The Customer Success Playbook

Customer Success Playbook Season 2 Episode 35 - Jasmine Reynolds - Agile Onboarding

• Kevin Metzger • Season 2 • Episode 35

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In this episode of the Customer Success Playbook Podcast, hosts Roman Trebon and Kevin Metzger interview Jasmine Reynolds, a Customer Success Manager at Pluralsight, about applying Scrum methodologies to customer onboarding. Jasmine discusses how Scrum, typically associated with software development, can significantly enhance the customer onboarding experience. She outlines six key Scrum techniques that can be immediately applied to onboarding processes, including prioritized backlog, sprint-based onboarding, daily stand-ups, and continuous feedback loops. The discussion highlights the benefits of this approach, such as improved time to value, increased customer satisfaction, and stronger client relationships.

 Detailed Analysis

The application of Scrum to customer onboarding represents a significant innovation in customer success practices. This approach addresses several critical challenges in traditional onboarding processes:

  1. Flexibility and Adaptability: By breaking the onboarding journey into sprints, companies can respond more quickly to changing customer needs and feedback. This agility is crucial in today's fast-paced business environment where customer requirements can shift rapidly.
  2. Cross-Functional Collaboration: The Scrum approach encourages better coordination among various teams involved in onboarding, including sales, customer success, product, and support. This holistic approach ensures that all aspects of the customer's needs are addressed cohesively.
  3. Accelerated Time to Value: By focusing on delivering value in each sprint, businesses can ensure that customers start seeing benefits from their investment much earlier in the process. This rapid demonstration of value can significantly impact customer satisfaction and long-term retention.
  4. Enhanced Customer Communication: Daily stand-ups and regular feedback sessions keep the customer closely involved in the onboarding process. This transparency builds trust and allows for immediate course corrections if needed.
  5. Measurable Progress: The sprint structure provides clear milestones and measurable progress, making it easier to track the effectiveness of the onboarding process and identify areas for improvement.
  6. Scope Management: While scope creep remains a challenge, the sprint-based approach provides a framework for managing and prioritizing additional requests without derailing the entire onboarding process.
  7. Continuous Improvement: Regular retrospectives allow teams to refine their onboarding processes continuously, leading to ongoing improvements in efficiency and effectiveness.

For businesses looking to implement this approach, Jasmine recommends starting by breaking existing onboarding processes into sprints, defining clear value deliverables for each sprint, and creating a prioritized backlog. She emphasizes the importance of flexibility and setting clear expectations with customers.

The potential integration of AI tools in this Scrum-based onboarding process presents an exciting opportunity for further innovation. AI could potentially assist in sprint planning, predicting potential issu

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Kevin Metzger:

Hi, everyone. Welcome back

Roman Trebon:

the Customer Success Playbook Podcast. I'm Roman Trebon, and with me always is my co host Kevin Metzger. Please do us a huge favor and give our show a rating, subscribe, and like it so we can continue to grow our audience. Kevin, I hope you're doing well. How was the

Kevin Metzger:

weekend? Yeah, it was a good weekend. Getting into full swing of football season, so that's good and excited. we've got a great guest today that I'm excited to learn from.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah, I'm excited as well. And Kev, let me ask you before we get into our guests. Have you ever been part of a customer onboarding process where you use traditional project management techniques and it just didn't cut it for you?

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah. I've definitely been involved in that. I think a lot of the sales process tends to talk about delivery and waterfall. we kind of get into a waterfall delivery a lot, but that's not always the best way to go about it. I'm excited to have that conversation with our guests today.

Roman Trebon:

today we have the pleasure of speaking with Jasmine Reynolds. customer success manager at Pluralsight, Jasmine is an expert in customer success and has a wealth of experience in applying scrum methodologies to enhance the customer onboarding experience. With her background in managing complex customer relationships, Jasmine has successfully adopted scrum principles from software development to the onboarding process. Transition for new clients. So today we're going to dive into how scrum, which is a framework typically used for sought in software development can be a game changer for customer onboarding. Jasmine is going to share six key scrum techniques that can be applied immediately. including prioritized backlog, breaking down the onboarding journey into manageable sprints, fostering functional collaboration, implementing daily stand ups, and so on. So we're going to get into this, Kevin. all focused on empowering the customer success manager to be the voice of the customer. Jasmine? Welcome to the show.

