the functions across geographies like that, but then in that way that kind of makes sense so that you have a balance in each of those teams of all of those business functions.

Chris Taylor: 4:32

Yeah, and you're growing each region at a different pace. So while we have this overarching vision for what these functions might look like in a year, um, each region. So we've got APAC, EMEA, and Americas, they're going to grow at different paces, different times. So planning recruitment is a bit of a it's kind of what I'm doing predominantly throughout the last couple of months is recruitment planning, headcount planning, um, all of that kind of stuff. And then we've recruited in a couple of new leaders. So we've got a new support manager um to lead that team. We've hired a customer engineering architect um who will be running the consulting customer success teams, um, which is really awesome. And we're just recruiting now for a customer education lead to run our content and documentation functions. So lots going on.

Charlotte Ward: 5:16

That that sounds great. So I I think I'd quite like to explore a couple of angles with you. First of all, I'm super interested how that um how the just operationally, the line management and the functional management of those and the geographic um uh kind of management of those pods breaks down. Um but also um, you know, specifically like talking about that balance of skills and those different roles in each of the pods and how you personally have found taking on these different business functions, although you're forming this this you're taking on the that remit as part of I I I guess this this restructuring. Um how you personally have found taking on business functions podded or otherwise with like completely different measures of success and completely different uh uh KPIs, I guess, and keep completely different um frankly, personalities and and approaches to doing the work, right?

Chris Taylor: 6:15

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I'll touch on geography and line management and stuff like that initially. So currently we we manage them as separate teams still. So we've got uh customer operations, which which includes support, success, technical content, and you've got a skill set line manager for each. So we've got uh the customer engineering architect leading the consulting and customer success teams, we've got a support manager leading the support team, etc. etc. Um, so right now it's I'm I manage the leaders of those departments, um, and they they are managing the teams directly. We're quite small still. So we're in our growth phase really this year, where it's gonna ramp up and we're gonna have to start thinking about geographical management. But I think in the long term, we'll probably end up with um like an operational manager in each region that we have to manage uh the incoming workload ticketing, customer success bookings, that kind of stuff. And then we will um still have our skill set leaders who build the practice of those departments. So we will have um his name's Gregor running customer success and building all the assets process, et cetera, but in conjunction with like a regional manager, and that's how they manage the day-to-day workload. So you've kind of got a strategic leader owning the practice of customer success, customer support, and then you've got a tactical leader managing the day-to-day workload. That's how I kind of envision it down the line. Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 7:45

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense because they're they're two quite different uh takes on the work anyway. Absolutely. So let's talk about you then. How have you found this journey taking on? I mean, success is is the obvious and most close, closely aligned, I think, and it's the biggest next step after and outside of support leadership, isn't it? We often move into success next or experience, I guess, to a degree. But for you, that's been specifically success. How have you found that?

Chris Taylor: 8:14

I really like customer success. Um, I like customer support as well, don't get me wrong. I've been there for a long time. I find customer support to be very reactive, right, compared to success being proactive. And I really like that proactive nature of it. So, how have I found it? Good. I've really enjoyed it. Obviously, we've had some teething problems, growing pains. We've had to recruit in a new leader straight away for the team. Um, and we're just about starting to get into our flow of how we work together and that kind of stuff. I think there's more work to be done on bringing the success and support teams into closer alignment and again with the product team, um, which is all kind of ongoing work at the moment. Me personally, um, I am I'm pretty au fa with data and numbers. So that was a big part of my first couple of months looking into what data do we have on the success operations, what do we need to put together? I've spent a lot of time uh sort of sanitizing our HubSpot, our Zendesk, um, everywhere that customer success operates, so that we have a nice set of KPIs. I'm glad to say that now we have a regular set of KPIs for each team that we can report on monthly. So a lot of data work, um, a lot of new people to manage. So that was interest, that's been interesting from like a time management perspective mostly, because you know, I've gone from four to 10 to 12, whatever it may be. Um so that's been interesting. I think um we've been in a kind of uh prepping planning phase for the first couple of months while we get all of our stuff together, and now it's really gonna start to ramp up. So in a couple of months we might repeat this conversation and I'll be able to give you a fuller picture.

