The Adoption Imperative: How Product and Customer Success Co-Own the Customer Journey
Let’s get on the same page - it’s not enough to build great products. Customers need to adopt them, understand them, and get real value from them.
That’s where Product and Customer Success (CS) must team up. Adoption, retention, and expansion aren’t just downstream outcomes – they’re the result of tight collaboration between the people who build the product and the people who ensure it gets used.
In other words: Product owns what gets built.
Customer Success owns whether it sticks.
But both own the outcome.
Onboarding Isn’t Just a CS Problem
First impressions matter. If a customer can’t get up and running quickly, confidence fades fast and it’s incredibly hard to win back.
Product teams may view onboarding as a CS-led effort, but in reality, good onboarding starts with good UX. Clear flows, in-app education, frictionless setup; these are product responsibilities that directly impact how easily CS can do their job.
And when onboarding struggles pop up, it’s often CS who sees the pattern first:
- Customers skipping key steps
- Features going unused
- Setup taking too long
These red flags shouldn’t just live in CS reports – they should trigger product conversations.
Client Health Is a Shared KPI
Most CS teams track some version of customer health: usage trends, NPS, support volume, feature adoption. The challenge is that these metrics often live in dashboards that Product never sees. That’s a missed opportunity.
When Product is looped into these signals, they gain real-time insight into:
- Where customers are getting stuck
- Which features are driving value
- How usage correlates with retention
This data can inform roadmap decisions, backlog prioritization, and even messaging strategy. It also helps Product teams build with customer longevity in mind - not just feature delivery.
Proactive, Not Reactive
Customer Success teams are uniquely positioned to see trouble before it happens.
Maybe a high-value customer hasn’t logged in lately.
Maybe they’ve hit a ceiling with a current feature.
Maybe they’re struggling to get buy-in from their own team.
These are early indicators of risk that Product teams should care deeply about. Why? Because many of these problems are solvable with better UX, more scalable workflows, or smarter defaults.
When CS and PMs meet regularly to review these patterns - especially for strategic accounts - it becomes possible to solve problems before they show up as churn.
Working Together on Expansion
Product teams are often focused on new features and new users. CS, meanwhile, is trying to grow existing relationships. The intersection is expansion.
A customer might be a great candidate for an upsell - but only if the product delivers enough value at their current tier. CS might identify the opportunity, but Product plays a huge role in whether the value is visible and accessible.
That’s where shared planning comes in:
- Building for scale without complexity
- Creating natural upgrade paths
- Equipping CS with product knowledge to have strategic conversations
Expansion isn’t a Sales-only moment. It’s the result of ongoing, intentional product experience.
So What? It’s a Journey, Don’t Go it Alone
Adoption. Retention. Growth. These aren’t “nice-to-haves” tucked into someone’s QBR deck.
They’re the difference between healthy accounts and churned ones; between companies that scale and those that stall. And they’re not just CS problems. They’re Product problems too.
The strongest B2B teams understand that Product and CS don’t just hand off the baton.
They run side-by-side - building, coaching, iterating - so that customers don’t just buy the product…
They stay, grow, and succeed with it.