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Josh Schachter:
Hey, everybody, and welcome to this episode of Unchurned. I’m Josh Schechter here with Christy Feltorusso. And today, we’re talking to Michael Goetz. Michael is the vice president of customer success strategy at GitHub. He’s had that role for just over six months now, and before that, he was the vice president of customer outcomes. So I’m very excited because we get, like, the leader in outcomes and strategy, you know, tactical and strategic. So, perfect. Michael, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Michael Goetz:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Alright, Josh. Can can I can I lead in quick?

Josh Schachter:
Go.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Because I have a very specific so, Michael, you have the most intentional titles of any customer success professional I have come across. So can you please help me understand how did we get there at GitHub? Because you went from vice president of customer outcomes, again, very specific, to vice president of customer success strategy, which sometimes you see those things kinda wrapped under the generic title of vice president of customer success. Yeah. But I I need to understand the intentionality behind these and the work that you’re doing.

Michael Goetz:
No. No. It’s a it’s a great question. It’s actually interesting. There’s there’s a slightly interesting story to this. So when I joined, a little over four and a half years ago at at GitHub, I was hired as, VP of customer success. Then I reported to a VP of customer success and support. And so as I was coming in, I was saying, you know, it seems kinda strange that you would have two different levels of leadership with the same name.

Michael Goetz:
And, realistically, if we wanted customer support to embody the entirety of what we do to help make customers successful, you know, my boss should just be the VP of customer support, customer success, and then I need to come up with a new name. Right? And, many many companies ago, I became really hyper focused on the idea of driving the outcomes that customers want versus, you know, really focusing on, like, am I driving renewals? Am I driving adoption? And I used to have this big mantra about what is the business outcome the customer is looking for, and if we could deliver on that, we’ll be successful. So I’d used customer outcomes before. I ended up being the VP of customer outcomes, focusing on really trying to make sure that we are spending all of our energy on getting to the outcomes customers the desired outcomes customers really look for. Now fast forward to about six months ago, well, it’s probably a little bit over a year ago now. Again, I’ve scaled tremendously even since I’ve been here. And, you know, we got into that same problem where the delivery organizations were both trying to deliver and drive strategy to scale and drive strategy and drive repeatability and know, develop offerings and all those pieces, and it just became too much and very fragmented. And so working with my with my boss, we, you know, we decided to to consolidate across all the different parts of customer success.

Michael Goetz:
The things that would be, more strategic or cross functional nature. So you think about, like, support and services offerings, anything about, you know, adoption frameworks and offerings or repeatability, some specialists sort of, like, cross functional technical specialist team, and pull those all together. And that’s where we came up with the customer success strategy organization name. So that’s kinda how that’s the the navigated road how we got there.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Josh, can I can I double down?

Josh Schachter:
No. I mean, I love it. You get to skip the the tactical and just go straight to the fun strategic thinking.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, I mean, I just

Josh Schachter:
I just Kudos to you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I just have a lot of I have so many questions, Michael. Sure. Me selfishly. They’re all selfish too. Right. Okay. So I actually post this yeah. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay, Josh. Relax. So I did a post this morning talking about the fact that most customer success managers basically don’t really understand the business side of their customers enough to articulate a measurable goal that is tied to their support services, you know, software, whatever. And that’s not uncommon. Right? You ask customer success managers almost all the time, could you identify a measurable goal for every single one of your customers? And usually, the answer is no. Right? Even the most tenured, you know, experienced senior executive individual contributors. How did you get your team to operationalize the work they did around outcomes? And how did you incentivize the right behavior? How did you help your customers articulate their goals? Because I feel like that’s also a blocker for folks. You show up to these meetings very well intentioned to have a conversation around goals and outcomes, and your customers are giving you bupkis.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And so a lot of these folks don’t know how to how to massage that into something meaningful and measurable. So can you can you walk me through how you built a business around that?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Kristy, I just wanna say that this was a really good question.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Thank you.

Michael Goetz:
I it was it was

Kristi Faltorusso:
It was selfish. I I appreciate you saying that.