Jasmine Reynolds:

Thank you. So excited to be here with you guys. I appreciate it. I'm excited to jump into this topic with you all.

Roman Trebon:

We've talked about onboarding, but we've never talked about scrum as part of the onboarding. to Kevin's earlier comment, I know we're both excited for this. Jasmine, we'll start with this. scrum is often associated with software development, right? But you found great success using it in customer onboarding. why do you think Scrum is so effective in this context? And what are some of the key benefits you've seen?

Jasmine Reynolds:

Yeah, you're right. Scrum is typically aligned with software development. But it's the core principles that really drew me to it being applied to onboarding and to customer success. So the core principles is definitely like flexibility, incremental progress, Continuous feedback applied so that the customer onboarding experience is unique but still follows a path, right? The onboarding process, can be really complex. It usually requires a lot of coordination across teams. product team, support team, onboarding team, deployment team, customer success, like sales. It's there's so many people with their hand in the pot. And I think with scrum, it allows us to. Make sure that everyone has a very important role, and we're able to pull them in when it makes the most sense. But also like the, the sprint structure that Scrum does follow it really breaks it into. More manageable phases. I like to use the example of a company that a lot of people know, and when it's mentioned like, oh, gosh, we're about to implement this new product. Everyone knows that this specific company takes a very long time. Their onboarding is very complex. It's very overwhelming. a lot of moving pieces and it's time consuming and dreadful, but everyone knows that you need to do it. So when you try to put it into a scrum methodology and apply that there, it breaks it down into more manageable pieces so that the customer and the team isn't overwhelmed and you're continuously delivering value as you go along.

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah. I think one of the things that. We often hear about, as crucial to customer Retention long term is first time to value, right? So I guess one of the things with scrums and the agile methodology is you're really working on delivering a value first perspective in your development methodology.

Jasmine Reynolds:

That's exactly right. So the way that I've seen it most benefit is definitely the time to value greater cross team accountability and real time adaptability for customer feedback. But for the time to value, that is definitely the biggest piece of it here. when we're thinking about sprints, you think about increments of this process and what value can I deliver during each increment. That's the way you need to think about it. And if you think about it from an onboarding perspective, it's like, wow, that's Makes a lot of sense here.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah. So Jasmine, I mentioned it in the show opening, but you've really taken six scrum techniques that you can utilize right away. Can you talk us through those six and maybe how you came up with those?

Jasmine Reynolds:

Yeah, so it's really just the scrum process or the scrum methodology it includes, having a backlog. Which I think is the heart of the onboarding process. There is the daily standups, which is making sure that you're continuously communicating with your onboarding team and internal team and making sure that everybody is on the same page. I like to say that in a daily standup, it's making sure the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. it seems so simple because it's all on one body, the right and the left hand, like you should know more often than not, you don't. the daily stand up encourages that the retrospectives are a really important piece where you're looking back at the end of the journey and saying, how did we do? Where did we fall? What mistakes that we make? Also, during the standups, you're making sure that you're communicating what I've completed, what I'm working on. Those are all important things for, the team to know with what everyone's doing. Having the different sprints, that's another element of scrum that you're making sure that you're paying attention to.

Roman Trebon:

I think that's the last.

Jasmine Reynolds:

I said retrospective standup customer. So getting that continuous feedback where you're, making sure that even during the onboarding process, you're getting the feedback This might have worked for my previous customer, and we're following this onboarding structure, but that doesn't work for them. So we need to get that feedback immediately so that we can make the changes internally so that their success is our number one priority.

Kevin Metzger:

Where are you finding that in the process? You find that in your retrospective, your weekly or biweekly scrum retrospective that you're looking at?

Jasmine Reynolds:

Yeah, so the retrospectives, it lets us know that. But the feedback we're constantly asking for feedback during the onboarding process. So because we're going through sprints at the end of each sprint, we're actually having a conversation with the customer and saying, like, here's what we delivered. Here's the value you should be seeing. Here's a, you know, the milestone we've crossed. Do you agree? Are you seeing that value? Are you using it? Are you not using it? we want that feedback immediately after each and every sprint. And then the retrospective comes at the end of all the sprints.

