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Unchurned is presented by UpdateAI.

Jess Cohen:
With customer success, all of us want to just tell our clients how to do something. Right? Because it would be so simple if we would just say, go do x, y, and z, and you’ll get the most out of the product. But we can’t do that. We have to perform this magic of inception. We have to get them to realize it’s their own idea, and then they go and put it in place. And we have to not be offended when they get the credit for taking that idea and running with it. So it’s about finding your champions.

Jess Cohen:
It’s about planting the seeds early and often.

Jon Johnson:
Where where there’s friction, there’s also growth. But When you do, one of the things that I’m learning right now is when you do feel that empowerment to speak, when do you how do you, like, balance Where that change or friction can be implemented, it can’t always just be Tear down, tear down, tear down.

Jess Cohen:
We teach people how to treat us. And that is true with customers in Slack.

Kristi Faltorusso:
When does this go live, Josh?

Josh Schachter:
Wednesday.

Kristi Faltorusso:
When? So does my new podcast, how great oh my gosh. Isn’t that so crazy?

Josh Schachter:
That’s how we’re starting this episode. Welcome everybody to Christie’s new podcast. I mean I mean, Unshurned presented by UpdateAI, CS and BS, but just the precursor to Christy’s new podcast. Christy, tell us all about your new podcast.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m So excited. So it’s called She is So Sweet because I had to make it a little cheeky. But sweet is spelled s u I t e, and it’s intended to just interview women in the c suite, primarily in tech, but all different roles. So I’ve got folks for in chief product officers, chief financial officers, CEO, CROs, CCOs. And so I’m really just trying to expand Our visibility into how all of these wonderful women have gotten to where they are in their career. So it’s it’s really journey focused storytelling. I get to ask them a bunch of questions, and selfishly, it’s just an opportunity for me to learn from some of the industry’s best. I actually have someone from John’s Organization teed up for the next couple of weeks from user testing, their their chief product officer.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’ve got a great lineup of folks. I’ve got folks from Calendly on the on the schedule. I mean, it’s just I’ve I’ve been really amazed that All

Josh Schachter:
suite c suite.

Kristi Faltorusso:
All suite. All suite. All suite. I even got the CEO of Hootsuite Responded to me and gave me her comms, her comms email to us. So we will see. I I really shot for the stars with some of the folks that I reached out to. And then if you’re if you’re listening, I I tried to to to go straight to the top. I was like, that is my ungettable get.

Kristi Faltorusso:
We’ll see. Did not get a response yet.

Jess Cohen:
From who?

Kristi Faltorusso:
So who knows her? Mimi from from HubSpot,

Josh Schachter:
our CEO. Yeah. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
She’s the

Josh Schachter:
the grand pooper of,

Kristi Faltorusso:
the CEO of HubSpot. So so that’s my ungettable get. So took a shot, sent a message. I’ll definitely have to back shot on, try to find somebody who can help me there. But, Yeah. So far so good. I’ve got I’m launching with 3 3 awesome stories, 3 women in 3 different roles, different types of organizations, and then I’ve got a A bunch coming over the next couple of weeks.

Jess Cohen:
I love the new title. We’ve been playing around with Some new titles for, my weekly posts and things like that. And we we have sort of settled on do less with Jess. How to be product productive in customer success land.

Kristi Faltorusso:
See, I think it’s just fun when you have a fun title. I will actually say, John, Michelle responded to me because of she goes, I love a good pun. She goes, I love a good pun, so this is great. And she goes, the title alone. I’m like, yes. So nobody has thought it’s terrible, the idea. So that’s good.

Josh Schachter:
Well, speaking of shooting for the stars, let’s introduce our guest who’s already introduced herself. She violated the rules just like they always do on me. Yeah. John, you’ve been quiet this time, but you know that you’re usually poker trader number 1 on this. So anybody anyways, I would like to introduce to everybody UpdateAI’s new head of customer success and community, Jess Cohen.

Jess Cohen:
Hi, folks. My name is Jess. I’m the new head of CS and community at UpdateAI. I joined earlier this year in January. So it’s been a whopping 2 or 4 weeks depending on when you start counting. And I’m super excited to be here today. And, yes, they’re making fun of me with the reach for the stars because I, like most children, wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. However, I, unlike other children, didn’t give up on that dream until I was 24, and basically went to I took a nerd camp class in astrophysics when I was 13.

Jess Cohen:
And while the astrophysics and the math was way over my head, didn’t have any calculus yet, really couldn’t do that, I fell in love with the story of the planets, the idea that Earth, Venus, and Mars basically follow the Goldilocks rule. 1 is too hot, 1 is too cold, and 1 is just Right? 1 is too far, 1 is too close, and 1 is just right, and over and over like that. And I went home after that summer and said, This is what I want to study for the rest of my life. And I read everything that Carl Sagan had to write. And in particular, Carl Sagan, a little stuck in the eighties nineties and Said that when we go back to the moon, and more importantly, when we go to Mars, we have to take geologists. These are the people who know what rocks to pick up. Now he was a little shortsighted, didn’t really understand all the advances we were gonna make in robotics and things like that, but that’s okay. And so I walked into my undergrad and said, I want to be a geologist.