Michael Goetz:
It it made me feel good about, like, we we’re clearly doing everything right. We’ve nailed this, and and that it’s honestly, it’s it’s a work in progress. Right? I would say we we are doing better than we were, and we still have a long way to go in terms of really getting to that, understanding and anchoring our conversations around what the business outcomes and the challenges customers have. Some of this has to do with, like, we don’t necessarily know sometimes when the customer comes out of the sales process. We didn’t get a lot of context, and so we have to go and and do a bunch of discovery. Other times, we have a much more robust sort of set of information to deal with, and we kinda know the reason they came to GitHub was because of x, y, and z. But, you know, it I think it’s a challenge for customer success managers because the thing about most of them are incented or measured. It’s about renewal rates.

Michael Goetz:
It’s about adoption rates. It’s about, it’s about CSAT, NPS. Right? And all those have to do with, like, the business’s perspective of how well the customer is doing. So you don’t come from a place of, like, what are you trying to do? Right? And so what I try to impart upon people is is that, yes, it’s important to measure those as business metrics, but the best thing you can do when talking to a customer is just understand what they’re trying to do and help them solve that problem in a very consultative manner. Sometimes, ideally, you’ve aligned in the sales process too that your product helps solve those problems. So that’s a natural flow. But it’s okay also to say, well, we can help you with two thirds of that problem, but I also know about these other maybe tools or something else is gonna actually get there. And I’ve found that customers are much more appreciative and much more willing to do the hard work that you need them to do, championing the software inside of their organization, really partnering with you to help drive adoption through the organization when they feel like you’re focused on making their outcomes successful.

Michael Goetz:
So if you can do that, you’ll get a lot of help internally that’ll just help you scale as a CSM, and drive more impact without having to go do it all yourself.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Well, I gotta go tactical for a second because even the best folks that can get good answers to these questions Yeah. The tracking of it is trash.

Michael Goetz:
Yep.

Kristi Faltorusso:
How are you tracking these things with your customers so that at scale, as an organization, you can see, like, 80% of our customers have a good qualified goal identified, and they are progressing towards it. Right? Because it’s not even just the identification. It’s, like, the how are we measuring against it in a scalable way to, like, know if the business is on track if that’s your entire reason for existing.

Michael Goetz:
Yeah. We we, we’re we’re going through another iteration to see if we can do this a different way because it I would say it’s about marginally successful the way we’re doing it now. We had historically tried to we went the original route of let’s just make one unified success plan. Give me your objectives, and I’ll make proper plans against them and kinda go down that path. And what we found was what we got was their objectives were rollout copilot to 1,000 developers, and and those those aren’t the objectives and the business options you wanna get wanna get to. Right? And so then we tried to go take a different tact and break it apart and say, okay. We’re gonna have a discrete business outcome. It has to be what is the customer trying to do, and then you hang all of the work and activities off of that, as opposed to having, like, a singular plan for a customer.

Michael Goetz:
Trying to mirroring a little bit more what we were seeing with our customers where they have, like, five different things that they’re trying to do. And especially if you get into different business units, they’re not aligned half the time. Right? And so being able to track that in one plan was really challenging.

Josh Schachter:
What what are the differences? I mean, is it just isn’t it always just build better better more code more better code?

Michael Goetz:
Not always. Sometimes it’s about a lot of times it’s about developer experience. Right? So, you know, I think, it’s about providing the tools developers want to make them happy. There’s a saying. Right? Happy developers make better code. Right? So, so the more that you can keep your developers to having a good experience, they’ll develop there’s actually research that’s shown, like, they will develop higher quality software faster, right, and with less issues. If they are using the tool and they get into the flow, the develop flow a lot of times is what they call it, you know, so sometimes customers, they’re just carried about, like, I don’t really care which Git platform I use. Everyone wants to use GitHub, so let’s use GitHub.

Michael Goetz:
Right? It’s less about the features, at that point. You see this a lot of with Copilot and some of the other, generative AI, tools in the generative AI space. It’s really about, like, developer choice, is can be something. Sometimes it is to your point, Josh. Like, especially in top down organizations, it’s I need to reduce increase developer efficiency by, like, 30% or 20%, and it’s a money issue. Sometimes that’s the case, but it’s not always just as simple and cut and dry as that.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. No. That makes sense. How so you guys use Gong, for your call recordings. Are you using Gong to to understand what the needs are of your customers, you know, when they first come in the door afterwards?

