How to Break Down Silos While Encouraging Ownership

How can you clarify areas of ownership?

We use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as the guiding framework to provide clarity and empowerment to each of our EPD teams.  Take the Onboarding team as an example. Their primary goal is to reduce Time To Value (TTV) to get customers on board as quickly as possible. They can be very laser-focused on a task that has a tangible, measurable goal that they can achieve. 

Then they think about all the systems they own: from data ingestion to data warehouse integrations and mappings to authentication and authorization and user permissions. All of that is driven by that primary goal of “how do we make this experience as seamless and as frictionless as possible for onboarding customers?” 

The same can be said for the Productivity team. They think a lot about engagement, stickiness, and retention.They ask questions like, “How many people are using a feature on a daily basis? Out of a CS team, how many are in our tool day in and day out? Are they creating notes and tasks? Are they automating playbooks and emails? Are they communicating and collaborating with one another using Catalyst?” 

And for Renewal/Expansion, the team’s primary goal is to provide the insight and intelligence necessary to help a CS leader understand renewal opportunities, account health, process roadblocks, and more. 

After using our platform, the CS leader would be able to tell their management team, “My team was directly responsible for saving X number of customers and renewing Y number of customers. And because of that, our NDR is this and our NPS is that.” This helps Customer Success leaders tell their story, and this is how Catalyst is helping them contribute to their business success. 

What do you think is the biggest challenge for organizations that want to bring CS to the Center?

Take the time to think through “What is core to your business?”  This will help you focus on what is most impactful to your customers, and will guide how you think about your organizational structure to do what’s most important for your business.  Focusing on the customers, and what is core to the business, will help you determine the key success metrics and drive clarity for your organization.  This is something the entire company can rally around, and is not specific to the Engineering, Product and Design organization.

Catalyst’s vision is to bring Customer Success to the center, and so it makes sense for us to align our product teams and engineering workflow towards what’s most important for CS organizations.  So think about what’s core to your business, and create an organizational structure that aligns closely to the key aspects of your business.  

Focusing on what’s important to the business will also lead to a longer, and most sustainable approach to organizational design, and prevent unnecessary re-orgs as roadmaps and product features change and evolve. Having shared goals will lead to better team alignment and a structure for scale that revolves around clarity and ownership.

How do you prevent silos in the organization?

Sometimes, creating full stack teams with full ownership can lead to artificial silos and local maximas - each team is so focused on their areas of responsibility, that they are not looking at what is the most important for the company.  So it’s also important to think about shared goals from a cross-team, cross platform perspective to mitigate silos.

At Catalyst, we’ve started shifting our Engineering, Product and Design organizations towards a “services” paradigm, where teams need to collaborate with other teams, in order to think through API designs and contracts.  For example, the Onboarding team is responsible for the Authentication and Authorization services, which means they will need to work with the Productivity and Renewal/Expansion product teams to build a system for Roles and Capability permissions that meet all of our customer needs.

Additionally, we have created two horizontal cross-platform teams: UI/UX and Infrastructure, that are focused on consistency and common modules and libraries that can be shared across all teams.  The UI/UX platform team focuses on Usability, Page Performance and shared user experience including Navigation, Styleguide, and Layout.  The Infrastructure team focuses on Reliability, and is responsible for our production systems and SLAs.

Taking this up a level, as the leader of our Engineering, Product and Design organization, I also constantly talk to my peers in the Customer Success and Sales organizations.  As a leadership team, we need to model the behavior of collaboration.  We all work towards a common goal, and can’t afford to think or operate in a vacuum.  We have to talk to other teams and understand dependencies and what’s the most important from different perspectives. We encourage cross-team collaboration and avoid isolation, because isolation will lead to a disjointed product experience for our customers. 

There's a couple of other points to make around this topic:

First point is that you have to do a lot of cross-team check-ins. For example, I would ask if an idea makes sense from a product perspective versus a sales perspective. I’d insist on peer-level reviews and work through the details of an idea first, then present it to get everyone’s buy-in. 

Second point is verifying whether or not you’re at a place where you can do what you’re planning. This is both from an architecture and a feature development perspective. There will be a time where your primary focus is getting features out. But you’ll eventually have to start thinking about what things you need to put in place in order to build a runway to make the larger goals happen.