The Customer Success Playbook

Customer Success Playbook S3 E35 - Ken Sandy - Solve Meaningful Customer Problems

• Kevin Metzger • Season 3 • Episode 35

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In this dynamic midweek episode of the Customer Success Playbook, Kevin Metzger and Roman Trebon are back with product leadership veteran Ken Sandy. This time, Ken tackles one of the most pressing challenges in modern product management: how to juggle the urgent demand for quick wins with the strategic need for long-term customer value. He delivers practical frameworks, witty anecdotes, and powerful reframes that will resonate far beyond the product team.

Detailed Description: We’ve all felt the squeeze: stakeholders want that feature live yesterday, while customers expect thoughtful innovation. In this energizing conversation, Ken Sandy—author of The Influential Product Manager—returns to the Customer Success Playbook to answer one big question: how can product leaders (and cross-functional teams) balance short-term revenue goals with long-term innovation?

Ken starts with a provocative truth: solving meaningful customer problems should inherently deliver business value. If it doesn’t, the strategy might be missing the mark. He then walks through three steps to align customer-centric strategy with day-to-day execution:

  1. Elevate customer value metrics to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with revenue goals.
  2. Build and own a strategic roadmap that provides clarity and intention beyond reactive requests.
  3. Track and communicate resource allocation so trade-off decisions are rooted in data, not drama.

What follows is a masterclass in how influence, transparency, and structured thinking can replace the chaos of ad hoc demands. Ken’s insights extend beyond product management. Customer success teams, account managers, and business leaders will find immediately usable tools to help their organizations solve the right problems for the right reasons.

Don’t miss this sharp, relatable, and practical playbook for aligning execution with vision—no matter what department you call home.

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Check out https://funnelstory.ai/ for more details about Funnelstory. You can also check out our full video review of the product on YouTube at https://youtu.be/4jChYZBVz2Y.

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Roman Trebon:

Customer success.

Kevin Metzger:

Hello and welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Metzker, here with my co-host Roman Reon. It's Wednesday and we're joined again by Ken Sandy, author of the Influential Product Manager, Roman. You think we should start with some, uh, some fun questions?

Roman Trebon:

Yeah. We can't, we can't get into the one big question until we get into like a few smaller questions. Right. We gotta lead'em up, right? So get get'em built up here. Alright, Ken, you ready for this Buckle up? Sure. Where's one place you'd like to visit that you've never been?

Ken Sandy:

I'm a huge traveler. A lot of people don't know that about me, but I've taken years off in my career to go and do backpacking and, and, uh, visiting great cultures. And so I love it. I like to collect small countries. So, uh, the last few years I've picked off Andorra Vatican, San Marino, and Luxembourg, but Lichtenstein is still like not in my, my clutches yet, so I'm gonna have to get that. Ah. That one. I have to say though that the answer to that specific question is that I, I'm originally from Australia, spent most of my career in, in, in San Francisco, and I really haven't done Australia ju uh, justice yet. And in particular it's red center. Just imagine like the size of Europe, or two thirds the size of the contiguous states of the United States is empty red. Beautiful scenery and just these beautiful desolate landscapes and amazing ancient history. So I gotta say, that's where I've gotta go next. I love

Roman Trebon:

it in our first Stein, uh, reference on the show CV in case you're keeping track of it all. There you go.

Ken Sandy:

You're

Roman Trebon:

home City, San

Ken Sandy:

Francisco. Actually, I have, uh, recently relocated to Melbourne. I'm, I'm doing a, a, an interesting experiment professionally being bi continental. Uh, we'll, we'll just see how that goes.

Kevin Metzger:

Very cool. So if we came to visit Melbourne, what's one place we should, uh, visit and, and eat?

Ken Sandy:

So Melbourne is not like you would imagine, say Sydney or even New York, very showy. Like, oh, there's places you have to go and like see Melbourne's a little bit more like. You've gotta get to know it over a little bit more time and just sort of gently introduce yourself and get it to introduce and reveal the, the fantastic culture that we have here. Uh, so you just have to get outta the neighborhoods. Different communities, different neighborhoods have completely different sort of styles, cuisine, communities, and vibe. I would've said, you got to go and taste Melbourne coffee. But I don't drink coffee, which is like a bit shocking to the average Melburnian. Um, it's like, I'm, I'm lucky I'm not ostracized for that, but everyone talks a lot about that being the place you've gotta, you know, go, go try a coffee. But I really do think. You know, you can't go wrong head, you know, land in the city, head off in a direction and experience the neighborhoods.

Roman Trebon:

Last one, uh, Ken, uh, do you have a, a book, TV show or movie recommendation? Anything you're consuming that our, uh, our audience should be have on their radar?