Michael Goetz:
Yeah. I mean, we are experimenting with it right now. I think it’s a very interesting age of all the different tools that can just sort of, like, capture information much easier than handwriting down the notes or typing other notes. I would say I think we are on the process of rolling of of using it for customer conversations. I do know that we use it, in parts of our sales organization already. They do use it, which is where we were saying seeing a lot of the tremendous value that they were getting out of it. And so we’re experimenting right now in our in our sort of customer success story.

Josh Schachter:
Cool. Because I wanna tell you my idea, Christy. So I hadn’t told you this before, but the question that you asked, you know, of course, I’m promoting here. Always be selling. Right? But the question you asked about tracking those needs, that’s exactly what I wanna build and update. I’ve been wanting to build it for two years. Richard, my head of engineering, won’t let me. He’s he’s so controlling with the roadmap.

Josh Schachter:
But I wanna build, like, a canvas, call it whatever you want, that basically tracks for every customer through the entire revenue life cycle, presales all the way through renewals and expansion and whatnot. Am I capturing the needs of the account? And even at the per stakeholder level, even based on which stakeholders matter the most? And am I continually going and updating what those needs are? And am I capturing the outcomes qualitatively because you can use other metrics

Michael Goetz:
and

Josh Schachter:
stuff for the quantitative piece. But am I capturing the needs and the outcomes in their own

Michael Goetz:
voice? Mhmm.

Josh Schachter:
And is there a gap in the two, or am I omitting and I don’t have the information for either of the two? That’s my I don’t know what it looks like. It’s in my brain right now. It’s just a fuzzy thing like a a Jackson Pollock, but that’s what I wanna build is tracking the needs versus the outcomes over time. So I’ll I’ll call you up, Michael, when we get there. Not not tomorrow, but maybe, you know, maybe next month.

Michael Goetz:
Well, I look. There’s a it’s a challenge. Right? Because it’s such a nebulous thing, and it’s a it changes. Right? It’s depending on the outcome. So I always tell I always tell my teams, if as long as you is the person that’s making the buying decision or the company that you’re working with or whatever has a higher perceived value than the literal dollars they’re paying for your solution, that really went. Right? That’s it. And that perceived value could be anything. Right? It could be I got a promotion, so I will you’re you’re I’m bringing you along with me.

Michael Goetz:
Right? It could be, you know, direct. I was able to cut, you know, I was able to reduce costs. I was able to, you know, show these metrics moving up into the right. So I think your idea is not a bad idea. I think that the challenge is just sort of, like, there’s so much variability on what the value is for all customers. It might be difficult. But, you know, throw me up. Happy to talk.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Hey, Michael. Alright. So I wanna I I promise this will be my last, like, ton of tactical question on this,

Michael Goetz:
and then

Kristi Faltorusso:
we can move on to something far more interesting.

Michael Goetz:
How does the tactical

Josh Schachter:
the tactical is the interesting, Christy. Right? People don’t need the high levels

Michael Goetz:
that they

Josh Schachter:
want to be. Yeah. The tactical is the interesting for listeners.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Alright. Well, I don’t wanna speak on behalf of all of our listeners. I mean, the five of them could all have very different opinions on what this looks like. Okay. So, Michael, did you think about approaching this very differently across your customer base? I mean, you guys don’t have a hundred customers. Right? You have quite a few customers. So when you think about approaching this, is it different by industry, by segment, by, like you know, how are you guys Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Approaching this and, like, where did like, talk talking about the structure across the customer base.

Michael Goetz:
Yeah. I mean, GitHub has b to c and b to b. Right? So we have individual we have free people, free users that use GitHub. All those free you know, developers, you know, billions of developers use GitHub every day. Right? And, we’re all the way up to these large strategic customers, right, through partnership with Microsoft and others. Right? And so, the the approaches have to be different, right, the way that we think about this. It’s like so when you think about it, the very tail end of the scale with our community team, it does a great job, engaging through these discussion forums that we have. And the way they think about it is, at the high level, it’s like there are personas.

