Customer Success (CS) platforms have become indispensable tools for modern CS teams, helping them automate workflows, gain data-driven insights, and align CS strategies with broader business objectives. However, successfully implementing and continuously improving a CS platform isn’t a one-and-done task. It requires meticulous planning, a clear roadmap, and ongoing collaboration among stakeholders.
This article focuses on how Product Owners can build an effective CS platform roadmap—covering everything from getting stakeholder buy-in to creating a cycle of continuous improvement. Whether you’re responsible for the initial configuration or ongoing enhancements, these best practices will ensure your CS platform remains a strategic asset for your organization.
Related Reading: For more on assembling the right team to drive platform success, see our article on Building the Right Team to Succeed With Gainsight.
Why a Roadmap Matters
A roadmap is more than just a list of features; it’s a strategic plan that aligns platform capabilities with your organization’s Customer Success goals. Without a roadmap, teams risk:
- Feature Overload: Deploying too many tools or features without a clear focus, overwhelming end users.
- Misaligned Outcomes: Spending resources on enhancements that don’t support key business objectives.
- Slow Adoption: Launching new capabilities without adequate communication and training, leading to low usage.
A well-structured roadmap provides visibility into planned improvements, clarifies timelines, and aligns teams around the most impactful priorities.
Step 1: Gather Requirements and Align on Vision
Engage with Stakeholders Early
Before anything else, you must understand the pain points, goals, and expectations of everyone who will use or benefit from the CS platform. This includes:
- CS Leaders: to define top-level objectives like churn reduction or expansion goals.
- Frontline CSMs: to gather real-world insights about day-to-day challenges and process inefficiencies.
- Sales & Marketing: to ensure account handoff and pipeline data are integrated smoothly.
- Product Teams: to share user data and integrate product usage metrics.
- Data Teams: to discuss data sourcing, transformation, reliability, and availability to ensure you have the information required for effective CS platform insights.
By conducting interviews, surveys, or workshops, you’ll collect a comprehensive set of requirements that reflect each stakeholder group’s unique perspective.
Define a Shared Vision
Consolidate feedback into a one-page “Platform Vision Statement” that captures:
- Purpose: Why does this platform exist in your organization?
- Value: How will it support overarching business goals?
- Scope: Which major features or workflows are in play?
This Vision Statement acts as a guiding light for future decisions about platform enhancements.
Step 2: Translate Business Goals into Platform Capabilities
Prioritize Use Cases
Not all use cases carry the same weight. Identify the ones that drive the most significant impact on your organization’s goals. For example, if reducing churn is a top priority, focus on capabilities such as:
- Predictive Risk Dashboards
- Health Scoring Models
- Automated Renewal Playbooks
Conversely, if expansion is the main target, look at features that enhance cross-selling opportunities or improve renewal processes.
Map Use Cases to Metrics
Every roadmap item should be tied to measurable metrics. Examples include:
- NPS (Net Promoter Score): Improving the customer experience.
- Renewal and Expansion Rates: Tracking how efficiently you retain and grow revenue.
- Onboarding Time: Reducing friction in the initial stages of the customer lifecycle.
- Support Ticket Volume: Gauging the effectiveness of self-serve resources and knowledge bases.
By mapping roadmap items to specific metrics, you set clear expectations and create a framework for measuring ROI.
Step 3: Develop the Roadmap
Create a Feature Backlog
Organize all requirements and improvement ideas in a feature backlog. This backlog should include details like:
- User Stories: Brief descriptions of the functionality from an end-user perspective (e.g., “As a CSM, I want to see at-a-glance health scores so I can prioritize my outreach”).
- Impact Estimate: A rough measure of how many customers or internal users will benefit.
- Effort Estimate: High-level complexity for each item (e.g., Low, Medium, High).
You don’t necessarily assign formal priorities at this stage—priority and sequencing will depend on the agreed-upon business outcomes and immediate needs that surface from cross-functional discussions.
Timeline and Milestones
Start with “Now, Next, Later”
When you first begin creating your roadmap, a “Now, Next, Later” model can provide a clear, simple framework:
- Now: Items you’re actively working on or will begin soon.
- Next: Enhancements you’ll tackle after completing the current batch.
- Later: Initiatives that are on the horizon but require more planning or alignment.
This model helps stakeholders easily see what’s in progress and what’s in the pipeline without getting bogged down in specific dates or quarters—especially if your team’s velocity is not yet well understood.
