If you are looking for a more concentrated view of my experience, please see my resumé.
Global Customer Advocacy Manager.
Optimizely
My skills in relationships and organization were noticed by upper management while I was serving as the head of my team, and I was singled out for a unique and new opportunity to fill a brand new position at Optimizely.
One of the important aspects of customer success is to form a community - to get in the room with a customer or establish an online forum and get their feedback on the product they are buying from you and using on a day-to-day basis. With this in mind, the Global Customer Advocacy Manager role was born.
Because of my experience with documentation, process creation, organization, and visualization, I was able to very rapidly create an entire hub of resources for people to find out more information. This included documents listing out processes, best practices, and instructions on how to use certain tools and resources; tables that allowed employees to quickly scan them and determine the mode and make of the connection they were attempting to create; and a myriad of easy to use spreadsheets to take the guesswork and cat herding out of administration.
In addition to these documents, images, etc, I also created channels where interested stakeholders from across the company could join and learn about what was up-and-coming for these projects, discover freshly made assets, and raise suggestions. The channel grew rapidly and included stakeholders from product, marketing, customer success, sales, and more.
This role required me to expand my connections even further beyond than when I had been a manager, since it requires work with regional staff in multiple fronts. It has allowed me to forge better understanding of marketing strategies and practice long distance working with my Australian colleagues.
Though there are other tasks that compose this role, my two most major focuses include:
Global Customer Advisory Boards.
When you sell a platform made up of products that used to be individual companies’ software, you run into inconsistencies of method and structure. To make the CABs most successful, I helped to provide that structure.
The best work is informed work, so I sat in on the boards that I hadn’t been a part of before and observed them. I discussed their setup with those who ran them, and then took what I knew and created a system that bolstered all advisory boards.
Just some of the structure I created includes standardization of number of CAB members per board, a glossary of universal terms to keep us on the same page, a flexible session planning template suitable for all kinds of approaches, quick guides for employees to know if something should be brought to the board or not, attendance tracking tools, reporting dashboards to monitor changes in opportunities and risks for CAB members, brand-approved slideshow decks for interviewing potential candidates, and advance scheduling playbooks to ensure member attendance at meetings.
Worldwide Events.
Partnering together with our marketing teams, I took on overseeing the CS side of our events on a worldwide scale, planning and coordinating for events in the United States, England, Sweden, Germany, and Australia.
Much of my work was learning the ropes, and once I had absorbed lots of good information, I composed a start up kit to help make sure that events were put on with ease and attention to detail. Through this I aimed to make events accessible to CSMs and their customers and to get ahead of the planning process.
Manager of Customer Success.
Optimizely
After my time as a senior at Optimizely, I rose to a management position for the central region team. This was and is a team of talented, established individuals who had previously been under a seasoned manager. However, together with the support of these go-getting individuals, we quickly fell into a system that worked for all of us.
I lead with the pillars of transparency, honesty, sincerity, and most importantly - empathy. I believe that a team is made stronger when all of its individuals feel heard and seen, and feel like they are a part of the changes that happen. My team was made of people first, and that allows me to build rapport and understanding quickly so that we can address the concerns that they have in an environment of trust. This not only helped to boost retention, but it also allowed for good process establishment.
The foundation of a strong company is in its documentation. I have a long history of creating, supporting, and implementing process through documentation. When a question arises, it should become documentation so that anyone asking it from there on out immediately has a resource to depend on. This also allows for employees asking the questions to become quick and educated resources, because they can easily share the documentation that they now know is pertinent.
Together my team at Optimizely handled ~$55M in ARR. My team included 8 people, including 3 seniors. I partnered together with my team to plan strategy, answer questions, cover outages, and keep everyone informed about the latest new at Optimizely. Because my team was across an entire region, the accounts that we handled went from small, mom-and-pop style flower shops up to huge, well-known brands such as Nike.
I kept as communicative as possible and took ample notes on what my team told me about regarding their customers, their satisfaction with their jobs, and their expectations for their careers. I refined various models for successful collaboration and review. I regularly asked for feedback from my team so that I could continue to provide the best work experience possible, because I saw my role as being the CSM for my CSMs!
In addition to the responsibilities and projects listed below in Senior Customer Success Manager (Optimizely), I have lead and worked additional projects to continue to improve Optimizely’s effectiveness as a CS org.
Data Analysis and Refinement.
A company is only as good as its data, and there’s no more complicated source of data than a company in the process of multiple mergers trying to fit everything together. I built formulaic dashboards and reports that help myself and my other region counterparts how we are performing numerically so that we can better understand what practices need to be taken up to make our CSMs - and through them, our customers - truly successful. This included building multiple systems, such as a book of business analyzer that tells us when changes take place on the account, who might be able to take on customers in the case of an individual being out or leaving, what the balance of ARR is per CSM and per team, and how involved the customers are. To supplement this and make it more accessible for my own team, I built a game card system where we process the OKRs that I discussed and set with them as a team (individual OKRs are tracked separately) and displayed their progress towards our group goals. This allowed them to see and correct where they may be falling behind, complete paperwork to boost their scores easily, encourage each other to further their team total, and to showcase their strengths so that they could rely on one another for advice on certain job duties.