Michael Goetz:
So there are admin personas. There are developer personas. There’s security personas. And, like, are we producing content that is, you know, helpful for that? Right? It it takes on a very there’s a lot of tight market, partnership with our, marketing teams as well. Not that we’re marketing in the forums, but it’s the same sort of thinking. Right? We think about personas and we think about the content that would be helpful to those. But then we also have teams that directly engaged in those discussion forums to make sure that those those individuals have at least a human touch point, right, versus just all you’re doing is pumping out a bunch of content. There’s some sort of interaction level that’s happening.

Michael Goetz:
You go scale all the way up to the enterprise, it’s very different. Right? We have very white glove, multiple people working, very discreet understanding of what it is they’re trying to do, heavy partnership, regular touch points. Right? The middle gets hard for us because, we have customers that, you know, we would consider small a small business, but they are unicorns that are gonna grow up in the enterprise within eighteen months. Right? How do you actually treat them to where they’re going to be versus where they are today? So, so it’s it’s definitely varied, on how we approach it, but, but we try to reuse as much as possible as we go through the different segments. So, for example, we have these adoption frameworks for each of our product lines. Those adoption frameworks basically say, here are the things you should do from awareness all the way through sustainment of usage, and best practices. Set up a champions program, do an enablement, or and then we take it and we build it for the enterprise, the biggest, widest glove, strategic implementation possible. And then we start stripping things out, so we can get down to that scalable motion for per customer to drive.

Michael Goetz:
So that’s sort of the strategy we’ve been using for, as we approach all things, and that includes sort of, like, identifying what their what their drivers are and what what they’re actually trying to do with the job.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What are your thoughts on, like, creating smaller milestones around this? Right? Because an outcome could be this big lofty business goal that takes two years to to get to. Right? But we know that’s like a herculean effort, and it’s it’s hard to keep people involved and engaged and motivated to continue to do the work when the goal is so far from them. So how do you work with your team to design smaller attainable goals or milestones along the way, especially when their goals are so different across all of these different size customers and cohorts?

Michael Goetz:
How do

Kristi Faltorusso:
you think about that approach?

Michael Goetz:
Yeah. One benefit of being in a developer centric company, is, you know, one of the core tenants of software development is how do you break things down at the smallest piece possible. Right? And you start working on little piece, little piece, little piece. So I can refer back to that and say, if you have a big lofty goal, you have to break it down one level down, another level down, a level down, another level down. There’s a lot of you know, I try not to, you know, make people roll their eyes at me with Gantt charts and, you know, WBS codes and project management terminology. But, I mean, it works. Right? Like, the idea, the methodology around a work breakdown structure actually worked as long as you don’t call it that. Right? You say, look.

Michael Goetz:
We have to break our big problems down into little tiny problems and then get it down to the very smallest piece that you can because you want to, a, be able to complete it without too much, like, interdependency or anything that might block you along the way. You also want the the adrenaline rush. Like, hey. We just we made progress. Right? Because the things are too big to your point, Christy. Like, if they’re too big, it feels like they take too long and you lose energy and momentum. Yeah. You know? Companies customers are busy.

Michael Goetz:
You are not the only thing that they’re worried about Even if you’re the core, like, development platform that they use, they have a thousand other things that they’re trying to do. And so you I what I’ve seen is the the smallest you can make, you can break these things down while keeping them sort of connected to the overarching goal and the outcome they’re aiming for, keeps helps keep momentum. But you gotta come back and circle back and say, look at all these wins. Right? Look at all the progress we’ve made in the last quarter or month, whatever your regular check is.

Josh Schachter:
Customers are busy, but they they may be in your product more than any other for your customers. Right? I mean, how often is a developer and that might be might not be a buyer. Right? But they’re, like Yeah. 50 times a day. Right? I mean

Michael Goetz:
Developers are in are in constant. Right? And well, it depends. Right? So, some developers use GitHub.com themselves, so they’re on the web browser and they’re actually making changes. A lot of them will be be in a terminal. Right? It’s just Git after all. And so Git is ubiquitous. We we don’t own Git as a source control system. But, and so they may not have any other actions other than they know when they push their code up to their, their repository, it says GitHub on it.