Transition to Quarterly Targets
Once the process launches and you gather data on your team’s velocity and overall capacity, you can evolve the roadmap into a quarterly-based approach. The specific focus for each quarter should be driven by business needs, allowing you to flexibly adapt to shifting priorities. It often helps to group related tasks or user stories into epics, which represent larger initiatives that may span multiple sprints or quarters. Here’s an example of how that might look:
- Quarter 1:
- Epic: Establish foundational data flows and basic reporting.
- Initiatives: Resolve immediate data quality issues, implement quick wins for Customer Success Managers, and conduct essential user training.
- Quarter 2:
- Epic: Enhance reporting and integrate key systems.
- Initiatives: Develop advanced reporting dashboards aligned with business KPIs, roll out strategic integrations (e.g., CRM or analytics tools), and refine health scoring models based on early feedback.
- Quarter 3 and Beyond:
- Epic: Scale and automate for higher-level insights.
- Initiatives: Introduce AI-driven features, automate renewal playbooks, and expand into predictive analytics—building on the earlier foundational work and focusing on more sophisticated, high-value capabilities.
By structuring your roadmap in quarterly epics, you can break down ambitious projects into manageable phases, maintain alignment with evolving business objectives, and continuously deliver tangible value to both internal teams and customers.
Step 4: Communicate and Manage Change
Stakeholder Updates
Ongoing communication is crucial for maintaining momentum and alignment. Establish a communication cadence for updates—for example:
- Weekly or Bi-Weekly Syncs: With the internal CS Operations or technology team.
- Monthly Stakeholder Reviews / SteerCo Sessions: Sharing progress against major milestones, soliciting feedback on upcoming priorities, and ensuring executive oversight.
- Quarterly Business Reviews: Showcasing ROI, platform usage metrics, and collecting strategic input for the next quarter.
User Enablement
Even the best roadmap won’t succeed without user adoption. Invest in:
- Training Sessions: Live or recorded tutorials walking through new features and best practices.
- Knowledge Base: Use tools like Confluence to store step-by-step guides, FAQs, and video walkthroughs so users can learn at their own pace.
- Champions Network: A small group of power users or CS ops leads who can train peers, gather feedback, and promote best practices.
Step 5: Measure, Iterate, and Improve
Establish a Feedback Loop
Once new features or workflows go live, gather feedback from end-users. Consider short pulse surveys, Slack channels for feedback, or direct 1:1 check-ins to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
Key Questions:
- Is the feature solving the intended problem?
- What is the adoption rate?
- Are we seeing any ROI improvements in key metrics like renewals or NPS?
Continuous Improvement Cycles
Armed with user feedback and performance data, revisit the roadmap periodically. Some tasks may need to be deprioritized if they’re no longer high-impact; others might become urgent as business needs evolve.
Pro tip: Keep a rolling backlog—once you complete key milestones, add or refine new items based on learnings and shifting priorities.
Best Practices for Product Owners
- Balance Speed and Scalability: While quick wins keep stakeholders happy, ensure the platform architecture can handle future requirements—particularly if your CS team expects rapid growth.
- Champion User Experience: Product Owners should collaborate closely with end-users to ensure the platform remains intuitive and truly helpful. This might mean refining dashboards, customizing workflows, or streamlining data entry fields.
- Maintain Executive Sponsorship: Regularly update executives on progress, successes, and challenges to secure ongoing support for budget, staffing, and resources. A monthly SteerCo session can be an effective forum to present updates and receive executive guidance.
- Leverage Cross-Functional Insights: A CS platform often intersects Sales, Marketing, Finance, Product, Data Teams, and beyond. Encourage collaboration and data-sharing among these teams to maximize value.
- Invest in Training and Documentation: Structured training programs and comprehensive documentation—stored in easily accessible tools like Confluence—accelerate adoption and reduce support overhead.
Conclusion
Building a high-impact roadmap for your Customer Success platform isn’t just about scheduling feature rollouts. It’s a strategic, continuous process that aligns stakeholder needs, organizational goals, and user feedback. As the Product Owner, you hold the critical responsibility of translating business vision into platform capabilities—ensuring that your company maximizes both the immediate and long-term benefits of its CS platform investment.
By taking a structured, communicative, and data-driven approach, you’ll not only keep your stakeholders engaged and informed but also foster a culture of continuous improvement that propels your entire Customer Success organization forward.