Ken Sandy:

Yeah. Um, I like to flip through a lot of my fellow, uh, professionals books to sort of see what folks are saying in particular. I love sort of getting nuggets of frameworks and sort of new ways of. Looking at things, and I actually picked out, uh, two that I, I kind of liked, uh, recently. The first is, uh, Theresa Torres's, uh, continuous Discovery Habits. Oh, yeah. Really? Like just how she's unpicked, uh, how we think about opportunities and solutions. I've actually even used that in, in a real environment and even built upon those frameworks to help people in particular. You know, stay in the right space from problem to solution opportunity, being very clear on what objectives, but also to stop people from gravitating immediately to one solution as if that's the only way to solve a particular problem. So I kind of like, I do like, uh, what she has to say there. She is a, uh, wonderful product leader and she wrote radical product thinking, and she's just really talking about the mindsets around innovation. And how to really approach it, I think in with, with integrity, with clarity, uh, objectivity and being kind of, uh, radical enough and you're thinking that you're really freeing yourself up. So I really like, uh, what, what she says and, and radical, and I've known each other now for a while, and, and her book was the second that the publisher that my book. Was on product management that, uh, was published. So, uh, it's really great to see that we are putting a series of product management books out there with, uh, with some fresh thinking. That's

Kevin Metzger:

fantastic. All right, Ken, let's jump into our big question for today. How do product leaders balance the pressure for quick wins, like immediate feature releases or revenue boosts against the need to invest in long-term innovation and customer-centric strategies.

Ken Sandy:

So let me, let me start with the unhelpful answer. I actually don't know why those things are often seen in conflict. You know, if you're in the business of solving meaningful customer problems, in turn you should be able to extract your fair value of, and revenue in particular from solving those problems. So I'm not quite sure why we're, we are, and we are constantly faced with that tension between innovation and customer-centric strategies. With releasing tomorrow's features and getting, you know, revenue boosts and I, I think the problem actually comes down often to, uh, shared vision, strategy, purpose, clarity of what needs to be addressed and for whom. So being super customer centric, so obviously product leaders need to help fill that gap and, uh, without it, it's very easy for probably one a, a good common example of where these things tend to depart and get. Kind of, uh, misaligned is, say, pursuing some largely unsustainable, maybe disruptive sales deal to hit some kind of revenue goal, which, let's face it, sales team are incentivized to hit revenue goals. And if you are not, it's a product person. Balancing that with, I think, guardrails around the vision and, and ultimately strategy. That you want to, uh, the, the problems you want to be solving for the right segment and being clear of what your tech can and can't do, you're gonna get yourself into trouble here all the time. So, uh, that is a big gap to fill. So the helpful answer is there are a couple of steps that I find useful to. Get your company, your teams on, on the path to being able to do a better job of balancing these, these things. So the first, uh, the first step is to take whatever goals you have in an organization will almost certainly include revenue and, you know, some kind of financial goals. So the first is, how do you elevate customer value goals to at least the same level as pursuing say? Short term revenue goals. Now these can still be financial like for example, rather than simply focusing on revenue, can you build an understanding on customer lifetime value, retention and churn, unit economics, the things that, that are naturally more aligned. Financially with you delivering long-term sustainable value to a market segment as opposed to getting a pop of revenue on your, on your business side. Or they can actually be completely very complimentary, but they're, they're kind of metrics that are much more about the customer, such as adoption rates. Time to onboarding, time to first value one of my favorites, repeat usage. So where possible you pick these sort of leading metrics that really get at our customers on the path to getting value out of my products and services and try to. Make sure that they're elevated from a transparency and a conversation perspective, at least to, to the same amount as revenue. Now you've got at least some framework in which you can have some trade off conversations, and you can talk about what it is that you're doing to further all of the goals. So that's the first step. The second step is. Having a roadmap that you own that talks about the strategic things that you wish to build as a product manager so you're not leaving so much to chance that it's going to be largely dictated by people coming and asking you for things. So don't be in order. Take a pm. Mm-hmm. Have a strategic point of view. What does, it doesn't have to be groundbreaking. It doesn't have to be even correct. It can be something you can learn from, but it does clarify the priorities you believe that need to be invested in, and you can break that out in a way that you now have milestones along the way to actually achieve, uh, your goals. Uh, most importantly though, this will allow you to talk about different streams of work. What are you doing to further your strategic roadmap versus what are you doing to respond to customer intake or short term ask? Uh, I find that even the best teams might only be 50 to 60% of their resources on a strategic roadmap, but you're making progress. Then, so you're now able to sort of talk about different strains of work and even prioritize them differently, so long as you've kind of allocated your resources. So I like to track that and actually make sure that we are making some progress against the strategic roadmap, which of course has to exist. And now I've got a separate process by which I can take and prioritize these asks separately without necessarily disrupting. So splitting out your resources, being clear on that allocation is key. And the third step. Tracking that and making sure that you are showing basically the pie chart. Here's where we're really spending our time and invariably. The vision coming in, and you'll have your stakeholders be like, yeah, that sounds great. Let's do 60% against the roadmap and 40% against everything else. Invariably, you find that it's reversed or worse. Now I actually have the evidence to say we are not making the progress that we said we would against the strategic needs. Each of these requests that were coming in were reasonable. On their own, but as a whole, they're meaning that we're not making progress against our longer term goals at all. And that changes the conversation.'cause it's based on real data, based on what's really happening. We, uh, as pm I'm just revealing the data and, and now allowing us to have a true, a real conversation about the trade offs going forward. And usually that's when you really start shifting to, uh, a better balance.

