About You
I am a Kiwi based in Sydney, Australia.
I have been in technology for 30 years. I have always worked for US software companies, both enterprises in the form of Oracle, IBM, VMware, and now GitLab and startups such as Tealium and Marketo.
I think of my career as a portfolio rather than a path.
There has been my time in tech, but it’s complemented by 8 years simultaneously in governance roles as a non-executive director, and my time in elite sport with the old endurance adventure along the way.
The lessons learned on the side of a mountain or at the board table complement and strengthen my contribution to tech.
Technology has always fascinated me in terms of the benefits it can provide businesses in innovation and efficiency. That’s what drew me in and holds me in a tech career.
Key Achievements
Taking Tealium from 4 employees in APJ with no customers to 70 employees and 50 customers in 5 years, with a product that did not even have a category when we started.
I have represented NZ 6 times in triathlons and cycled over the highest rideable pass, Thorong La, in the Himalayas.
Currently, I am cycling in Sri Lanka from tip to tip.
Driving Customer Success
The strategy I always return to is customer connection.
No matter what problem you are trying to solve within your business, you should never lose sight of your customer.
Ensuring there is an ongoing dialogue at multiple levels of the business, especially with a set of key stakeholders, will prevent the business from straying too far from customer needs.
Ensure you hear early about issues with the relationship, and often, the customers are the best sources for product development direction.
This dialogue has to be give/get in nature; there is plenty for the vendor in that kind of conversation, but what is in it for the customer?
Also, this is a process that the executive needs to be deeply invested in, to ensure the conversation occurs at all levels of the customer.
What’s Your Take On AI and Customer Success?
Embrace it and educate yourself on how you can use it just as you would any other tool, such as search or analytics.
What Generative AI (Gen AI) can deliver will quickly become table stakes for everyone; the quicker you learn how to value-add to that, the better.
Learn how to use it to speed the generation of foundational content, and then you add your unique insight to this.
Customer Success struggles with scale, and Gen AI has the potential to help accelerate some of the more repetitive, mundane tasks, such as basic success plans.
On those micro-credentials I mentioned earlier, make one prompt engineering, another understanding of what Gen AI is good at and what it should not be used for, and finally, use Gen AI for Creative Ideation.
In terms of how you make your career resilient to the impact of AI, cultivate your uniquely human skills.
Of the three pillars of CS I mentioned earlier, that is Mindset, the leading edge of technical/industry/category.
And for your CS skills, it’s relationship building, commercial conversations, and so on.
Building a Customer-Centric Culture
Customer Success at VMware has a paid and vendor-invested offering.
When I joined the business, the team already had a remarkably strong customer-centric culture due in part to the amount of time they spent with their customers, as the paid offer enabled more time to be spent and for this to be on-site.
Maintaining customer centricity and uniformity, given the size of the customer, was more of the focus.
As they say, what gets measured gets done, so having a uniform metric for customer sentiment, initially NPS and later perspective score, helped detect where there may be an issue with centricity.
It comes down to caring and delivering to the customer outcomes.
So it starts at the beginning of the relationship with understanding what those are and maintaining mutual alignment with those via success plans throughout the relationship.
Ensuring these are shared as customer-centricity must be company-wide.
Here’s what we covered in the 2nd part of our interview:
Team Empowerment
Discover how trust and empowerment are the keys to success in leading diverse teams across 16 countries.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Learn practical tips for effective collaboration by focusing on "What's In It For Me" and building strong customer relationships.
Proactive Customer Engagement
Explore strategies like customer gatherings, benchmarking, and proactive risk reviews to ensure lasting customer success.
Leveraging Technology
Find out how to navigate challenges with customer success tools, productivity tools, and collaborative alignment using OKRs.
Measuring and Iterating - Key Metrics
Simplify success metrics to align with business objectives and proactively manage customer risk.
Continuous Improvement
Dive into building a learning environment for continuous improvement, where diverse views are welcomed.