Michael Goetz:
Right? Like, that’s that might be the only thing that they really interact with on a daily basis. And so, there’s a lot of work that our product engineering team does to create for, like, command line interfaces that make the development experience better, when using Git. And so we kind of addressed them in that. But, it’s kind of a hard measure. Right? The thing that we really struggle with or not struggle, but, we don’t we don’t really have a lot of driver for is those champions and those sponsors, right, to really get in regularly. Because usually those are VPs, CIOs, CTOs. Right? And speaking as a VP of CS strategy, it’s been a very long time, since I’ve actually had to push code on a regular basis. Same thing with that.

Michael Goetz:
Right? And so we’ve historically had a, an approach of we’ll create a bunch of APIs, and then it’s up to you to build the visualizations of how you’re using GitHub. That’s slowly shifting. We’re providing a little bit more of a prescriptive perspective, and we’re hoping that that gets those champions a little bit more plugged into this is the value. You’re in GitHub. You’re actually in it with your developers as well. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I mean, that was kinda my question because you have all these raving fans Yeah. Or enemies. Right? But I I you know, you guys are a very well esteemed product. So you’ve got all these raving fans at the end user level, for important people that are using the product as well, but yet there is that dynamic that they’re not necessarily the ones that have the wallet. So I guess my question is, you know, how does that help or hurt you in in some way?

Michael Goetz:
Well, it it hurt there, but helps in the fact that it’s it’s if it’s made avail if the products are made available to developers, generally speaking, driving individual, like, I need this developer to use GitHub is not high. Right? So it’s not just trying to create a change or transformation in an organization with it. And so that that’s that’s super great. It makes adoption of the individual user. The challenge that comes into, sort of, like, defending the value around the product is just how with the organization. And so, you know, one of the things I talk to our product managers a lot about is it’s great that you have a developer persona. You have an admin persona. You’ve got what are the functionalities? But, like, what’s the persona of the organization itself? Like, how are you showing value to the grouping of people? Right? And do you have specific, moments of truth for them in the product? Right? So, like, take for example, every large enterprise IT organization that I’ve ever seen has a finance team that they answer to, and that finance team really doesn’t like this big giant bill they don’t know how to attribute to all these different business units.

Michael Goetz:
Right? And so you that’s why you have cost center billing and all these pieces. Right? And so we were this customer success story was a big advocate early on. And, you know, we needed to be able to provide that same sort of, output to the champions that we had because we knew that that was important to them as value. That took a while, but we start started to see improvements to the billing APIs, and now you can kind of bring out, cost centers as well inside of there. And so so that’s the thing that I think is the most challenging is GitHub is great. Like, if if I I could go to a billion developers because they would love it. They like the experience. It’s great.

Michael Goetz:
They it’s wonderful for them. As long as they we don’t have any uptime issues and it’s there. Right? You know, we don’t that’s not the issue. The issue now is, you know, when you’re trying to get customer companies to pay millions of dollars for, you know, the added features and the value that we know that they’re getting out of it by kind of centralizing on a on a standard platform, We gotta make sure that we’re we’re being able to prove that in a way that’s interpreted by the champions, stakeholders, those other people that aren’t actually using product on a daily basis.

Josh Schachter:
What’s the the biggest rock you’re pushing up the hill right now? Where is your biggest focus?

Michael Goetz:
Volume. So what I mean by volume is the pace of change, especially in generative AI right now, is insanely high. And I and I was early on in the DevOps movement, and so that seemed really fast to me, the startup that I was working on. That’s nothing compared to what we’re doing now. I mean, I think we’re getting new features or new capabilities or features that were new six months ago or now, like, nobody wants to use them anymore. Right? It’s almost it’s like, JavaScript frameworks on on, you know, steroids or something. Right? Where it’s just like, things are just moving so fast in this space. And so what I mean by volume is it’s really hard for not just our customers, but for our field teams to keep up.

Michael Goetz:
Right? Like, I was just talking to to somebody earlier today on another call where so we have to think about this differently because I have a CSM who is saying, hey. I’m asking a question about a feature that, you know, I was shipped three months ago. That CSM, high performing CSM, they go to all the enablement sessions. They read all of the the different newsletters and everything that comes out, everything we do to enable, and they still miss this feature that their customer asked for shipped three months ago. Right? And so, you know, you can go about it and say, like, well, let’s do more enablement. Let’s do more training. And I think the pace and the volume that’s coming out, you know, really trying to figure out how do we, you know, get more just in time enablement and just really be more assistive that, you know, be more of an assistant to the field teams than expecting them to hold all of this context in their brain, and be able to provide the right recommendations and guidance for customers. I think that’s gonna be the biggest folder to kind of address over the next, you know, twelve to eighteen months for us is the pace isn’t gonna slow down.