Roman Trebon:

Ken, I love that. And I love, you know, you tied in talking about the business goals upfront. I'm, I'm sure as those. Requests come in, you have that 60 40, whatever the split in. It's a good way to decide, right, where as you decide on priorities, what, what stays in, what goes out. You have those business goals, you know what they are. You can kind of really help frame those, those decisions, which is, which is good stuff.

Kevin Metzger:

Roman, along one of the, along those lines, one of the other things can, I guess that really does help, and one of the things that I've worked with my CS M teams to do when. Working with customers is to bring product into like our EBRs or QBR, to have the conversations with the customers. And with encouragement to share what the roadmap looks like. I think a lot of, well, one, having it is a great thing when you do have it, that's fantastic. But the other thing is, is as you get customer requests, oftentimes customer requests can fit into the roadmap and like they do fit into the roadmap. They're not necessarily something that. Are off to the side and it's a good way to prioritize what's next within the roadmap and how you're going too, so that you've got the customer or request mm-hmm. Coming in and aligning and it can kind of show where the alignment lays and hey, even are we on target with what we're thinking, um, it's right. Provides for additional, uh, additional information up to management and in where we want to target and how we want our roadmap to, uh, to aim. Sure.

Ken Sandy:

I, I will say that, uh, it allows you to do a couple of different things. Number one, when you do hear these requests, you can start hearing the requests across. Market rather than in an individual customer. And so you can start thinking about like, what am I really trying to solve here? Is this, I'm hearing this request, but it's differently presented and often presented as solutions. How do I take a step back and say, what is actually going on here? And that's probably the more important strategic roadmap item. There's some capability that's missing that they're trying to do certain things around the lack of that capability. And that's what you wanted. You wanna find out. So you can't. You can't just listen to one customer. You've gotta listen to the whole set of customers and still do the thinking yourself about what's really needed. The second thing is, uh, reminding the customer of the value you are already delivering and the priorities that are already there. And this can even be from the customer's point of view. You may have already delivered the functionality. They're just not adopted it yet. To them, that's like a future roadmap. So yeah, look at the things that they're not using that they could be using. Get them excited about your roadmap of the things that you're gonna help them adopt and use, because in their mind, it's, it's still the future if they haven't got the value out of it. Just because you've delivered the technology doesn't mean it's done. Uh, and so being able to, uh, talk about. Excite them about the things that they're already getting, will, will often just lead to the natural conclusion of, of course we can wait for that other thing. If we're gonna get this. Usually it's more important, they're just not necessarily, uh, you know, it's the, it's the new, the fellow, the new feature thinking. It's always about the next thing, the next thing. It's not actually true. Are you getting the value out of what we've already delivered and how do we improve and on on that?'cause that's usually the. The more valuable thing for you. So these conversations are critical because you can point to things to either defer the asks, or you see a pattern of asks that actually better inform your strategic roadmap.

Roman Trebon:

Kevin, you know, we could replace product manager with CSM or account manager or support, and what Ken's talking about relates to all of it, right? Listen to clients understand the value of what they have today. I mean, it's so relatable. It, it reminds me of like, you know, kids playing, they just play basketball, but the kids that play baseball and soccer and basketball, they're so more well-rounded, right? It's you, you learn from, from that diversity. So. Ken. Uh, Ken, this is amazing stuff. You're, we didn't scare you off. You're coming back Friday for our, our Friday segment. Right. I'm, I'm looking forward to it. Awesome. So on Friday, you're, you're, we're gonna talk ai Kev, you're fr Friday AI day. You're gonna talk about how AI is reshaping product leadership, especially in terms of data-driven decision making and strategic innovation. So our, for our audience. Please subscribe, give our show a like comment on it. If you subscribe, you'll be notified so when the Friday episode comes out, you'll get a notification. Boom, Friday, AI is available. Listen to Ken now. Until then, we really appreciate you listening and Kevin, as always, keep

Kevin Metzger:

on

Roman Trebon:

playing.

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Kevin Metzger

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Roman Trebon

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Ken Sandy

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