Charlotte Ward: 9:58

Well, I would I would love you to come back and and let's let's cover the next two months. Um how have you found you talked about you know figuring out what data you had available? Um have you kept the metrics sets quite distinct and separate? And do you do you see that is going to be the case going forward if you have?

Chris Taylor: 10:23

Um right now there's a couple of shared KPIs and a couple of individual ones for teams. Um so for example, net promoter score will be across both both organizations, so you support and success. Um, but then there's specific things for type. So how quickly do we get our users into production with the product? That's the responsibility of a consulting because customer success engineer. Um, so that's something they would only be targeted on. And then um, we've devised like a technical health score for all of our accounts. That's for the customer success team. They also have a shared KPI with commercial on renewals. Um, so as a team, we own all of them, but separate pots will influence certain metrics, you know.

Charlotte Ward: 11:10

Do you imagine closer alignment beyond the geographic for these two business functions over time? Or do you think that they will, by their very nature, do you think that proactive reactive split will will always remain? I ask because I I'm I'm aware of other organizations out there that effectively treat a customer as a single team. And it's a it's a model I sort of I think I quite like in that there's no differentiation between providing support and enabling success for your customers.

Chris Taylor: 11:43

Yeah, I'm in two, I'm in two minds about it. I think I see the benefit very clearly, but I think it's all to do with how technical the platform is, right? Because of ours is so in-depth, it's an infrastructure component. Um, a lot of the time our success engineers need to be people who can really understand that infrastructure, go to client sites, maybe install it for them, blah, blah, blah. Whereas support, it tends to be more queries around um how do I configure it's more about our product rather than the environment it sits in, right? So I think in terms of a we won't merge the teams, you won't see success engineers um doing support tickets really regularly. They'll get involved if it's like a bug or a feature that their client wants, so they're aware of the full picture. Um, but how they will align is let's say we've got a pod which is a success engineer and a support engineer, um, they would have a group of accounts, and you can say, for this pod, this is your NPS score based on the average of your customers. And that's how we can kind of bring them together around a metric and say, okay, this support engineer, this customer success engineer have an NPS score of 35. What clients do we need to look at? What plans do we need to make? How do we uplift support experiences for these people? Blah, blah, blah. And that's how we'll align them.

Charlotte Ward: 13:02

That makes sense. They're they're working on success of customers together, but in different ways. Yeah, a finite group of customers. That makes sense. So personally, then, what have you found a challenge of the last couple of months, would you say?

Chris Taylor: 13:17

Uh, time management for sure. Um, I have teams in Singapore, um, Atlanta, Texas, elsewhere in the UK, loads of people around Europe. So it's it's just getting to speak to everyone and stuff. And then I think it's just prioritization. So I've got a JIRA where I plan all of our team workload. Um, we've got individual epics for like support, success, individual people, uh, documentation processes, data, whatever. So organizing all of that has been the bulk of my time in the last month or so. Um, and it's just what do we go with first? What are the quickest wins, right? So clearing some quick wins, picking our strategic priorities for the next three to six months, uh, recruiting, a lot of recruiting, and that is very time consuming. Um, so yeah, and really understanding more of the customer success department, because they they've been a bit of a an enigma to me. I don't I I've never sat on their calls, sort of listened to how they work and what they're up to. Um so a lot of that, getting to understand stuff from their perspective where I might have a different view of things, you know.

Charlotte Ward: 14:29

I was uh I was smiling to myself there because I too oper my my major challenges are just time management. Like just I I have people in Siberia to the west coast of the US, um, which is the same similar challenge to you. And uh and JIRA, JIRA management of ops, it's where I spend a lot of my time. Uh that's where we track everything operationally from our OKRs to our post-mortems and SLAs and everything else. You and I must get together and share and like do a JIRA comparison at some point.

