Implementation teams are the biggest experts on your product that you have in your company; they’ve been with each product and feature from its conception and development cycle to its launch. They have deep knowledge of products and features that organizations should tap into to design more impactful customer onboarding processes that lead to higher adoption and retention rates.
Increasing those rates leads to improved customer satisfaction– and happy customers spend more money and recommend your product to more of their industry peers, ultimately increasing your organization's revenue.
Here’s how your organization can get the most from your implementation team product experts, leaning on their expertise and translating it into an improved customer experience.
The key to success in any system meant to capture, transfer, and seamlessly update organizational knowledge is establishing a single source of truth. In this case, you want to build a system that captures the deep product knowledge from the implementation team and makes it readily available to the customer-facing teams designing and implementing customer onboarding and more.
Every implementation team will look different, but most include at least one product manager (if not a product management team), a project manager, a development team, a product marketer, and key stakeholders like a Chief Product Officer (CPO). Larger teams might also include a product designer and more specialized engineers.
It’s often true that when you’re very close to something- as in the case of the implementation team with product knowledge- you don’t know everything you know. That’s when teams need to sit down cross-functionally and identify key learnings that need to transfer from the implementation team to customer-facing teams.
Implementation teams will look slightly different depending on the size of your organization, the stage it's in, and the industry (just to name a few factors). If you’re a small startup, it might just be 2 or 3 people who need to meet and establish a scalable system for capturing product knowledge. At larger global corporations you might need a system capturing knowledge from a cross-functional product team including:
Ideally, you want to put in the work upfront to build a system that scales as your organization does and that’s also easy for new team members to learn and begin using as they’re onboarding in their roles. Everyone on every team should have access to the system with the understanding that all of the latest versions of everything they need- from copy about product updates to design- will live there.
The best product managers push out updates proactively rather than having individual team members go in and search for what they need reactively. This saves implementation team members time since they face fewer interruptions throughout their day asking for the latest version of something.
Once a system is established, learning how to access and update the system (depending on the role) should be part of your organization’s employee onboarding and training. Keep the system as simple and automated as possible, ensuring it integrates as seamlessly as possible with your organization’s existing tech stack.
If you’re a smaller company with limited resources, you may need to reevaluate the system more regularly and consider updating it when you reach a critical tipping point in growth. Larger, more established organizations may only need to review their system annually and make tweaks based on feedback from across teams.
No matter the size of the system, prioritize building one that sends out automated updates to the right team members proactively to save important implementation team resources– mainly the time and energy of your product managers.
With less time spent updating cross-functional teams, implementation team members (including product managers) can concentrate on their jobs: conceptualizing, developing, updating, and launching products and features.
The best systems will incorporate real-time feedback from cross-functional teams as updates are automatically pushed out. Customer-facing teams can take feedback from customers and get it back into the system for the right members of the implementation team to receive, digest, and apply where necessary.
This approach to communication systems increases product reliability- bugs are flagged and addressed much faster- leading to improved customer satisfaction with less downtime. This facilitates a cycle of continuous improvement, driving faster product development and launch cycles.
Giving cross-functional teams the ability to feel bought into the entire product development cycle also increases job satisfaction, further aligning teams and boosting productivity.
Building these systems into company culture is key to establishing them as important feedback loops. Implementation team knowledge goes out to customer-facing teams who can design better trials, marketing, and customer onboarding programs with that knowledge.
Those customer-facing teams can then bring customer feedback on products and features directly back to the implementation team, giving them a headstart on identifying bugs and deciding which products and features to prioritize on the roadmap.
Once a system that serves as a single source of truth is established and implemented across your organization, you’ll likely need fewer cross-functional meetings. The meetings that you do have can center on deep work, reviewing important decisions with key stakeholders like roadmap prioritization.
The best teams use this single-source-of-truth system in conjunction with a culture of open communication. Team members are encouraged to ask questions, share feedback from customers or other sources they come across in their roles, and generally keep communication channels open. This fosters creativity, collaboration, and increased productivity overall.
As part of the system, make sure all feedback is captured, and documented, and regular reviews are conducted to identify any remaining communication bottlenecks or other sticking points. We recommend reviewing your system at least quarterly. Make capturing anonymous feedback from across the organization part of the process so everyone’s candid viewpoint can be taken into account.
While the implementation team will have the deepest product knowledge from an inside perspective, it’s important to compare that with regular customer feedback from every point in the customer journey. Customer-facing teams should be gathering feedback from prospects engaged in trials, customers who’ve just completed onboarding, and regular, in-depth interviews with customers who are happy and unhappy with their experience.
It might be harder to get an unhappy customer who’s churning to agree to an exit interview- and it might be painful for the implementation team to hear the feedback- but it’s crucial to design better products and experiences.
It’s invaluable for implementation teams to know what common challenges users are experiencing, what successes they were able to achieve for their organization through using your product, and any other insights that can be drawn on for product improvements.