Jess Cohen:
And from day 1, I was a geology major. It was never a question of what I was gonna do. And then when I finished up, I spent my senior year working at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, which is associated with NASA in Houston, Did my senior thesis all about water rings in basins on Mars, if you wanna know about that, and then went straight to grad school, for lunar geology and really thought that this is what I was gonna do for the rest of my life. And then I, a, met my husband, and b, decided I liked people too much to just sit in front of a computer all day, every day and said, you know, maybe it’s time for a switch. And so I walked away with my master’s and went to Work as an environmental consultant cleaning up Superfund sites, and then eventually went back to school because I realized if I was gonna do that for the rest of my life, I would rather write the regulations than read the regulations. So I went back to school, ended up back at MIT, where you basically have 2 weeks at the beginning of the semester to find someone to pay for your education, lest you end up lots and lots of 1,000 of dollars in debt. And I actually ended up working for a group that was focused on process improvement, which is how I ended up in what I do today, which is a combination of organizational behavior and change management. Can you tell I’ve told that story multiple times before?

Jon Johnson:
I mean, I feel like that’s the podcast. Like and like scenes. I mean, can we just talk about rocks? Like, I like, for shit. I I’m in. Like, I just watched a TikTok, about, how

Kristi Faltorusso:
he’s an expert. Tell us about your TikTok campaigns.

Jon Johnson:
No. No. No. No. I want validation here. This is not experts. I watched 1 TikTok. And there’s maybe you know this.

Jon Johnson:
Please tell me I’m an idiot and that I shouldn’t be in TikTok. But there’s a guy, I forget. His last name is Green, and he they posits that the moon, is actually a remnant Of our Earth and vice versa, and that there was a cataclysmic event that happened on eons and eons ago, And that another planet, you know, crashed into our planet, and they’re now discovering that some of the, things in our mantle Are actually the same exact, rocks that are in the moon. Is that So Jesse?

Jess Cohen:
Yeah. Josh, I hate you.

Jon Johnson:
Am I kind of

Josh Schachter:
Josh, it’s fine. Listen to you.

Jess Cohen:
He’s actually correct. Yes.

Kristi Faltorusso:
He is. Wait. Your TikTok feed is very different than

Jess Cohen:
mine, John.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. I scrolled past the girls really quickly.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh my god.

Jon Johnson:
And I go to the sites.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Have more Different. Oh. You’re talking about Okay.

Jess Cohen:
Alright. Okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’ll go find that one.

Jess Cohen:
For everyone out there listening, John is 100% correct. There was a proto Planet in between Mars and Earth that eventually crashed into the Earth. And for those of you, on the video, I’m gonna Do a little something with my hands for those of you who are not. I’ll try to describe it. Basically, if you have Earth as your left fist and the other planet is your right fist, Your right fist crashed in at such an oblique angle, it’s called, instead of kind of dead on. It was an oblique angle. And what happened was it went off, But because it was such an oblique angle, the original planet actually just kinda kept going. It didn’t completely get destroyed.

Jess Cohen:
But what stayed got caught in what’s called the accretion disk. I think this

Kristi Faltorusso:
idea

Jess Cohen:
that

Josh Schachter:
parts

Jess Cohen:
of what was left kind of got caught in the Earth’s gravitational field. So essentially, we had rings like Saturn did for a little bit. Yep. And then over time, those coalesced gravitationally into what we know as the moon, which means that the moon is kind of a Combination of that protoplanet and what popped out of the Earth when it got hit. And that’s actually related to what I did my master’s thesis on, which, if anyone wants go look it up was a study of 7 particular lunar craters on the moon where, if you think about a pool of water, when, You throw a stone into a pool of water, you kind of it ripples out and you get this peak in the middle. Now what happens on the moon when it’s you’re talking about 1,000,000 of years and really different temperatures is that central peak can actually freeze. And so by studying through mass Spectrometry, what’s going on in that lunar peak, you can tell what’s on the inside of the moon. And that’s how we know that a lot of those lunar peak those central peaks So lunar craters are made of olivine, which is a really cool ferrous green mineral.

Jess Cohen:
If you’ve ever been to the green sand beach in Hawaii, it’s made of olivine. But olivine is one of the things that’s Absolutely. In our mental as well.

Jon Johnson:
That’s amazing. Fun fact.

Josh Schachter:
But how

Jon Johnson:
do you feel about Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift? I was

Kristi Faltorusso:
gonna say, does anyone wanna know how many grams Protein I had for lunch?

Josh Schachter:
How

Jon Johnson:
many splat points did you,

Kristi Faltorusso:
I did not get the splat points fixed. I am trying to stay in the green zone training for my endurance. I’m building endurance, so I do not wanna spike my heart rate. So I did the 23 minutes at just, like, a almost a base and a little bit higher than a base, John. Thank you

Josh Schachter:
for asking. Are you training for?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I have a bunch of I have a bunch of half marathons coming up, and then I have Can

Jon Johnson:
you just combine it to 1 just a full marathon?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m doing that Right. Doing the 9 plus one this year, so I can run the New York City marathon next year. 2020. That’s good.

Jess Cohen:
Yep. So I wanna hear you out for that. Together though.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Here we go. My my proteins are the running. I mean, I’m just curious. Okay. Let’s go. Let’s go.

Jess Cohen:
So, basically, when I walked from geology. And I started here

Jon Johnson:
for this conversation

Jess Cohen:
process improvement. Right. Which process improvement really boils down to How do you change your behavior? How do you do something different? And I actually spent years studying runners and programs like Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous to really think about what is the human motivation that gets people to change how they behave. And that’s exactly what I do now as a CSM, and what we all do as customer success professionals, is we are trying to get people to change their behavior and do their work process a different way. So it all comes full circle. I promise.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I wanna know why not everyone wants to exercise like me.