QBR Enablement.
A QBR is an important practice for CSMs. It ensures that deep, quality conversations are happening that strengthen the relationship, build additional connections, discover opportunities, and allow for the resolution of pain points. Ensuring that CSMs feel comfortable in presenting is foremost - but alongside that is pinpointing value, having a firm hand in controlling the direction and tone of the meeting, and determining strategy internally and externally for the account. The enablement was engaging, interactive, and flexible - it allowed for CSMs to bring their experience and share with each other while also establishing boundaries and parameters. The program was very popular for its highly interactive nature and has spawned a number of fresh QBR opportunities.
Senior Customer Success Manager.
Optimizely
At Optimizely, I took on a senior position. This has been a great opportunity to expand the skills I had already strengthened as well as expand myself to new lessons and challenges. As a senior, I deal with accounts that were more bigger and/or more uncertain of their experimentation program. For the majority of my first year, I worked to familiarize myself with the tool and the tasks of success management.
This included learning skills that were more associated with sales, which I had not been a part of in the past. I learned how to properly manage a renewal process to ensure that my sales and renewal teams had success and my customers were equipped with the knowledge of what additional resources they could ask for and what direction they may want to plan for with their upcoming year.
Becoming more sales-adjacent also meant that I learned how to read and understand contracts in the context of our product(s), navigate Salesforce to a much greater extent, learn the basics of our packages and what that meant for our customers, and working more closely with account executives and managers.
I’ve continued my skills of schedule coordination and time management, customer empathy, documentation, resource allocation and delegation, and communication regulation in my time as a CSM. I’ve only become more aware of how critical these skills are to customer success, since being aware of time and the customer’s needs are tantamount to my responsibilities.
My book of business at any given time is roughly 30 accounts totaling $4-6M. This book is a mix of high, medium, and low touch accounts. I schedule regular time for checking through all of my accounts to ensure that it hasn’t been more than a couple weeks since I reached out, that I’ve addressed all their questions each week, and that I am looking for appropriate growth opportunities I’ve learned about that week. I continue to take copious notes that are shared with our system.
I’ve taken on additional roles and responsibilities in addition to my senior title as well. I am working with the Vice President of North America Customer Success to examine and expand the comprehension and communication between product and customer success. This is a double barreled project:
Product Enablement.
Enablement is always a complex topic for any company - making sure that people know what the product is, what’s new, and what’s to come. Optimizely rapidly acquired a number of companies in the span of 2-3 years, and this meant an enormous expansion to our product line. The customer success teams are fairly siloed since they were grandfathered in from their previous companies. I scheduled and coordinated with our enablement team to begin preemptive preparations for cross-product alignment across all global CSMs. This meant organizing the training for CSMs in NA, EMEA, and APJ across 5 different product monoliths. My goal was to ensure that this training was provided tactically - before there was significant cross-sell - so that CSMs would be prepared to support new customers regardless of their purchase. I am driving this process continually as we progress, with my current goal being to prepare day-to-day resources that CSMs can access self-paced as it becomes relevant to them.
Customer Advisory Boards (CABs).
The second piece beyond making sure that Customer Success knows our products is making use of the relationship that is already forged between a CSM and a customer to create a cycle of feedback in the form of a CAB. CSMs help scout and manage customers who are suited to the advisory board and also promote new release to them in regular syncs. I’ve been coordinating with product, the customer success org, and executive leadership to put together a team of experts who will be managing and coordinating the CAB efforts. This work has also included revamping documentation, expanding communications, answering chair questions, meeting with branding, and creating and monitoring success metrics for the executive team’s digestion.
Customer Success Engineer.
New Relic
As a Customer Success Engineer (CSE), I was tasked with helping any of our larger scale accounts with onboarding and enablement. This meant being familiar with countless combinations of languages, environments, and configurations. I guided customers from the basics of tool usage and continued on into best practices by assessing their setup and determining what their priorities were and how those could be matched to tools in the New Relic Platform.
An important part of my role as a CSE was relationship management - after all, it is hard to be successful with a customer who you do not have a relationship with. At any given time, I had roughly 10 different clients, which changed each quarter, since CSE services were short-term. This meant I had to be able to forge relationships quickly and effectively.
My strategy for doing so included the following techniques:
Asking open ended questions to understand how the currently use New Relic (NR), what they are most interested to learn about, where they have encountered difficulty in the past (if applicable), and whether there was anything they were unfamiliar with that they wanted information on.