Michael Goetz:
So how do we make it to where our teams are able to keep up with and and meet the customers with a response to the needs that they have with the most latest and greatest updated information that we’ve got? And then we’ll have

Josh Schachter:
And how you’re going about that?

Michael Goetz:
Noelle, you know, I don’t know. The I heard something about large language models really good about taking a bunch of information and distilling it down into, you know, a very targeted thing. We just gotta worry about those tricky hallucinations. Right? So I think that’s that’s the that’s the thought. We tried to do workflows. Right? So it’s sort of like, if customer has these criteria, then go here kinda like a choose your adventures. But it got too complicated too fast, for us. So yeah.

Michael Goetz:
So if I know if I know that if I know this answer to that, I’ll definitely let you know. But we’re we got some experiments rolling around.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Michael, how are you and the team, the broader organization? So whether it be be product or marketing or or sales, like, how is the rest of the organization rallying around that same problem. Right? Because I think it’s one thing to think about it through the lens of, like, how are we enabling our teams to help enable our customers? Why not go straight to the source with other parts of the organization? So are you working collaboratively with other folks to help address that?

Michael Goetz:
Yeah. I mean, you know, the one of the people I was talking to earlier was in the product organization. Right? And and, they are struggling with it too. Right? The pressure that they have to compete in the market today is increasing more and more. Right? They have to quickly adapt, quickly change. And with large organizations, you know, you think about I mean, GitHub GitHub is just a part of Microsoft, but we have thousands of employees. Right? Right. And it gets really hard.

Michael Goetz:
Right? It’s like a big whip. Right? When the leadership or the product leadership decides to make a shift, even if it’s, like, a a tangential shift, By the time it gets to the bottom of the organization, I mean, people are thrashing all over the place, context switching and everything that’s happening. So, you know, I would say, I’m constantly talking with others. There’s a lot of empathy. Okay. Reason yeah. I got I got the same problem. And so, talking to other peers in the industry, you know, and just, like, hey.

Michael Goetz:
How are you thinking about this? What are you doing to try to solve this? Oh, I think a lot of people are so stuck in just trying to keep up, but they’re doing what they’ve always done, and they’re just trying to add more resources to it. But I think there’s a lot of financial pressure, especially in the tech industry, to keep those prep those costs down. I think that’s gonna start to force some innovation to happen in this phase, because I don’t I don’t see how you can keep up with the pace and not and keep doing it the old sort of manual way, and move forward.

Josh Schachter:
We we skipped over this in the beginning. Tell us a little bit about the way that your org is set up, the the number of folks, the the types of roles, that sort of thing.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Sorry, Josh. I skipped right to everything. Sorry.

Josh Schachter:
You did cut to it. It’s fine. It’s fine.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I had really rough time. I had so many questions, Michael. I’m sorry to derail our conversation.

Michael Goetz:
No. My my organization is small, and I would argue that any any organization that’s like mine should be small. Right? So we’ve got about 20 ish people now, 21, people. I will say it’s kinda nice only having to sort of manage 20 people after managing, like, a 40. But, so but they’re all senior level folks. And so we’ve got a couple of folks that focus in on our support and service offerings. So these are the people that go evaluate the market. They listen to customer feedback, and they determines, you know, maybe our premium support offering needs to have some sort of, like, incident command to control component or something.

Michael Goetz:
Then they go work with the support organization and they say, is this feasible? Can you support this? Like, what’s the what’s the the ROI on this for us? Right? And so they kinda manage. Same with services. Services is, you know, what are the type of challenges we’re seeing? What kind of packaged offerings can we have? What’s the margin gonna be on those, and kind of doing offer to develop. I have another team called the what we call them customer success practice leads. And it’s a new role. We’re still sort of figuring out exactly how it aligns, because the strategy team, as as my boss likes to say, doesn’t have any arms and legs. Right? The the arms and legs are the CSMs, the services engineers, the support engineers. Right? We call them support a cast.