Jess Cohen:
So I can’t I here’s 1.

Jon Johnson:
I had a joke, but I held it in. Did you, Jess?

Jess Cohen:
I hate exercising. Yeah, exactly.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Like all kinds, but would you consider walking exercise?

Jess Cohen:
So, yes. And the only reason I walk is because I have an under desk treadmill that, and I walk because that little extra for walking while I’m typing is enough to keep me concentrated and focused on what I’m doing. I have never gotten a dopamine high of any sort from exercise. It’s A pain in the ass. It’s We need

Jon Johnson:
to play some pickleball.

Jess Cohen:
Part of like even group sports. And like, maybe this is the ADHD in me. If I’m not Good at something I won’t do it. So, John, I remember stepping up to the baseline for my very first tennis lesson ever. And the coach said, you look like you’re going to know what you’re doing. And I swung and I missed completely. And that was it. Never ever wanted to play tennis again.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So you walk away from anything you’re not good at?

Jess Cohen:
Yep. Yep. I’m, I’m

Kristi Faltorusso:
very interested in expressing that. From everything I wasn’t good at, I would do nothing.

Jon Johnson:
No. But I also like, I get that a little bit as somebody who, like, also, like, struggles with like, I don’t ever wanna be seen as somebody who doesn’t know my shit. And, when you I I do push into it a little bit, but I I the counter to that is that you also lean really hard into what you are good at. And it I think that sometimes people don’t have that part, and it’s a sad part of life, and they’re like, oh, I just quit. And they don’t do anything. But To to, like, kinda curry the first, what, 75 hours of this podcast already, you are very good at a ton of other stuff. Right. So it’s not like it’s I don’t do anything.

Jon Johnson:
It’s just, you know what? I’m good. I don’t I don’t need to do that.

Jess Cohen:
And I love trying new things, which is how the taxidermy came about. And I’ve taken, you know, I

Jon Johnson:
want to know what a taxidermy taxidermist looks like.

Jess Cohen:
Oh, That is that is an Instagram.

Jon Johnson:
I’m sure there’s a Tumblr.

Jess Cohen:
Oh, yeah. That is super fun. My favorite these days. So I’ve only done little animals like Squirrels and chipmunks, and I really wanna graduate

Jon Johnson:
I’ll get you some more.

Jess Cohen:
But, wow, there is a woman out there that makes White mice into strippers. Sorry. If that’s not like you have to go and Google this.

Kristi Faltorusso:
They are definitely also feels like would probably be in my in my technology or something.

Jess Cohen:
Like, that feels right around

Kristi Faltorusso:
the content, I’d be consuming.

Jess Cohen:
And by strippers, I really mean Very classy pole dancers, which is a whole different world. But it is just There is a difference. And there’s a woman is very hard, actually. Yeah. There’s a woman who takes alligator bodies and takes their heads and puts them on like the old creepy dolls. Which also just fascinating.

Jon Johnson:
I am I am just in awe of you, Jess. This conversation is on when I don’t know where this is gonna go. I just wanna sit, like

Kristi Faltorusso:
I don’t think it needs to go anywhere. I think it’s just this might not be a very linear conversation. It might just be a Conversation that exists. It’s just Yeah. It’s just It has no direction. Remember, not all that wander are lost.

Jess Cohen:
And my fear is, so there’s a great book that I once read. Again, my brain does wander like this a lot, mostly to the bad stuff, but that’s a different topic that we can talk to. But there’s a great book. I can’t remember the title, but the author is Nir Eyal. He writes a lot about productivity. And one of my favorite sayings that I remind myself and people of all the time is, Wasted time is not wasted time if you plan to waste it. And that comes back to the idea of Christie that your brain is a muscle just like everything else, and you wouldn’t do a 5 mile run followed by a 50 minute leg day. You would give yourself a break, and that break is not wasted.

Jess Cohen:
Your brain needs the same thing, especially when you’re trying to adapt to new behaviors and learn a new way of working. You have to give yourself that time off as well.

Jon Johnson:
Oh, that’s really good. Also Should

Kristi Faltorusso:
we start our time off now? Like, I just, I’m

Josh Schachter:
So you so so so, Jess, you Go ahead. You mentioned that, What really intrigues you is organizational change. Yes. You’ve been a change agent in Slack and all these other other organizations. What’s, coming into UpdateAI, what’s the biggest organizational change that you’d like to see?

Kristi Faltorusso:
You don’t want her to fire you live on a podcast, do you, Josh?

Josh Schachter:
That’s an awkward for everybody.

Jon Johnson:
We are gonna bring on every UpdateAI Employee would be like, what does Josh need to do differently?

Josh Schachter:
Oh, I mean, I know I’m setting myself up here. This is like, she’s got a whole ammunition to do.

Jon Johnson:
Josh. Just speak.