Advice for Leaders
Gain insights on leading from your current role, building a career portfolio, and valuable advice for personal and professional development.
In The News
Understand the impact of recent layoffs in the Customer Success community and the importance of refining metrics and considering paid offers.
What's Next
Get a glimpse into what the future holds for Catherine in 2024 and her exciting exploration of new opportunities.
Her Hobbies and Recommendations
Explore Catherine’s amazing hobbies, involvement with a non-profit, and recommendations for influential people to follow and podcasts to listen to.
Team Empowerment
Trust is the key to motivation and empowerment.
For me, I am a leader of leaders. They are the specialists in their regions, teams, and products.
My job is to trust them to do that and provide the support and guidance to optimise success in that.
As a virtual team spread across 16 countries, empowerment comes from leading to outcomes, removing the temptation to micromanage (which is impossible with such a diverse team), and enabling the teams to flex to the different environments in which they work.
I believe in building brave spaces where teams operate with radical candour. To openly assess when things go wrong as they will, proactively resolve, and prevent repetition.
All teams in technology companies need to be embedded in ongoing learning.
The WEP Future of Jobs Report 2023 estimates that half of our skills will be disrupted, so ensuring the team is constantly learning is imperative.
Ensuring all the team members have Individual Development Plans, which are reviewed with their leaders quarterly.
15% of their time, i.e. 6 hours per week, is needed for learning to ensure they simply stay current.
This means they need to be scheduling micro-learning daily through podcasts, short YouTube training, etc.
It’s important to keep the team structure and people's careers moving as this is the healthiest, most resilient state for the individual and their employer. Career ladders, Individual development plans, and succession plans need to be used in concert to ensure this fluidity.
SPIFs and ongoing recognition are always useful complements to help with engagement and empowerment.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
“When encouraging collaboration across functions, I tend to rely on the WIIFM principle - What’s In It For Me”
Know your colleagues and their KPIs and ensure that collaboration is driving toward success for everyone.
Regular cadences that progress everyone’s KPI are the most successful.
One of Customer Success's unique values in this collaboration is our relationship with everyone, including a deep knowing of what’s up with the customer.
Recently, the business asked CS to help our customers consume credits that were going unused and expirin,g which was a lost opportunity for our customers and VMware.
It wasn’t until sales goals were aligned that they also came to the table.
When they did, there was a new building of relationship and coming together that had benefits way outside the particular program of work.
How Do You Drive Proactive Customer Engagement?
By providing gatherings (breakfasts or half-day sessions) for the Customers to come together and get unique access to resources and information.
We struggled initially to get these meetings reinstated post-Covid but we persisted, and they returned to a valuable rhythm with our customers.
The cross-customer networking component of these sessions should not be underestimated.
Providing cross-company anonymised benchmarking is another great value add for our customers. Without the vendor brokering this, it is difficult for our customers to understand how they are progressing, especially when it comes to new tech, where industry standards are still being developed.
Ensuring we get our senior executive across a key customer, including regular face-to-face visits, helps if issues do occur, as there are then multiple levels of connection.
We use a Bi-weekly Customer Risk Review process with a series of standardized metrics to get ahead of problems before they become urgent and ensure the right level of executive oversight.
Leveraging Technology
We use Gainsight for Customer Success.
It's a good tool, but it is not designed to cope with the complex structures of our large customers, so there is some insight we lose.
This is a challenge for all of the Customer Success platforms in the market, and there is some freedom in having a simple data structure for the Customer data, but the CS tool does need to map the Customer view held in other source systems to be effective.
A lot of our productivity tools, such as the Customer Risk Dashboard, are internally built and maintained due to the number of source systems we have.
The company uses Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to increase collaborative alignment which we maintain through Workboard.
Measuring and Iterating - Key Metrics
Success is mapped to ARR growth, adoption growth, and increased credit burn, which align directly with overall business objectives.
It is important to boil the metrics down to 2-3 significant ones when reviewing progress with the whole of the business.
