Ever launched a feature only to find customers barely use it—while others threaten to leave over unseen issues? PMs can learn from CS teams who fight daily to retain reve
Ever spent weeks perfecting a product release only to discover customers aren't using the feature you prioritized? Meanwhile, other customers are threatening to leave over issues that never made it to your roadmap? You're not alone. While project managers focus on delivery timelines, customer success teams are fighting daily battles to keep revenue from walking out the door – and they have insights that could transform your prioritization process.
To understand how customer success operates at scale and what project managers can learn from their approach, we spoke with Dave Epperly, who directs a CS team that oversees thousands of accounts in the healthcare SaaS sector. His perspective reveals why bridging the gap between project management and customer success might be the key to building products that truly deliver value.
For most project managers, success means delivering on time and within scope. But for customer success teams, the metrics look different. "Each of our CSMs owns a book of business that potentially adds up to millions in annual revenue," Epperly explains. "We expect them to run that book like a business and they are compensated on the retention and expansion within that book of business."
This creates a fundamentally different approach to prioritization. While project teams might focus on completing features according to the roadmap, CS teams are laser-focused on preventing churn and driving expansion revenue – which means delivering immediate value to customers
What makes this challenging? Scale. “In many organizations, Customer Success teams supporting large account volumes often work across borders, languages, and time zones. That dynamic, paired with lean staffing models, can create unique prioritization challenges and communication gaps that aren’t always visible to product or engineering teams.”
Quick Win: At your next roadmap planning session, invite a customer success leader to share their retention metrics by product area. Ask specifically which features are most likely to drive renewals versus which issues are causing customers to consider leaving.
Customer success teams face unique challenges that directly impact how product and project decisions should be made, but these insights often don't make it to the right ears.
"We have bugs, issues, product enhancement requests and usability concerns all coming at us from the customer side," Epperly explains. “On the inside of the organization, customer signals tend to be scattered across teams and tools: support tickets in one system, product feedback in another, and roadmap priorities in a third, etc. This fragmentation makes it difficult to align around a unified customer reality.”
The result? Critical customer feedback is likewise fragmented across tools, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture when prioritizing work.
“Even mature businesses face issues with data integrity within their CRMs and within fragmented billing systems. If you can't trust that foundational level data, there's no way to automate and scale with confidence in those cases."
Even with AI-powered tools designed to capture every customer signal—calls, tickets, sentiment, usage—the vision of a unified customer view often remains just that: a vision. As Epperly points out, "Currently, everything is piecemeal. Every vendor is putting AI into their system, and so you have to sort of tie it together to make it make sense." The promise of these tools often falls short when it comes to providing a unified view of customers.
Quick Win: Start small by creating a simple shared view of customer issues. Export your top support tickets or customer requests from your CS platform once a week and share them alongside corresponding Jira tickets in a spreadsheet. This basic connection helps both teams see the same priorities without requiring complex integrations.
Perhaps most frustrating for many CS teams is their limited ability to influence product decisions – despite being directly responsible for revenue retention.
“Over time, traditional go-to-market functions like Sales and Marketing have built strong muscles for influencing buying and roadmap decisions. Customer Success, while increasingly central to long-term revenue, often has to work harder to justify similar investments—despite being closest to the customers who drive retention and expansion.”
This disconnect can create a perverse incentive structure where the voice of existing customers often gets drowned out by the pursuit of new logos.
"CS has kind of gained ground over the last couple of years," Epperly notes, "but there are still a ton of old-school sales organizations out there running these businesses that are still heavily oriented around acquisition KPIs, even as the economics of SaaS demand a stronger focus on retention and lifetime value.”
For project managers looking to build truly valuable products, understanding how customer success teams operate can provide critical insights.
For project managers accustomed to focusing on delivery efficiency, it's crucial to understand that customer retention is more than just a CS metric – it's a fundamental business driver.
"It's really about customer acquisition costs because it's around five to eight times more expensive to acquire than it is to retain," Epperly notes. When project teams factor this economic reality into their prioritization, seemingly small bug fixes or usability improvements can suddenly become much more valuable than new features.
The implications extend to how we measure product success. "Every CS leader knows this...but in many organizations it remains an uphill battle for CS to influence roadmap and buying decisions" Epperly explains. "Meanwhile, Sales and Marketing stacks (top of funnel) still tend to be huge. CS tends to take a more scrappy approach by necessity and is therefore a fruitful place for PMs to partner and innovate.”
How can project managers apply these insights to create better products and happier customers? Epperly's experience offers several practical approaches.
While tools and data are important, Epperly emphasizes that human relationships remain critical: "There's also an element of 'tell me a story' in this. It's not just the data – make it real for me."
For project managers, this means creating space for customer stories alongside feature specifications. When engineering teams understand how real users struggle with their product – not just in abstract requirements but in concrete scenarios – priorities often shift.
Quick Win: Schedule regular "customer story time" sessions where CS shares recordings or written accounts of customer pain points related to upcoming project priorities. Aim to include at least one real example in every sprint planning session.
For many project teams, the pressure to deliver creates another challenge that directly impacts CS teams. "Rapid release cycles keep us agile and also place significant demands on enablement. Without a clear line of sight into what’s changing and why, CS teams struggle to keep customers informed and confident.”
This weekly release cadence creates a significant burden for CS teams who need to stay current with product changes while supporting customers. Without proper enablement, they struggle to effectively communicate these changes to customers – potentially leading to confusion, support issues, and ultimately, churn.
Project managers can improve this situation by ensuring CS teams receive proper training and documentation before releases. Involving CS in pre-release planning not only prepares them better but also provides valuable input on how changes will impact customers.
Quick Win: Create a "CS readiness checklist" for each release that includes documentation, training sessions, and identified potential customer impact areas. Schedule a brief enablement session at least three days before each release to give CS teams time to prepare.
The future of effective product development lies in creating better alignment between project objectives and customer outcomes. This means establishing shared metrics that bridge the traditional divides.
"The reality is that if you don't have a great data-backed argument, product is hand-tied to do what the roadmap says. However, by aligning on cross-functional metrics tied to retention and expansion, PMs and CS leaders can build together and win together." Epperly explains.
Breaking this cycle requires leadership to create shared incentives and metrics that unite project delivery with customer outcomes.
For project managers ready to take this leap, Epperly's heat map approach offers a valuable starting point: visualize product issues weighted by customer impact, prioritize fixes that affect multiple customers or significant revenue, and partner with CS to tell compelling stories that make the data real.
The companies that master this alignment will not only deliver on time but will build products that customers eagerly renew and expand – creating sustainable growth that benefits everyone involved.
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