Jess Cohen:
The floor is yours. So I’m going to tell a story of what happened last week. Josh, if that’s okay. Josh and

Jon Johnson:
he goes,

Jess Cohen:
Josh and Christi Gaunt and I last week had an amazing 3 day on-site, off-site, whatever you want to call it. We locked ourselves in a room and did a lot of talking and a lot of brainstorming. And it was arguably one of the best weeks of my career. Like, I felt like I was being listened to. I felt like I was listening to exciting conversations, and we were actively making changes to the product. And in particular, towards the end of one day when we were all a little bit tired and weren’t really sure where we were going for dinner and all that stuff, Josh said, Okay, one more topic before we walk out, we have to talk about these CCO club workshops. Here’s what I’ve done in the past. Jess, you attended one of them.

Jess Cohen:
What do you think? How can I, how can we tweak this? Like, we don’t wanna put a lot of work into this, but how can we tweak it to just make it better for the next boss in a bit? And, Josh, you wanna share what I said?

Josh Schachter:
No. No. I would like I would like those words to come out of your own mouth.

Jess Cohen:
I believe I said something along the lines of, Josh, do you want me to be honest? And he said, yes. And I said, Josh, that workshop was derivative and non value adding to my life as a customer success manager.

Josh Schachter:
And I did not enjoy it, and I did not enjoy it, and I would not recommend it to any friends.

Jon Johnson:
I, Josh, I just came up with your new podcast title, Derivative. What’s derivative? Josh? Josh Schachter’s derivative. I Wow.

Josh Schachter:
And Wait. Could Jess, should we ask Christy and John back after that? Honestly, no. She didn’t. Good.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I had a very different experience than I how many did I do? I didn’t No.

Josh Schachter:
Chrissy Chrissy, just to be fair, Chrissy, you and Jess were at the same workshop.

Jess Cohen:
This one. This is the one in New York.

Josh Schachter:
The one in New York The

Kristi Faltorusso:
New York one. Okay. There came up, but then there was also I did the San Francisco one too. Yep. Yep. That’s what I’m saying. So, like, I have perspective of 2 different groups that had also, I would say 2 different calibers of attendees.

Josh Schachter:
Yes. So can I try preface it last year? Level of attendees.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right. Right. Right. So so Correct. Right? Like so I felt like at the San Francisco group, I felt like I was amongst my peers, where I felt like New York had a very diverse group of folks at all different In their professional journey.

Josh Schachter:
Beneath And

Kristi Faltorusso:
so I got more value. I did not say beneath me.

Jon Johnson:
But Josh did.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But so I do think I took a lot, I took away more from the event in San Francisco just because I felt like I was learning because I was with my peers who were Similar experiences, solving same challenges. Whereas I felt like in New York, I was there to facilitate enable conversation more than I was to, like, personally grow.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Can I can I just add? So the funniest part of

Jon Johnson:
that a long way of saying derivative.

Josh Schachter:
Derivative. The the funniest part of this conversation

Jon Johnson:
was like, he

Kristi Faltorusso:
was lighthouse.

Jess Cohen:
Yeah. Do whatever.

Josh Schachter:
So Christie Christie Gaunt, our our founding AE, It’s trying to Christy and I were having a different conversation. We are at at dinner table talking across each other. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
So Christie got your founding AE.

Josh Schachter:
She was she was, like, she was sitting right between us, and she was, like, it was, like, she was, like, 1st row at center court of a tennis match. And her head just keep just goes back and forth, back and forth, like, just looking for reactions, for my reaction and for Jess’s reaction. And she’s like, oh, man. Jess just threw down the gauntlet. I had to tap myself on the back because I actually just smiled and I said, yes. Like, thank you. Tell me more. Like, tell me more.

Josh Schachter:
I want to know Why this sucked. And you know what? She’s right. She’s right. The, you know, the content had gotten stale. Jess is a different audience than everybody else in case it isn’t obvious yet. Jess is smarter than most. And she

Jon Johnson:
Everyone on this podcast.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. At least in this in in this quadrant here.

Jess Cohen:
To her detriment.

Josh Schachter:
And, She has UX research and design thinking background professionally. She did that for Microsoft, which is, like, the top of its game. So for her, derivative is new for John Johnson. But hey.

Jon Johnson:
As somebody who works in UX with Microsoft, let’s back up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
But she’s right. And and and the outcome of it, by the way, like, Is Yeah. We sat there for 2 hours and just unpacked the whole thing. And we’re doing 1 in Boston, March 6th. And, like, we We’re blowing it up, and I’m so excited about what we’re gonna do in Boston because we completely rearranged it all, and it’s gonna be a freaking awesome event based on Just looking at me in the eye and saying, eyes have 2. You know, this wasn’t fun.

Jess Cohen:
And that is The reason I bring up this story is to answer that question of, what do I want to change? There is a lot that I want to change, but the awesome thing about UpdateAI is that I have Found a set of people who get me, who want to listen to that. Even if Josh were to have said after that 2 hours, You know what? We’re gonna stick with the original plan. I would have been okay with that. Another one of my favorite concepts is this idea of disagree and commit. I want people to actively disagree with me, and I want them to actively talk to me. And so much of the rest of my career has been, Hey, Jess, whatever, be quiet, you’re disrupting things. And I feel like I’ve finally found a place where I don’t get told to be quiet, which is really cool.

Jon Johnson:
So I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna poke a little bit of a poke and prod a little bit based on our our first conversation, like, 2 years ago In a rainy backyard, of New York City. I also have a similar personality trait where A lot of times, I am told to be quiet and to sit down and, like, oh, you know, why do you have to be the 1st person to talk? You’re always speaking. You always have an opinion. And I’m putting a negative slant on it, and I I also believe in assuming positive intent. So I know that may not always be what people intend. But, Yeah. You know, we’ve talked about this in the past and, like, where where there’s friction, there’s also growth. But when you do, one of the things that I’m learning right now is when you do feel that empowerment to speak, when do you how do you, like, balance where that change Or friction can be implemented.