Chris Taylor: 15:04

I was just thinking I I've got to see that because um I've only recently started using Jira, but because we're a remote distributed global team, it's such an efficient way of tracking stuff. And you can put on your Jira tickets how long each thing is taking, so we can start to get numbers for what's can time track against it.

Charlotte Ward: 15:22

You can do all yeah, we time track against our JIRAs. It's it's it's heaven and hell all mixed into one. I'm one of those people who loves Jira and hates it.

Chris Taylor: 15:31

It's also a nice entry point for other teams to make requests of us, right? So I I find that really useful. Any new clients we get, we get a JIRA ticket for. It's such an efficient way to manage remote operations, I think.

Charlotte Ward: 15:44

It really is, it really is. And um, I I will I have to ask you, have you set up a next gen project or a classic project?

Chris Taylor: 15:52

Classic, yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 15:53

Good, good choice, good choice. We struggled with next gen and we outgrew it very quickly.

Chris Taylor: 15:59

Yeah, my I have about I think I've got 10 to 12 epics in there, and we've got about 300 tasks overall.

Charlotte Ward: 16:07

Uh I think what I love about what I yeah, exactly. What I love about the classic is the ability to have different boards. So we so we run, we run our we have um like a now board, which is our kind of today what you need to know. We have like I'm just gonna deep dive into JIRA for the next 20 minutes. I'm I I will not bore our audience with it, and I'm I will show you for real at some point, but but just to give you a flavor. So we've got our now, we've got we we have our day-to-day ops, we have our OKRs, we have um our content management on there, so knowledge management stuff, we have SLAs on a separate board, um, and now just adding in onboarding as well. So we're onboarding new engineers and have template onboarding plans in JIRA. It's brilliant. I love it.

Chris Taylor: 16:53

See, we're using loads of disparate tools for that. We have Trello for onboarding, um, OKRs are done in the differences, and blah, blah, blah. As much of that that I can centralize. I mean, don't R OKR for, I don't know if I should say this, but I'm getting R OKR for Q2 is to sort of standardize our company information internally and our own knowledge and wikis and how we create organizational memory, right? So the bulk of every team is moving to Confluence. We're gonna have confluence spaces with all of our process, et cetera. And I think a part of that should be each team has a Jira of some description. I just even if I was kind of working in ops or marketing, I think as a remote business, it's really, really powerful. Um, I love it, yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 17:34

It really is. Um, I we uh we've been time tracking and support. One of the things that I did within the first month of joining Snowplow is to implement time tracking for my team. And uh we've since rolled out across the company, and uh we're now time tracking in a lot of teams across Snowplow. And um I introduced as part of the time tracking working group that I was on, I introduced our finance, um our head of finance to JIRA, and we ran we ran the time tracking project through Jira. She she was running that, and and it was just like it was delightful to see somebody who just assumed this was a software tool, kind of get really excited about it, you know.

Chris Taylor: 18:15

That's that's for sure, because I'm not I I'm not technical in in that regard. It's a perfect project management tool for distributed teams. I mean, I feel like we're doing a JIRA advertisement now, so we might need to stop, you know.

Charlotte Ward: 18:27

So I need to say I I need to I need to just reiterate every now and then that I really hate Jira because I really do, because it is complex. But I think I think it is it's a it's a dual-edged sword, isn't it? I think it it's so complex, but that complexity gives you the flexibility, yeah. And finding the balance and and and building the skills to overcome the complexity to get you to the flexibility is kind of where it starts to become really powerful.

Chris Taylor: 18:54

Yeah, and if you invest in it and invest the time, it will pay off. Um just from my perspective, I was running even even when I just had support, I was running most of our projects on a trailer board or a Google Doc, or here's a spreadsheet, and do something about it. Now we've actually identified I I'm not sending out things on a tangent, everything is more structured. My team are very, I hope, grateful for it because I'm not so chaotic. Um I I think it's really powerful. I like it a lot.

