CSP - S3 E1 - Roman Trebon - Keep, Kill, Start

In this inaugural episode of Season 3, co-host Roman Trebon introduces the powerful Keep, Kill, Start framework for driving continuous improvement in both personal and professional contexts. This strategic approach helps teams and individuals identify what's working, what needs to be eliminated, and what new initiatives should be implemented for optimal success in 2025.

Detailed Analysis

The episode delves into the practical application of the Keep, Kill, Start framework across multiple organizational levels. Roman Trebon presents this methodology as a versatile tool that can drive meaningful change in both virtual and in-person team environments. The discussion highlights several critical business insights:

1. Organizational Adaptation: The framework provides a structured approach to organizational change management, allowing teams to systematically evaluate and evolve their processes.
2. Virtual Team Dynamics: The episode addresses the unique challenges of maintaining team cohesion in remote work environments, emphasizing the importance of intentional relationship-building beyond task-focused interactions.
3. Implementation Strategy: Trebon emphasizes the critical nature of follow-through, recommending quarterly check-ins to ensure accountability and maintain momentum on identified changes.
4. Cultural Integration: The discussion demonstrates how personal and professional development can be integrated through a single framework, promoting holistic growth and sustainable change.
5. Resource Optimization: By explicitly identifying elements to eliminate ("kill"), the framework helps organizations address the common pitfall of continually adding new initiatives without removing outdated ones.

Business Applications

The Keep, Kill, Start framework presents several practical applications for business leaders:

• Strategic Planning: Use the framework to evaluate and refine organizational processes
• Team Development: Apply the methodology in both individual and group settings
• Change Management: Implement structured approaches to organizational evolution
• Resource Allocation: Make informed decisions about where to invest time and resources
• Performance Optimization: Regularly assess and adjust operational effectiveness

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Transcript

Kevin Metzger: 0:24

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Customer Success Playbook Podcast. We're bringing you actionable insights, quick tips, and fresh ideas for driving customer success in 2025 and beyond. I'm one of your hosts, Kevin Metzger, and this year we'll be introducing a brand new format. Each week we'll release three mini episodes with our guests. On Mondays, you'll hear our guest's number one tip, for customer success. On Wednesdays, we'll pose one big question, and on Fridays, we'll explore the impact of AI on that week's topic. In addition, we're talking to our guests about a specific business topic each week that may be different from customer success, but we're going to talk about how customer success impacts finance, marketing, product, sales. You name it. We're going to talk about it today. I'm thrilled to kick off the year with our co host Roman Trebon, who is going to get us started as our first guest in the new format. Roman, welcome to the show. Happy new year.

Roman Trebon: 1:26

Welcome to welcome to our, my own show with you, right, Kevin? It's a weird thing. I, well, I'm glad I'm excited. I love, I'm excited for the new format and yeah, I'm excited to kick us off here.

Kevin Metzger: 1:35

Awesome. So let's jump right in. What's your number one tip for preparing your team for success in 2025?

Roman Trebon: 1:45

Number one tip, Kev. So I love this exercise called the keep, kill, start approach, this can be a meeting. You don't even have to have a meeting for this, but I conduct it personally with myself, with my team one on one and then collectively as a team, right? And so what the concept is, I find this exercise. It's great as you enter a new year. We're now in the beginning, beginning of 2025, but you can do this at any time. And it really helps with continuous reflection on, what are the things that matter and what do we need to change? So keep. You know, it's as simple as that. What, what, you know, you start to identify the processes or the habits or the things that you're doing as a team or as an individual that's working really well, right? What should we continue doing? I want to keep this, make sure that it doesn't change, that we continue to do this into the new year, right? That's, pretty easy. Then you have the kill, right? What should we remove? those can be unproductive habits. outdated tools, ineffective processes, meetings that don't add value. Kill those, get rid of them, right? And then I like this start, right? So what are these new initiatives, new experiments, strategies? What should we start doing that we're not doing today, right? And it's a real simple framework. Keep, kill, start. Again, it works both personally and not just with WorkEv. It works great for work. It works both for yourself as well, right? I do this as a, just for, just for myself and my day to day life. What should I start, start kill and keep? I'll share Kev an anecdote. we just did this at the end of the year with my team. one of the things that came out of our our, our keep kill start meetings were, you know, we, we are all virtual. My team is all over the country. not just the United States, Canada as well. one thing that came out loud and clear in terms of we need to start doing is getting more time as a team together, collectively to bond and to meet outside of. So we do a lot of quote, unquote work, right? We, you know, there is this need of connection. This theme of connection came up so many times on these end of year meetings. And, and we meet, we do meet often, but it's usually around, you know, issues, client problems, a project, you name it. But we all said, you know, one thing we want to do is meet and, have a trivia day, Have a fun game, something to just get, you know, build trust, get to know your, your colleagues better. And that's something we weren't really doing. so I've invested in some software called crowd party, which is a super cool virtual, if you have a virtual team, a super fun platform. So we're going to start doing that every quarter and I'm excited to get that going. personally something I should start doing. Okay. And, and, and so I, I need to start doing things I enjoy more often. Okay. And so I, here's a couple of examples, you know, you would think, say Roman, you, you enjoy doing it. Why don't you do that stuff? It sounds simple, but I don't, I love going to the movies, sitting in those nice recliners, seeing the new attraction. I went to one movie last year, Kev. One. I didn't do it at all. I like playing basketball. I like shooting basketball, I probably picked up a basketball twice last year, Twice. So this year, reflecting on personally, what do I want to start doing? I want to start to do those things. So what does that mean for me? That means I need to start carving out time, I found a great theater. You and I live in Atlanta. There's a great theater that has a 9am showing of movies. That's perfect. That fits into my calendar and what I want to do, which is to start seeing more movies. And same as the basketball, right? if I have a stressful day, a busy day, and I need a few minutes to unwind, I like getting the basketball out, shooting for 10, 15 minutes. It gets my mind completely off what I was thinking about, what I was ruminating about. So, That's a good example of start keep, kill, and start. And so if you're listening, start it with yourself, Just come up with a list, jot it down on a piece of paper, Maybe start with yourself before you introduce it to a team. What are you doing that you want to start kill and keep? If you do it with a team, Kevin, I don't know if you've done this with the team before, but you know, it's really got to have open dialogue, the key to this concept is follow up, I like to check in quarterly There's a lot of actions that come out of this. Make sure you get those actions off the ground. And then check in quarterly. There's no point to, identifying what to start and what to kill if you never do it. So you've got to have traction or the exercise loses a lot of value.

Kevin Metzger: 6:25

Yeah. Roman, what an excellent for the audience, the keep kill start framework is fantastic. It's one of the, one of the critical things I think that we all forget when we start setting goals is that you've got to look at what you're doing. when you start looking at what you want to. Start doing next. A lot of times it's all additive, and if you don't think about what you want to kill, you're going to run into the problems of not having enough time to get everything accomplished. So, excellent tip. Thank you for this. Great podcast. Thanks for joining us today on the Customer Success Playbook. Like, subscribe, share. We hope you love this new format. Tell us what you think in the comments and we'll see you next time on the customer success playbook. And until then, keep on playing