Jon Johnson:
It can’t always just be tear down, tear down, tear down. Like like I said before, like, I actually really love that, Like, Josh is the right audience for that that feedback, and I love that. I don’t think that I could have that feedback because I don’t necessarily have, like, the analytical Side, I’m very emotionally driven, so I’m just gonna be, like, you hurt my feelings, and I didn’t laugh enough, and and maybe I didn’t feel pretty. Right? Like, that’s the feed and it doesn’t matter to Josh. Thank you. I know. I’m working on it. You’re so cool.

Jon Johnson:
But really, like, I wanna know your thought process around you’re coming into this new role. This is your 1st head of CS And community role, and I love this for you. But also, like, you’re also gonna learn, like, when to not hit the big red button that says you’re fucked. Yeah. You know? Like, Talk to me about your thought process there. You have the analytical mind, so I know you are in your head saying, I shouldn’t have said that or I should have said that or, you know.

Jess Cohen:
Analytical doesn’t even begin to start to describe it. You also have to remember

Jon Johnson:
is anal retentive. That’s what I get called.

Jess Cohen:
So years years ago, I had a mentor who said, Jess, what you see as passion, a lot of other people will see as aggression. And that really resonated with me. And that does come back to the the idea of in assuming positive intent and things like that. It is hard. And John, I have gotten it wrong so many times. And let’s be honest, I got it wrong In my last job where I hope no one from Watershed is listening, I was fired because I made engineers cry. That’s what they want.

Jon Johnson:
That’s a hard thing to do. That’s a hard thing to do.

Jess Cohen:
Yeah. Now I could, you know, defend myself by saying I’m 20 years older than a lot of these engineers who are coddled and entitled, or I’m a Jew from New York and this is really how our sparks patterns. There’s research about this. Do not make me laugh. Go look up Deborah Tannen. This idea. Listen, I’m

Kristi Faltorusso:
from Long Island. I I’ve all consuming. I’m I’m on I’m on board.

Jess Cohen:
I know. Truly, this idea that, like, as children, Especially, Ashkenazi Jews in the tri state area are taught to question everything. That’s part of our value, and it is not appreciated by everyone. It’s also, you know, you would it’s okay to have a conversation like this, where 4 people are trying to interject and yell over each other. But I’ve also been in communities where that is super scary to people. And so, John, that’s what I’m trying to get better at is to figure out when am I with my people? When am I not with my people? And if I am not with my people, how can I, it’s going to take longer, right? The same feedback that I could give to Josh in 1 afternoon Might take me a month to get through to other people. And it’s the same thing for customer success because, see, I’m really smart and can bring all these things back. With customer success, All of us want to just tell our clients how to do something.

Jess Cohen:
Right? Because it would be so simple if we would just say, go do x, y, and z, and you’ll get the most out of the product. But we can’t do that. We have to perform this magic of inception. We have to get them to realize it’s their own idea, and then they go and put it in place. And we have to not be offended when they get the credit for taking that idea and running with it. So it’s about finding your champions. It’s about planting the seeds early and often.

Josh Schachter:
Jess, why why are you why are you a customer success Manager and and now leader. How come you’re not like the the world’s 1st female Jewish astronaut from Bayside Queens? Like, What what what what what’s what’s drawn you to customer success?

Jon Johnson:
What happened? What happened a long time ago? Asking. What happened in your life?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Do you want to talk about it? Yeah.

Jess Cohen:
It’s a variety of things, to be super honest. So If we start from, like I was saying before, I decided I really liked people, which meant I was never going to be an academic. I was never going to be a researcher full time. I was never going to be the person who just Sat in a room and studied something forever. I will never forget the day I walked into my professor’s office and said, hey, look at this really cool thing that I think I found in one of the craters. And she looked at me and said, that’s interesting. Why don’t you study it for 3 months and get back to me? And I’m like, no, I don’t have that kind of patience. That’s not going to work for me.

Josh Schachter:
One motion.

Jess Cohen:
I do. Josh, by the way, made us all take the Gallup StrengthsFinder test recently, and we confirmed that one of my 5 strengths is the activator, which is I like to keep things moving forward. So I wasn’t gonna be a researcher. So once I left that, it was just kind of, well, where do I go next? And to be super honest, I’ve had a lot of weird quirks about my career that took me to different places. Right? So Christy talks about her fascination with consulting. There is a lot of value to consulting. I started my career as a change management consultant with IBM, and I might still be there. And this was literally 20 years ago, had my husband not gotten an offer to move to Copenhagen, Denmark, and I followed him.

Jess Cohen:
And so all of a sudden, I found myself in a foreign country, and I had to find a totally new job. And I found a job and I loved it. I was working for a shipping company. We were working on strategic projects. We were improving, processes. I got to travel. I got to visit 40 countries in 5 years, really taught me everything I know about how to communicate to people with different cultural languages, in how they want to get something done. And then my husband was told that he was the most expensive and longest running expat for his company ever, and we had to leave the country.