Michael Goetz:
You know? And, they’re the ones that actually do stuff. So it’s a lot of alignment and understanding those business units. So the CS practically, it’s our connected into products and our go to market functions. And they’re sitting here saying, okay. This is what’s coming down from product. This is how we’re gonna go to market with that product. And this has these sort of implications across customer success. So maybe

Josh Schachter:
Are these, like, different practice leads for each type of segment or how how you split?

Michael Goetz:
Yeah. So for each product line. So we’ve got we actually segment by product. So it’s we have one for Copilot. We have one for GitHub Advanced Security. We have one for GitHub enterprise and platform. And they sort of, align that way. And then they work with the different teams to kind of build out any offerings or capabilities that we think we might need to have or update as new product chain changes come, down the pipe.

Michael Goetz:
And then I’ve got, a group of technical folks. There are currently two teams. One is called FastTrack. It’s essentially, an invested resource on our behalf. Highly technical, very experienced, folks that are brought in for one to two weeks to basically get somebody unblocked or move a specific team forward very quickly. Right? So it’s very targeted issue. How do we get them going forward? Right? And then we have one last team, that’s called, ODST. I won’t I can’t the the acronym, I can’t even remember off the top of my head, but we just call them ODST for so long.

Michael Goetz:
But, those are, you know, I’ve had them at these types of teams and other companies. These are like the people that just parachute in. They have all of the knowledge, everything. They can literally commit into the core code base if you need them to. And they solve really, really, really difficult problems that are, you know, need that that magical unicorn dust of understanding customers and to understanding how the product functions itself. And and they don’t ever do any sort of, like, patch or, like, custom coding more specifically for one customer. They try to help them with the workaround, and then they try to contribute back into the product. Like, this is gonna help other customers that encounter the issue.

Michael Goetz:
So so that’s my team as a whole.

Josh Schachter:
And and there’s, like, what, like, a hundred and fifty hundred and fifty folks that are on the the tactical side?

Michael Goetz:
CSMs, folks? Customer outcomes team now, there’s about a 20 people. There and there’s about I think there’s a similar number of folks in our support and our services organization as well.

Josh Schachter:
And then you’ve got your 20 that support them. So you you’re kinda like the cool kids. You’re the ones that were

Michael Goetz:
you you I don’t know.

Josh Schachter:
Or or or like the advanced, like the, you know, like the what do they used to call it? Like in the bright classes, you take the top kids at whatever.

Michael Goetz:
Oh, the the gift the gifted and talented. The gifted and talented. Yeah. No. You guys have a gifted program. It’s actually not like that. I would argue that we have a lot

Josh Schachter:
of that are

Michael Goetz:
that are we are, what’s a what’s a better way to frame it up? We’re like the, we’re like the teacher’s assistants. Right? So if we’re gonna keep with the school reference. Right? So we we have a lot we have people who are plugged into what needs to be done, and they’re there to try to make, make life easier for the develop the delivery teams themselves. Right? And so teach help them out. So we have an enablement team, so they’ll partner with enablement team and make sure that they’re, yeah, enabling on the right content and and fine tuning things. It’s really about taking out the things that slow down delivery and time with the customer out of of the delivery or just putting it into one place. So all of the all of that sort of route that that’s you need a SME to build a new webinar. You need a SME to, you know, help with some copy on a an email campaign that’s gonna go out.

Michael Goetz:
You need all of these things just to keep the business rolling versus you instead of taking that out of the delivery teams, we try to we’re trying to centralize that into one place as much as possible to keep them focused on the customer.

Josh Schachter:
And do you have a a CS ops function as well? Or is

Michael Goetz:
this just We do. Yeah. We do have a CS operations team. They’re primary they are inside of our revenue operations team, and they partner with us pretty closely. I talk to them very regularly. They kinda keep the business running internally versus as much of sort of, like, how the business operates. So think think of, like, budget, resourcing, those types of those types of, items. They are slowly starting to expand and picking up more of, like, what I would say a traditional CS operations team would be a little bit of what we’re doing in CS strategy.

