Engineering Customer Success with Sunil Mavadia of Cloudbees

**Dan** (0:02)
I know from experience that executing customer success can make or break any business, especially when you're scaling.
Knowing where the customer success journey begins, how to initiate a customer success program, and knowing the right time to bring customers and developers together are the keys to success you'll gain on this episode of Dev Interrupted. My guest, Sunil Mavadia, has been building and growing customer success programs at software companies for over a decade, and is now the Director of Global Architecture at Cloudbees.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:37)
This episode is sponsored by LinearB. Give your dev team the power to improve with team-based metrics, high-risk code alerts, and the world's first project board based on real-time Git activity.
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**Dan** (0:52)
Sunil, thanks for joining us today.

**Sunil Mavadia** (0:55)
Welcome, glad to be here.

**Dan** (0:57)
Awesome, yeah, so happy to have you on the pod today. And I wanna just dive right in to our first topic because we have so many awesome things to talk about today. And what I am seeing in our industry right now, I think one of the biggest problems with engineering organizations today is the lack of customer insight. If I could get my devs closer to the customer, then I can make better decisions. We can implement better features. And therefore, at the end of the day, build a better product. And then that's what everybody wants to do.
What are some effective ways to bring the customer into the engineering department?

**Sunil Mavadia** (1:43)
Excellent question, right? So the biggest issue we see a lot of times, is that a product is developed by engineers without feedback from the field. So I always say, one thing that you really need to do is shorten the feedback loop by having your product management or senior support CS customer success team members, right? Having a regular one-on-one with your customer. Now, what does that do, right? One, it ties together the customer success person with the engineering person or product management person, right?
And the customer at the end says, this is what I'm looking for.
And in direct fashion, the engineering and PM folks can then react to that feedback, right?
Today, you might have the typical handoff from a customer success person to a product manager who then takes it to engineering and then there's that, oh, hey, can you go clarify X, Y and Z with the customer, right? Put them all together, shorten the feedback loop. Have a one-on-one call. Why is that so difficult? It shouldn't be in this day and age, right?
So that's one way. The other thing that I know I've experienced firsthand is really you've got to create technical champions, right? And stay in touch with them. It's not a simple task because one, people move from company to company, you might engage with one person at a specific company and you start building a relationship and they move on. It happens. But the idea is to always identify who those champions are at your customer base and really foster a relationship. You have to stay in touch, keep in touch. Just build a solid foundation where they are comfortable coming to you for anything and everything regarding your product. And last but not least, I think is improve the documentation. This is the documentation that comes from the product side and this way the customer gets what they're needing directly without too much churn. I mean, at the end of the day, customer success, the idea of CS is really to reduce the amount of churn that you have to the company.

**Dan** (4:17)
You bring up a really good point. Why is it so difficult? You think it's just like, hey, let's get on, I'm gonna call the customer. I'm gonna bring the devs on the call. Let's talk about the features. But that doesn't seem to always be happening.
And I actually have an example. We had this great developer, his name was Matt Bachman. This was at the last company I worked with. It was called CloudLock.
And he was a developer. He was super sharp. He was creating a feature. I think it had something to do with finding, we were doing security, finding sensitive information within documents.
And we were having our customer user group. And that's where we flew in all these customers, big time customers to our headquarters. We were doing presentations. And we had Bachman, we used to call him Bachman. We had Bachman do a presentation from a developer standpoint. How is he finding the sensitive information? What's he working on now? What's in beta? What's the features that are coming next? And that was our number one session of the entire user group.