Jess Cohen:
So I went back to Boston and had to say, okay, am I staying in logistics and gonna try to do this? Or am I gonna fall back on my change management skills. And I fell back on change management mostly because there weren’t any big shipping companies with offices in Boston. And since then, I’ve been chasing this dream of how do I get to be a person who actually changes people’s behavior? And customer success is a really great way to do that.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. And, you know, just to just to speak a little bit of, I I really love the move from, like, research and even, like, design like, UX design into CS. So as Everybody knows I work for a company that that builds, like, UXR and UXD platforms, right, to to kinda power, what people do on on websites, how to make it easier. And we’ve actually been bringing in a lot of if if you’ve not seen, there’s been a ton of layoffs in in the research world. Right? Just Tons and tons of jobs are getting cut left and right, and we’re actually hiring it, quite if we just brought somebody else from, like, USAA as a researcher into the CS role, And there is a lot there’s a lot of, like, analogs between the the the the 2 roles, and a lot of those shared skills. So it it’s not really a too big of a stretch for me. I love the background of Consulting because it’s, you know, project based problem solving. And then you’ve got the research where it’s like, I just gotta listen to these people.

Jon Johnson:
I gotta, like Like really look at the data and dig into what’s happening. Right.

Jess Cohen:
Exactly. My job at Microsoft was basically to travel around the world and ask People what they didn’t like about Microsoft Office, whether that be Outlook, Excel, Teams had just been launched the year before I was there, And I was brought in especially to work on a product that I think is now called Vega? Vista, something like that. But at the time, it was workplace analytics, which is Essentially, if you look at Google now and you know how it tracks how many hours you spend in meetings and things like that, it was a Product that was supposed to do that. It was supposed to be a Fitbit for your calendar and stuff like that. And I really loved the job, and I Loved the product as a tool. I did not love the product as this, like, creepy policing thing that it became.

Jon Johnson:
Right.

Jess Cohen:
But through working on that product and working with CSMs at Microsoft, I said, hey, I could I could be the CSM. I could be that translator between the customer and product, and try to help a customer change their behavior at the same time. I left Microsoft under not great circumstances again because they don’t accept the loud mouth ADHD Jew from New York as a way to talk. That’s They have a very, very different culture, and I didn’t fit in there. And so when I got to New York, I said, okay, I gotta find a new job. Slack was hiring for CSMs. I faked my way in and they hired me.

Josh Schachter:
And that was your 1st CS role.

Jess Cohen:
That was my 1st official CS role.

Josh Schachter:
And how many years have you been in CS?

Jess Cohen:
So now I’ve been in CS for about 5 years officially. So about 2 or so with Slack, 2 or so with Watershed, and now with UpdateAI.

Jon Johnson:
So I wanna talk about Slack because I remember, Specifically, I just really loved this conversation. When, when Josh and I first met, he I was up in New York Meeting some customers, and he hosted a little happy hour. And I had just gotten, you know, some of these kind of awards, and he hosted me. It was it was a really cool moment to meet a bunch of folks that I didn’t know in New York. And and Jess was there, and he made some great, brisket, and we got to meet his dog, and and it was really great. Like, it was just a really good time. But You were at Slack at the time, and I think you were in the process of looking at Watershed or looking at a move. Yep.

Jon Johnson:
But we had probably one of the Fieriest conversations about emojis in Slack that I’ve ever had ever had. And we did not agree on, anything Yep. Ever, in that conversation. And I would love to hear if your perspective has changed in any way.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Woah. Woah. Woah. You guys have to unpack that and, like, rewind because What was, like, what is it about emojis? What stance did you both take? I have a lot of strong opinions.

Jon Johnson:
I’m gonna share my my reminder. I will say what I remember, and then I want Jess to be like, you’re an idiot, John. This is what actually happened because I am like I said, I’m emotionally driven, so everything is tied to emotion. It is not tied to analytics. So I, we were talking about the way that Slack uses emojis as a form of communication. As in, instead of saying, hey. I got it, they put the eye Emoji on it. Like, instead of saying this is done, they put the thumbs up, and, like, it’s a form of communication.

Jon Johnson:
And I, hate that. Absolutely hate that shit. Like, just tell me that it’s done. I don’t know what a thumbs up mean. Like, there is no shared design language in our org maybe in Slack, and this is where the friction came on.

Josh Schachter:
The checkbox.

Jon Johnson:
It’s the checkbox. Yeah. That’s right. The checkbox. No. But, like, there is this thing where it’s like there is an internal language that was at Slack, And I felt like we were actually what was more at friction was our perspectives on, like, personality because you were coming from an in inclusive environment where that is Agreed. And mine, they just monkeyed covering at their eyes. Like, I didn’t see it.

Jon Johnson:
It’s like, what is that even like, I can’t trust.

Josh Schachter:
There’s no one that John gets most often in response to the Slack. Somebody No. It’s the one that to the

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, I send the girl that’s like, I don’t know.

Jon Johnson:
I don’t know. Am I am I am I tracking well? Like, is this that kinda what we’re at? Absolutely. So my emotions are not lying to me.

Jess Cohen:
No. They are not. And before I answer, I would love hear Christy’s opinion on that those statements.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, I hate Slack so much. I think it’s it’s it it is ruining the entire universe. I can’t get any work done. I think it’s where all work goes to die. I think that it it is a productivity killer. If I had to manage Slack all day and just all the conversations that were going on there, I literally wouldn’t do my job. So I ignore it all day. I pay attention to the things that I think need my attention.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And then half the things that are in there are in the abyss. And if someone needs to find me, they’ll follow-up.