Roman Trebon:

Jasmine, I'm curious how you came about adopting Scrum principles into onboarding. did you come from a Scrum background and then got put in onboarding and adopted it? Were you already in onboarding and then you learned Scrum? I love innovative approaches and this seems like an innovative approach to how to onboard. So curious where it came from and how you've adopted it.

Jasmine Reynolds:

I've been in customer success for now for. Gosh, like 11 12 years, something along those lines. And a lot of times, onboarding falls within the customer success managers responsibilities. working at Pluralsight Flow I work with Software developers our product is directed towards them. I had to learn about scrum methodologies and being agile, what waterfall is and what Kanban is and all these things. So I was like, this is a foreign language to me. But as I learned it, I'm like, Geez, this wouldn't make so much sense in this world as well. Like it makes sense for the software development world, but it can be applied in many different instances and I've become obsessed with it. So, yeah.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah. I love it. there's so many things I've seen in Kev. like traditional waterfall, you get all these requirements. You build, you build, you build. There's no feedback throughout it. And then you get to the end. You're like, that's not exactly what I wanted. I always go back and say, wait a second. Why don't we just do a little bit up front? Like, just iterate along the way. It makes so much sense, right? To adopt that in a monopoly perspective.

Jasmine Reynolds:

I think in most cases, most onboarding processes look like we have all these things that we have to do. And I have to check the boxes and check the boxes. can we check off 15 of those and get them using the product? And then in another 15. Get them to, expand to the next organization or expand utilization or adoption or further their enablement so that they're able to use different pieces of the product.

Kevin Metzger:

1 of the methodologies to that I, I like is the daily standups. And I actually even post onboarding when you get into ongoing. Maintenance mode. I find that daily standups can be very valuable in keeping your pulse on what's happening for the customer, all that I find. I find that to be such a incredible way to get feedback and to keep people moving In the direction of achieving goals for customers. That's something really like that you're adopting there.

Jasmine Reynolds:

Absolutely. It keeps everyone involved. it is easy to say here's our onboarding team and it includes a sales rep, the CSM, the product team, the business support team, but only tag me in when it's necessary, in a standup and a 15 minute standup conversation, they constantly are aware of what's important that's going on with this account. it is a quick conversation to say, here's what's going on. Here's what we got to do still, you know, things like that. So it's important to keep the pulse for everyone to be on the same page.

Roman Trebon:

Jasmine, it sounds like you had a traditional onboarding approach before you incorporated scrum elements into it. I'm curious for our audience that's listening. And it says, Hey, I really like what Jasmine's saying. I want to, I want to do this at my organization. What are some of the benefits that you have realized from making the move to more of a scrum approach and onboarding? And then can you also kind of give us some insight and lessons learned from having shifted from a waterfall to a scrum approach? Any lessons learned for people thinking of going on this journey?

Jasmine Reynolds:

Yeah, I would say that where to start is to look at your existing Process for onboarding and think about what steps and how you could break that into sprints and what value can you deliver during each sprint. Now a sprint could be a week, two weeks, three weeks, whatever that looks like. Some people's onboarding is really long, so it makes sense to have a bit of a longer sprint there, you want to think in tandem with creating these sprints. What value can I deliver at the end of this one sprint? Just one sprint. I have to deliver something. I have to deliver a working product, right? Like that's ultimately our goal. So that would be step number one. Step number two is to consider what's my backlog going to look like. And making sure that yes, you are creating that backlog amongst the team because you know, what is required of this and you know, what's best for you. And then, it needs to be prioritized to deliver that for a set of value during each sprint. I have to make sure that I plug this and this is something that you that we learned as well as we went when we say You know, incremental progress. And we're saying that we are allowing for flexibility and feedback. Don't be afraid of that. And then the customer throws something at you during sprint one. You're like, Oh crap, what do we do? So you really have to learn to be nimble and agile with that feedback. They could throw anything your way. So have some wiggle room in each sprint so that you can adjust and still be able to deliver what was promised.

Kevin Metzger:

I have a question out of that, because especially, especially with onboarding, which is usually professional services type engagement, how are you managing scope control on that scenario?