Charlotte Ward: 19:24

Yeah, yeah. Um, and I find just speaking to back to what I just said and and your experience of it as well, that it's if you the more you can layer in there and the more business functions buy into it, the more powerful it becomes. Because it it's not then even just another form of a black box that you know uh an engineering team or a support team or whatever functions inside. I will always link out. If I'm emailing someone and say, Oh, here's the project, here's the thing we're working on, I'll I'll include the link to the A card that's tracking it, right? Um, because it's just like that constant, it's the point is it's there and it's visible. And although you're using it very actively inside your business function, there's no reason why it doesn't surface that visibility to the rest of the organization either.

Chris Taylor: 20:15

Yeah, and that's the key challenge in a remote business. How do other departments know what you're you're up to? How can they know what they can contribute to? Or if a decision's been made, how how did we come about making that decision, right? So I think that's a lot of the benefit of Jira, Confluence, et cetera, and these kind of tools. Um, it's certainly something we're very focused on here. Yeah. And I remember actually from when I worked in the call centers, um, we used to have a similar system of cues. So we'd cue stuff to other teams, like we might send something to product, and that's how you get the visibility over it. I think at a startup, when you're quite low on numbers, it's kind of easy to just slack someone or send someone a direct message. But this Jira confluence, these kind of tools help set you up for scale for sure.

Charlotte Ward: 21:01

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So the final thing we seem to have completely gone off on a Jira tangent, but uh I've enjoyed that immensely. Um nonetheless, I do think we should round out on what we promised at the start, which is some insights on taking on taking on other business functions, particularly success in this case. Um we've talked about some of the things that you've done operationally in the first couple of months and and the things you found difficult. I'm gonna put you on the spot and ask you what's your one piece of advice for anyone making a move into this area, taking on their first leadership of another business function beyond support, particularly success. What would you advise?

Chris Taylor: 21:46

First of all, read everything you can get your hands on. Um, not just online, like Google or whatever, um, but internally. How have the team been operating? What assets do they have? Understand the environment that they're operating in now. I think as well, as a support leader going into it, I had a lot of preconceived notions about what the team were doing or um how they were kind of operating and working. Uh, just scrub all of that straight off the bat, completely forget all your preconceived uh perceptions and uh take it as a clean slate. Meet with the people, understand how they're operating and they're working, build that dialogue and get get your perceptions in order. I think that's key. Um beyond that, I think it's just uh everything when I first move into a a new department or team, my first point of cool is always look at the data and what assets we have. So that's my my first thing to do. But also, yeah, don't don't go in with uh an idea of what you think it should be.

Charlotte Ward: 22:46

Um yeah, yeah, look at the data. I and uh I think through data, understand, right? I think you can get a lot from conversations. And I know most leaders I've spoken to would advocate for spending a lot of time with the team, and I think that that is massively important, but I think that that also that focusing just on that perhaps defocuses you away from the data, which actually is another informant, isn't it?

Chris Taylor: 23:16

Yeah, and you have to you have to balance that very carefully. I think as you uh progress and you get more departments, it becomes uh more difficult to spend as much time with everyone that you would need to, right? So if it's rooted in data, um that's always a great starting point and the people stuff can follow, I guess.

Charlotte Ward: 23:36

It's just increasing levels of of increasing levels of abstraction, really. And I think that that goes for both the people, if you're not directly having one-to-ons with all of the in all of the ICs on your team, but you're managing managers. Um, but similar, similarly with data, you have to trust other people's interpretation of deep dive data and and and draw conclusions based on that next level abstraction, don't you?

Chris Taylor: 24:01

Yeah, for sure.

Charlotte Ward: 24:03

It's a whole new set of skills.

Chris Taylor: 24:05

Indeed. Data analysis, do it at school. That's what my recommendation.

Charlotte Ward: 24:12

Okay, I will take that as your parting parting piece of advice. Data analysis, do it at school. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one seven seven for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.