Josh Schachter:
I just hate to hate it. I don’t hate it at all.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Time out. Time out. I’m looking at

Josh Schachter:
it now,

Kristi Faltorusso:
and it’s making me nauseous.

Josh Schachter:
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the main event. In this corner, we have Christie Altorusso, The queen of customers is like

Kristi Faltorusso:
you say I will fight you. We are not weighing you in a number, so as long as we

Jon Johnson:
are excluding

Josh Schachter:
Weighing in in the other corner, we have the queen of Slack productivity, Jess Cohen. On your count.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. I just, like, I I just

Jon Johnson:
don’t like it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I just really don’t enjoy anything about it. I miss, like, AOL Instant Messenger. This is just too much.

Jess Cohen:
So, Christi, here’s the interesting thing. I both disagree and wholeheartedly agree with you at the same time, And I think that those are not diametrically opposed viewpoints. And here’s why. I The tact that you’re ending up taking out of spite of saying I’m only going to pay attention to things that I mentioned in is actually the advice that I give to everyone. Get used to letting go of everything else. It’s there’s we have this perception in our

Jon Johnson:
Woah. Woah. Woah. We’re not trying to grow here, guys. Alright? We’re fighting. None of this. What is this?

Josh Schachter:
Is this a deeper issue?

Jon Johnson:
You went into, like, change like, listen, I’m gonna validate you. It’s it’s a compliment sandwich.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. Jess, He’s just mad that that’s not how you approach the conversation with him.

Jon Johnson:
No. No. No. It’s fine. No. I totally ignore it. Wrong.

Jess Cohen:
No. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Actually, I hate to say it, John, you were kind of right too, because you did make me realize that exactly what you were talking about. That there is, There are operational definitions that everyone has to be in on. Right. And I realized that it’s slack.

Jess Cohen:
They taught us that at day 1. Right? And so what did I do when I got to UpdateAI, Josh?

Josh Schachter:
You ran a Slack 1 on 1 workshop.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So can I say that, like, I think organizations saying

Jon Johnson:
is that the if feedback that John gave you is in your That was

Josh Schachter:
a that was a gross interruption right there? Okay. Okay. That was

Kristi Faltorusso:
I let him continue. But no no no. I think that there’s a really valid point here. I don’t think that companies Really design a culture around Slack. And then you have employees who just use it haphazardly the way that they did at other companies or the way that they think it should be used or, like, let’s just be Honest here. I don’t know 90% of the functionality that Slack even has. Like, I don’t even know how to do things in there except, like, respond. So If a company isn’t designing a culture around how to use it and, like, creating rules and and regulation around it and, like, a governance around it, I think it’s the experience that I’m having every time I use it, which is just, like,

Jess Cohen:
oh my

Kristi Faltorusso:
gosh, overwhelming is horrible.

Josh Schachter:
Are you guys using it with your customers?

Kristi Faltorusso:
What?

Josh Schachter:
Are you guys using it with your customers?

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. Isn’t it what Fina does, though? Like, isn’t that the

Josh Schachter:
point that they’re pro rata? Yeah. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We don’t use it because It’s too much.

Josh Schachter:
I I have I understand.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Customers there, I’d have to ignore them too. Like, it would be horrible. So, like, I’m gonna be ignoring my employees.

Josh Schachter:
I believe you’re not using it for customers with your customers, then you’re behind then you’re behind the times. Jess,

Jess Cohen:
so this is the Really cool thing because when this podcast comes out, by the time this comes out, y’all should go, anyone listening, go and checked in check out my LinkedIn profile because Slack Turns 10 this week, and I have written a LinkedIn post that says Slack plus CS equals magic. And here are my tips for how as a CS leader and an individual contributor. You can use Slack, and I even mentioned Thena because I really think it fits really nicely together to manage your customer accounts. It look, there’s a quote from Maya Angelou. You guys are getting all my good quotes today that says we teach people how to treat us. And that is true with customers in Slack. If you let someone treat Slack like an instant messenger, They’re gonna use it like an instant messenger. Right? If you treat it like a ticketing system, or like an email system where you don’t respond Bond for 24 or 48 hours or whatever your SLA is with customers.

Jess Cohen:
That’s okay. They’ll get into that groove. And then it just becomes a better record of things, and I don’t have to worry about cc’ing Josh on all of my emails. The history is there if he needs it. And Anyone, anyone who is listening to this, if you want a lesson in Slack tips and tricks or Slack for CS, please call me. I will show you how you do it. I’ll show you how we’re trying to integrate UpdateAI into Slack and more. I will show you how I’m using Thena because even though my head, my title is head of CS and community.

Jess Cohen:
What Josh doesn’t say is he also gave me the support role, which is totally makes sense for starting out as CS. At the very beginning, startups at the stage of UpdateAI, CS and support, very intricately linked, Working closely with our engineers to make sure it works and the ability to triage these tickets and these concepts in Slack, It means that I learn every time an engineer answers something. And I can answer it the next time.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, tell them what you did with the engineering. Tell them what tell them what you did with Copa and and the, the engineering sidekicks that you’ve now brought on board.

Jess Cohen:
Oh, This is something that I think I first learned about at Slack. And then we tried it at Watershed and it kind of worked. But this concept of an adoptive engineer, Christy or John, have you ever heard about this?