Jasmine Reynolds:

Oh, scope creep. Scope creep is our best friend. if you're doing a really good job of creating that backlog for each sprint you can add certain requirements that have been requested or certain adjustments. Not necessarily to the first sprint, but maybe to the second or where it makes sense to put it in your plan. I would say be very, very careful of that because it could push out the progress of your sprint. And that's why I said it's important to have a little wiggle room in there as well. Two to three day buffer, because if you deliver early, that's great. You can go back and ask for more feedback but being cognizant of taking on too much now, yes, you can add to your backlog, Setting expectations of, this is great feedback and I hear you. I want you to know that we're going to have to put this in sprint three or sprint four, but it will be addressed. So setting expectations is a huge part of this play.

Roman Trebon:

And Jasmine, when you guys first rolled this out for the onboarding team, did you train them on Scrum and Agile, or did you just kind of give them a, wow, this is what a backlog is, here's what you know, just like the high level, or how'd you guys go about that?

Jasmine Reynolds:

Well, the wonderful part of working for Pluralsight Flow is that everyone knows what Scrum is. But if I didn't work in this environment that was already very familiar, I would say yes, absolutely. giving everyone a high level understanding of the general plan for being scrum and being agile. I personally went and got scrum certified just because If I'm going to do it, I'm just gonna do it. And that was fun. But yeah, not necessary. But if you're into it, go for

Kevin Metzger:

This is a question that's a little bit off. but one that isn't going to surprise Roman. Looking at the methodologies in your onboarding process have you looked at AI or any AI tools and how they might assist you in the process from an Agile onboarding approach and leveraging some of the generative AI tools within that.

Jasmine Reynolds:

I have not gone down that rabbit hole because I know it will consume me. one thing that flow does for our software developers, and it's monitoring their activity, their production, their productivity and it's monitoring actually their sprints and their sprints their sprint creep and their scope creep I'm sure there. Is some AI out there that could be used from a onboarding customer success point of view, but from a software, yes, it's, it would be, something similar telling you like, Hey, you did this sprint and you had 50 percent scope creep, what planning did you do? What planning inefficiencies did you have? How can you do it better next time? Making sure that you're staying on top of those percentages and things like that. I'm sure there is a out there that could help with that.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see over time how, AI can enhance the agile process through onboarding. So, last question for me, Jasmine, is I am like all about like speed to value and quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. Like, so have you guys, as you have adopted the agile onboarding process, Has your time to value or the time to onboard reduced? Are you seeing less errors in the, you know, maybe changes through the onboarding process? Curious, kind of the benefits you've seen from introducing it.

Jasmine Reynolds:

A hundred percent time to value. A hundred percent satisfaction. onboarding processes are not typically all that fun. They're usually a little chaotic and, you know, there's support tickets and just all these things. So satisfaction, time to value. And increased our customer champions. Because they they trust us. They know, like I told Jasmine this feedback about this last sprint. I know that it's coming up and sprint for sprint three or whatever that ends up looking like and they delivered that and they're continuously ask me. It's not just a lick them stick them onboarding process. They are tailoring this to my company and our needs and it's being heard. So that trust is being built tremendously.

Roman Trebon:

I love that. when you were mentioning it, like the fact that you're taking voice of the customer right away through the onboarding experience and then they can actually see that turn into action right away,

Jasmine Reynolds:

right away,

Roman Trebon:

I mean that talking about setting the foundation up, for a long term relationship perspective. makes complete sense, It's like, wow, they actually do this. My voice is heard and they may change this on the fly That's great. Cool.

Kevin Metzger:

Building a foundation of trust really early in the relationship.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah, I love that. Kev, are you ready to get into the hard hitting questions

Kevin Metzger:

hard hitting questions.

Jasmine Reynolds:

Okay.

Kevin Metzger:

Jasmine, you ready for this? You buckled

Jasmine Reynolds:

I'm ready. Let's do it.

Kevin Metzger:

Actually, on the video off to your right, it looks like you've got some kind of lights going on and off onto some papers. Okay. I'm just wondering what it is, Dad.

Jasmine Reynolds:

So there's a light underneath my desk, and it's actually not going on and off, but for some reason it always looks like it's strobing on my camera. I don't know why it does that, but it's a solid, like, light just underneath.

Roman Trebon:

it.

Kevin Metzger:

that wasn't the hardest hitting question

Roman Trebon:

That was an easy one. Jasmine, early bird or night owl?

Jasmine Reynolds:

Night owl.

Roman Trebon:

Night owl.

Jasmine Reynolds:

Okay.

Roman Trebon:

Oh

Jasmine Reynolds:

yeah.