Michael Goetz:
So we’ve been doing some some trading and saying, well, why don’t you take the health advantage program? Right? Why don’t you take the risk management program? I don’t need to do that. It seems like a very ops heavy activity. It’s been defined. It doesn’t need to be iterated on. You should just sort of run it. So we’re doing some some trading back and forth with them.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Michael, what’s the most interesting thing or most creative way that you your team is using AI today?

Michael Goetz:
Oh, jeez.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, I want the scrappiest like, well, like, I don’t want, like, oh, it’s embedded in our platform. I want, like, scrappy creative use case that, like, went under the radar that one person was like, you know, oh, I could do this thing.

Michael Goetz:
So so, I’ll give you the one that I just was listening I was I was getting a a listen on, from our ODST team. One of the things that they do when they dive in is that they identify some gap, and that needs to be developed. They wanna ship it back to the product. We don’t have product managers in our team. Right? And so there’s no product manager sort of managing the development of this thing. So you just get some engineers that are seeing a problem. They’re gonna develop a problem. They’re gonna ship it out the door.

Michael Goetz:
Right? And I think every software engineer is probably listening to this right now is like, that seems like a dream. No product managers messing around telling me to do any of this other stuff. Right? And so what was interesting is is they were like, they see the value of product management helping to refine and structure the work and making sure that, like, this thing is solidly built. It meets all the use cases. You know, we’ve kind of gone through, and, they’ve actually been experimenting with AI and trying to create sort of like a product management agent. Right? So basically say, like, here’s the problem I’m trying to solve. You know, it needs to be within this context. Can you kinda help me break this down into sort of, you know, user stories or, you know, like an epic and, like, structure those things out? It’s not working yet, but he did get pretty close to it.

Michael Goetz:
It’s a pretty interesting experiment that he’s working on. But, you know, I see a lot of our team if they’re not using Copilot itself, looking at ways to create agents or assistance for them so that for it to to make up for lack of resources. Right? So

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right.

Michael Goetz:
I I don’t have a content I don’t have a I don’t have an a a I don’t have a content developer for email templates. Right? And so I’ll see some of our practice leads. They’ll go and say, hey. Here’s a bunch of unstructured content that I have, and I need to make an email campaign targeted at SMB customers that is intended to drive adoption block. Can you give me some copy? And that gets them 80% of the way there, and then they’ll go through and sort of edit that copy. But the most interesting one was the product management one. I thought that was pretty interesting. So, yeah.

Josh Schachter:
PM’s lookout.

Michael Goetz:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Michael, this is great. Very exciting stuff. I love the the breakdown. We haven’t seen it before on the program, so really unique. Yeah.

Michael Goetz:
It it’s definitely been interesting. Like I said, I’ve been trying to talk to a lot of industry peers. There’s not a lot of folks that are focusing just on customer success strategy. As a team. There are some, and they’re out there. You find them doing offering offerings development is, like, the thing that I’ve I’ve seen is, like, somebody’s focusing on that. They usually have some sort of strategy team, surrounding them. But there’s not a lot.

Michael Goetz:
And I do think that there’s a certain size, right, where this becomes a reasonable investment. Like, if we hadn’t we didn’t need this, you know, a year and a half ago. Right? We could just do it. We should collaborate together in a work. But at a certain scale that you’re operating at, it is important to sort of break that out. The biggest tip I’ll give people that are considering doing creating, like, a a CS strategy organization is, you definitely wanna make sure that you, actively fight against that ivory tower situation to where you’re over here making a strategy and you have no connection to what the delivery team’s doing, and you’re just telling them what to do. So, yeah, that’s not gonna work. I’ve never seen it work.

Michael Goetz:
Because that’s part of why we have a bunch of technical specialists within the organization that still engage with customers regularly because we wanna have that touch point. It’s also why we don’t ourselves don’t have arms and legs. Right? We have to partner with the CSM organization, the sport organization to actually co develop with them the offerings and activities they do. So yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for being on the episode. Really appreciate it. Again, really interesting to learn, what you guys are doing over there, and we’d love to have you back maybe at the end of the year, sometime beyond. It would be great to see how you guys have evolved.

Michael Goetz:
Happy to. Yeah. This is great.

Josh Schachter:
Awesome. Thank you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Thanks. Thanks.