Jon Johnson:
Nope. No. No. But everybody in my school thought I was adopted. So if you’re

Kristi Faltorusso:
like, I’ll adopt you.

Jon Johnson:
The,

Jess Cohen:
it’s the idea that you usually think of an account team as The CSM plus the AE, maybe a renewals manager and account manager, those are the kind of standard folks that would you you would usually bring to meetings. And I asked Josh and our head of engineering, Richard, if I could bring if I could assign some of our more junior engineers to an account so that they could see it from kickoff through renewal. It helps them build empathy. It helps them understand what customers are actually asking for, and it makes the customer feel special. The customer now gets to know that their product feedback, like, yeah, they could trust me to take it back to the engineer, but they also get the experience of talking directly to an engineer. And the engineer learns how to talk to a customer and how to say, Hey. That’s a great idea, but I don’t have time to build it right now. I just think it’s a win win all around.

Jon Johnson:
This isn’t why they cried at the last spot, is it? The engineers?

Jess Cohen:
Alas, no. That was for different reasons.

Jon Johnson:
That’s good. No. I I like that model. I mean, it makes a lot of sense.

Jess Cohen:
And I’m not saying you could do it with every engineer, and I’m not saying you know, it it particularly works at UpdateAI because our engineers, while they focus on things functionally in different sprints. They’re essentially full stack engineers. Right? So, like, if there was a back end engineer and a user just wanted to talk about from end design stuff. Never gonna be a great situation. But we have the flexibility in the smallness, and I hope you will have either Papa or Jason on this podcast at some point to talk about what it’s like.

Jon Johnson:
I love that. Well, last question for me. What What does success look like for you in this role? Like, let’s look a year in the future. Right? If we’re if we’re gonna go 12 months in the future and you know where the road map looks like, you know what your team looks like now, like, what what does success look like? How do you how do you track your success as a head up right now?

Jess Cohen:
So Josh would kill me if I didn’t say that we have our series a funding within a year. That’s gonna be success. That means that we’ve got something that people want. And then personally, for me, it’s that we have put out a product that I can’t live without. I am

Jon Johnson:
That’s good.

Jess Cohen:
A targeted user. I I feel like to in some ways, walking into UpdateAI is like walking into my own personal IT company, where I get to say, here are the features I really think we should build. Here are the tweaks that I would make to how we’re, to how we’re doing something. Here’s how I would go to market. And Josh and Richard and Sergei and Christy and everyone on the team are saying, Yeah, Jess, you’ve been doing this for 5 years in CS, 20 years in organizational behavior and change management. We understand where you’re coming from, and we’re gonna build it. Now they’re not gonna say yes to everything. But that if we can do that, and then I can go out and sell that.

Jess Cohen:
And then we have 100 customers that are actively using every piece of our product. That’s success for me in a year.

Josh Schachter:
That’s awesome. Well, on that, I have any

Jon Johnson:
No. Word that I know in my dialogue. Like, I this has been

Josh Schachter:
No. Listen. I mean, my comment is just that we’re so thrilled to have Jess and the team. I I’ve known Jess for a couple years now. Know, actually, the same amount of time that I’ve known you, Christy, and John, and when I found that she was available to join us, I I just, like, immediately jumped out of my seat. I was so excited. I posted last week of, like, the top skills to look for in a head of CS, and she checks the box on all of them. I mean, Her background in UX He

Jess Cohen:
also wrote the list after hiring people.

Josh Schachter:
I did.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I reversed it. Yeah. That’s fine. Yeah. That’s fine. Yeah. Well, yeah. Wasn’t gonna give that one up.

Josh Schachter:
But, Structure. Oh my god. Oh my god. It’s like

Jon Johnson:
Josh is getting he’s all Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m already thinking, John. Josh, you want The structure or you don’t want

Jon Johnson:
the structure.

Josh Schachter:
I want the structure so bad.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So unstructured that it makes me nervous to hear how structured she is. Like, I’m panicked.

Jess Cohen:
So I actually think that’s, that’s why Josh and I work well together because I’m going to lean so far in the other direction and he’s going to lean so far in one direction, And then we’re gonna meet in the middle and find something that works, which is great because it’s so much better than what I’ve been told in the past, which is just go away. We were too soon for this. We’re too early. People can’t follow it. Don’t worry. Josh lets me put that structure in place. And then if we walk away from it, 5 days later, I’m okay with that. I know you didn’t really mean that thumbs up, but it’s there.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Sorry. The emojis.

Jess Cohen:
Yeah. So that’s the other strengths that we came up with, that my top strength is an arranger. And so I now have a new alter ego that’s called the power arranger. And so, if anyone wants structure lessons also. And this is, I like, no joke, 2 weeks ago was diagnosed with ADHD. I’m 47. Like, that’s insane that I went my whole life without knowing that. But I now look at that and I can see like, we think of people with ADHD as not being structured and not being organized.

Jess Cohen:
I developed that superpower because otherwise, I would never get anything done. Right? And so now it’s kind of cool to be able to share that with other people.

Josh Schachter:
That’s awesome. Paul, thank you for sharing that with us today. Thank you for sharing everything about your rich background, and we are looking forward to make your Moonshot happen at UpdateAI. Yeah.

Jess Cohen:
Oh, look at that.

Jon Johnson:
Thank you,

Jess Cohen:
Josh. Thank you all for having me. This was a blast.

Jon Johnson:
I’m gonna go take my medication.