There are lots of other metrics that are leading and lagging indicators that need to be reviewed on a weekly or biweekly basis to ensure you are proactively managing your customer risk.
It should include monitoring renewal risk for the current quarter and Q+1, perspective score risk, relative adoption progress, and consumption.
Continuous Improvement
To facilitate continuous improvement with customers, it is key to cultivate a team environment where learning is at the very foundation and where the team worries less about whether they know the answers, but rather comes with their sleeves rolled up to find the solutions.
Given the speed at which things are changing, we want it to be a learning team that invites diverse views with team skills to debrief and reset when things go wrong.
An inclusive, learning environment has three primary conditions.
First, a clear Purpose provides the motivating force that makes it easier for us to work hard to overcome obstacles because we care, or at least we understand how the work we are doing fits into a larger whole and who depends upon us to deliver, because frankly, teamwork is hard and people need motivation to do it.
Second is psychological safety is a belief that it is okay to take interpersonal risks in this group, like admitting a mistake. It is essential for good teamwork. Teamwork is hard, and it won’t always go well. We have to be able to openly process those things together to make progress.
Thirdly, interpersonal skills can be described as emotional intelligence, but often it is just the ability to engage in thoughtful conversations with others.
Check out the work of Dr Amy Edmonson and her recent book, The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.
It’s an interesting perspective on how to change your view of failure to enable learning and continuous improvement.
Her research examines psychological safety and teaming within and between organisations.
I am particularly interested in how leaders enable the learning and collaboration that are vital to performance in a dynamic environment.
Advice for Leaders
Lead from your current role, even as an individual contributor.
For two reasons:
It’s great practice and includes a place to make mistakes where the stakes are low.
Second, that behaviour is seen and will lead to other opportunities.
“When I say lead from your current role, it does not have to be of people as sometimes that’s not viable.
I mean, demonstrate the traits of a leader.”
I mentioned a career portfolio rather than a path earlier.
What I learned from racing Kona taught me a lot about resilience when times get tough.
What I learned around the boardroom table helped me write better business cases.
Whether you are a Mum, a carer, or a golfer, use your whole life experiences to be a better leader.
Check out HBR - Why you should build a Career Portfolio for more details on Career Portfolios.
Your Take On CS Layoffs
The layoffs that have highly impacted the Customer Success community in the past year are a factor of the age of our profession.
We are still quite young and developing our value proposition.
I think we need to get to one metric that Senior Execs and the board care about that signifies our value.
I know there will always be many metrics that capture the state of the customer, but not having refined down to one hurts us when the squeeze comes on, and the business is working out what they can do without.
If I were going to pick a metric, it would probably be NRR.
CS will also likely need to consider paid offers, as VMware has.
Where there is a revenue stream, there is insulation when times are tough, and it helps with headcount allocation, which I think is another area that challenges Customer Success’s growth.
From an individual development lens, I think successful CS professionals need to divide their development evenly across 3 fields:
CS-specific skills
Mindset
And technical/industry/category knowledge.
It is the last field that earns us a seat at the customer table, bringing value to them.
I think today, it is where we are least stron,g and that has also contributed to the impact of the layoffs.
This pressure crucible of layoffs, while hard, is good.
It will strengthen the CS profession for years to come.
Hobbies and Recommendations
Adventuring and racing, mostly on bikes, are part of my life portfolio.
It takes me around the world, tests my limits, and reminds me of my privilege.
I have just joined the board of Brainwave Australia, an NFP focused on families who have children with acquired head injuries. A path my own family has trodden more than once.
People I follow
Dr Kristen Ferguson - author of Head & Heart: The Art of Modern Leadership
Dr. Amy Edmonson - is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. She is the author of The Fearless Organization and The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.
Dr Ben Hamer - Futurist who comments on the future of work, keynote speaker, and author of The Kickass Career: How to succeed in the future of work, now
Podcast I recommend:
Rethink Moments with Rachel Botsman
Brene Brown's Dare to Lead (this is no longer being released but is still available on Spotify and is highly useful).