Kevin Metzger:

What is the one place you would like to visit next on your bucket list?

Jasmine Reynolds:

if I could go anywhere on my next trip it would be like Fiji. I'm an island girl I love ocean and water just Sign me up anywhere near some water

Roman Trebon:

Yeah, Fiji would be awesome. All right, so we've been asking this question to our guests, but this was a little I'm, very excited for your response. we've been asking guests If we visit where you live and you live in Pittsburgh, right? I do,

Jasmine Reynolds:

yes.

Roman Trebon:

What's the one place I have to visit and the one place I have to eat?

Jasmine Reynolds:

Okay. I have to say the Pittsburgher thing to say right. Must visit Mount Washington. Our city is beautiful. I got to go with permannies, even though it's like a staple. You got to try it, put French fries on everything.

Roman Trebon:

Oh, I love it. So I am from Pittsburgh as well. And so the audience may know that from before, but I was wondering what you'd say, and you've knocked it out of the ballpark. So the two correct answers, not washing permannies are the correct answer. that was awesome.

Jasmine Reynolds:

She put it.

Kevin Metzger:

So next question I usually ask about favorite sport or whatever, but I'm going to frame it a little differently. What's a secret golfer?

Jasmine Reynolds:

Oh, I love that you caught that because I wasn't sure if anyone actually clicked on that part of my LinkedIn. I'm trying to learn how to golf because deals are, before being a customer success manager, I was in sales and the reason why I moved to customer success is just like, I, my sales are great because of the relationships I've built. So customer success, sign me up. Sounds great. But even in sales, I knew that deals are made on the golf course. And being a woman is like, usually we don't get invited and it's usually because the guys are there and don't really play well. I wanted to be like the girl to go and like crush all the guys. So that's trying to learn golf.

Roman Trebon:

How's it going? How are you? What are you shooting?

Jasmine Reynolds:

it's in progress.

Kevin Metzger:

I think golf is always a game in progress.

Jasmine Reynolds:

My dad and I have five brothers. I'm the only girl. I'm the oldest, but all of my brothers. play golf and they're like, come out with us. I'm like, no, thank you. I don't want to play with y'all. I think that does not sound like fun time to me, but yeah, working on it.

Roman Trebon:

I love it. Well, you'd beat me Jasmine. I know that already. I can't speak for Kevin's golf game, but next year's U. S. Open is in Pittsburgh, the Oakland country club. So there you go.

Jasmine Reynolds:

It is

Roman Trebon:

Well Jasmine, where can our audience find more about you and the work you have going on?

Jasmine Reynolds:

LinkedIn is primarily where I'm at. I'm Starting a new venture. I'm doing a bit of rebranding for my customer success influencer. I am now going to be known as the conference correspondent. So I'm going to conferences and corresponding like the news people I have my first couple of conferences coming up this fall. And that will lead to more social media presence. So I'm building my like Tik TOK presence and, primarily Tik TOK, Instagram and LinkedIn, but LinkedIn for now. So LinkedIn is Jasmine C. Reynolds. Or just Jasmine Reynolds and yeah, that's why I post on my content.

Kevin Metzger:

what conferences can we find you at this fall?

Jasmine Reynolds:

So I will be at sisters and sales, which is in New York, next weekend. it's for women in sales encouraging each other at that conference, that's going to be a good one. I will also be in Amsterdam. For a conference. that's a high on the bucket list, Amsterdam. So that's in November and yeah, really excited about that one.

Roman Trebon:

Oh, awesome. check out Jasmine on LinkedIn, find out what conference she's going to be at. If you're in town, go see her. say hi, tell her. You heard her on the. Customer success playbook podcast Jasmine, thank you so much for joining us. I love what you're doing with scrum methodologies and onboarding and looking forward to hearing more about your new endeavor with the conferences. I'd love it. It's great. We can do some, Kev, we may want to take some TikTok tips from her after, after the show. So, let's break that down. All right. Audience, as always, thanks for listening. We really appreciate it. Again, check us out on LinkedIn. You can find me at Roman Trebon. Find Kevin at Kevin Metzger. We have our customer success playbook page. Go on there, direct message us tell us which guests and topics you'd like us to have on the show. As always, thanks for listening and take care. Keep on playin

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Kevin Metzger

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Roman Trebon

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