Taking copious notes about the above - after I met with the customer, I would review these notes and analyze the information that I had available to me on their account to find where I may be able to show them additional features that align with their priorities and they may not have known about yet.
Each session, I would leave time to answer any questions that arose during the course of our session, and then I would follow up afterwards with any answers I hadn’t been able to give at the time along with a summary of what we covered to establish a long term resource from our short term engagement.
Taking careful note of concerns that individuals raised and following up with them afterwards to ensure that if I couldn’t address their concerns myself, I got them to a resource who would be able to help them find a solution.
Asking for feedback and reviewing our progress at the end of the enablement so that I could continue to improve my strategies in the future.
This role helped me to truly refine my ability to generate and execute effective strategy. On more than a few occasions, I was brought in to cases with difficult customers expressly for my ability to listen, plan, and enact tactics that made happy customers out of ones previously threatening to leave. Part of the reason I have worked so hard to perfect this ability is because I have a sincere passion for helping others, and that shines through in my work and discussions with others.
As a generalist, I learned a great deal about distributed systems, networking, language configuration, and communication. During this time, I studied AWS practitioning, React, and Salesforce. That said, because each new case brought fresh new ideas and challenges, CSE above all else has been a learning opportunity for me - one that has made me even more passionate about growing and honing the skills I already have in tandem with education on new skills.
Of the members of my team, my survey results were the most frequently filled out, and were always very positive.
In addition to rapidly learning customers, forming relationships, and finding solutions, there were a number of other projects I was involved in as well, which can be found on the Portfolio page.
Business Analyst I / II.
University of Minnesota - College of Science and Engineering Information Technology
Analysis is a particular passion of mine. I enjoy the task of finding a problem, rooting out its issue, making a plan, and collaborating with others to efficiently and effectively create change. In my time as a Business Analyst at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering (CSE-IT), I was tasked with managing six departments and their technological needs.
Because the college IT unit was smaller, I had to do a large amount of the work myself with the limited resources I had available to me. I became well known for my resourcefulness and efficiency in solving problems. I had to be a business analyst, a project manager, an ITIL manager, and technological support for all of my departments, so I had to be adaptable with what I did.
In addition to supporting my departments and managing their first- and third-party technology support, I participated in a number of positions within CSE-IT, including participation in the Project Management Office (PMO) as a project manager and in the Service Management Office (SMO) as the Incident manager, Knowledge manager, and Request manager.
Through the SMO, I wrote, developed, trained, and managed the processes for incidents, knowledge, and requests. I additionally modified the means and ease by which requests and incidents could be submitted as escalated, and reviewed the feedback from these systems. Many forms that previously lacked direction became automated, simple processes under my guidance.
As the knowledge manager, one of my top prerogatives was to reform, redesign, and review all of the documentation across all teams to create a centralized, managed knowledge system. For more details, please see my project portfolio.
I learned a significant amount about ITIL, management, prioritization, and process writing in my time as a BA with CSE-IT. Though it was my intention to stay for a long time, my next position sought me ought and provided many new challenges, opportunities to learn, and more resources. Leaving was a very difficult decision, but I left a legacy of organization and productivity up to the very last minute of my employment there.
Messaging and Identity Services.
University of Minnesota - Office of Information Technology
My passion for organization made Messaging and Identity an ideal first step in my career - my skills matched nicely with the duties of account management, permissions, and Google administration.
I quickly became an invaluable member of my team, having studied our tasks eagerly and enthusiastically, seeking out deeper explanations of system functions and purposes from the next escalation team, Identity and Access Management.
One of the ways I familiarized myself with the topics of the team was by revitalizing the documentation. I spearheaded and lead a project to revamp the documentation we had in place on both the private and public side, including undertaking additional research to fill gaps in previous knowledge, work with sequestered developers who held additional knowledge, and training to understand Knowledge Centered Support (KCS).
Following my studies, I rapidly became the go-to team member for all, including my team leads, upper leadership, and the Identity and Access Management team, who involved me in a number of projects to weigh in on and assist with their duties.
For the Service Desk, I was also a resource that was often called upon to oversee problems, answer questions, and explain complex solutions in an accessible way.
I learned and honed many of my basic skills in this position, but eventually decided to leave over pay dispute and to seek new knowledge.
Previous Experience.
In previous roles I have worked in service desk positions as both a worker and as a team lead. At one point, I was the sole student manager in charge of scheduling and hiring. In addition to my regular shifts, I managed and crafted the schedules of my 90 fellow students. I reviewed, interviewed, and made calls on hiring all of the new staff for the service desk. I also began to study documentation and began to expand on some of the existing works so that my colleagues could be better prepared to troubleshoot and hand off their escalations. I left the position to move on to the tier two Messaging and Identity team, and because of my hard work an initiative was passed to allow students to apply for the lead position and include a pay raise.