Product marketing can also take that information back to the wider marketing team to build better campaigns, enablement materials for sales, and more. It's especially powerful when used to build off of established market research.
Whenever possible, all feedback should be put into one place (that single source of truth again) and translated into actionable insights. That’s true not only for the implementation team but for teams across your organization. An ideal system will be able to present actionable insights in a format that makes it easy to prioritize them and assign tasks accordingly.
For example, if several customers alert customer success about a bug and they’re able to feed that information into the system that automatically creates a ticket for the engineering support team, that bug will be fixed much faster. Customers will experience fewer bugs and less downtime, leading to higher satisfaction.
How do you know your system is working? Be sure your organization is tracking key metrics around these changes to measure success. Consider KPIs like:
You can compare these metrics in the time before your new system was established and after to see the impact they’re having.
The sales team needs actionable insights they can take to work on the sales cycle as much as the implementation team needs real-time feedback from customers to inform their development cycle.
This ensures that the sales process is based on a robust understanding of what the product and certain features can and cannot do (no false promises to prospects who feel tricked after signing a contract) and what’s on the product roadmap.
Collaboration early and often is key to helping sales teams build the product understanding they need to best introduce your products and features to prospects. Product teams should hold regular cross-functional product updates and training workshops in addition to pushing out updates proactively through the organization’s system.
Product marketing should work closely with the implementation team to ensure that sales have all of the enablement materials they need, tailored to address specific customer needs and roles.
A collection of case studies and customer stories centered on specific use cases is one of the best types of content to equip sales with. If these are built in conjunction with product teams, they have everything technically correct while also telling a memorable story of what your products and features can do for customers.
Getting product features and specifications right by working with the implementation team is key to managing customer expectations. Sales teams and other customer-facing teams who don’t understand product limitations can inadvertently make false promises to prospects, leading them to feel tricked and lied to later in the sales process.
In the best-case scenario, it takes dedicated time and energy across the organization to win back that trust. Building it through transparency in the first place by being honest about your product and feature capabilities is a better foundation to build on.
Once that trust is established, you can continue to work with prospects and customers to build out more custom solutions that will make their lives easier– and keep them your customers for life.
It’s important to strike a balance with cross-team collaboration; too much and every team feels like they’re being micromanaged by the other while having too much extra work to do. Too little and important knowledge is lost in translation or never translated at all.
Building a regular cadence of cross-functional stand-ups, check-in meetings, and less frequent product updates and training sets everyone up for success. The exact cadence your organization needs will depend on many factors from size and industry to how your specific teams work best together.
Some teams work incredibly well in a mostly asynchronous style while others prefer to use in-depth synchronous meetings to convey the most important technical updates and details from product teams. The key is to ensure accuracy on product capabilities throughout sales messaging so prospects and customers are always set up for success.
Cross-functional team alignment often hinges on building empathy across teams; product teams need to understand what it's like to work directly with customers while customer-facing roles understand the importance of the deep product knowledge coming out of the implementation teams.
Some organizations build job rotation programs to establish this insight into one another’s roles.
Most organizations can’t afford for team members to spend large amounts of time in a role they aren’t performing day-to-day, so considering quarterly day-long swaps, or building in some shadowing during new employee onboarding are other options.
Before your organization designs any rotation program, you should define what the purpose and objectives are. If it’s a deeper understanding of team structures and responsibilities so they know who to go to with specific questions in the future, a few hours or a day spent learning about each department might be sufficient.
Your organization might find more value in longer rotations between key cross-functional stakeholders. The ones making the decisions should have the deepest insights into the specific challenges their fellow teams face to work better together.
Product teams can learn a lot from customer-facing teams, who deal with all of the frontline feedback (good and bad) about products, features, and the organization as a whole. Customer success, marketing, and sales teams each have a unique connection to and view of customers the implementation team members can benefit from.
If you find your implementation team isn’t tapping into that wealth of knowledge from your organization's single-source-of-truth system, consider how a job rotation program might encourage that learning.
Be sure to collect feedback from all participants so the program can be evaluated and improved the same way you collect feedback across teams to build better products for customers.
The ultimate goal is always to build the best product possible; one that solves the problems prospects and customers come to you for help with. Implementation teams have the deepest product knowledge because they’ve spent the most time thinking about these problems and how they can best be addressed.
The best teams bring the feedback collected from prospects and customers and use it to foster empathy in the products they design going forward. What makes a great product, in theory, doesn’t always hold up in practice, especially if customers find unique use cases for what your teams have built.
Implementation teams and customer-facing teams need to work closely together to surface and incorporate these learnings into development cycles to improve customer satisfaction and organizational outcomes.
The most successful organizations build teams with strong communication skills who can help each other do their jobs better, from implementation teams to customer-facing teams. That’s part of building a culture of collaboration that encourages open communication, establishes purposeful feedback loops, and regular evaluation and learning.
Every team is an expert in their area and should acknowledge the expertise of other teams. It’s only by combining this knowledge that the organization can succeed as a whole.
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