CXetera

What are the unwritten rules of career progression?

This week, Adam has a crank theory. But it's based in experience! As we progress in our careers, we go from "unwritten but self-imposed" rules ("I did XYZ so I deserve a promotion") to "written rules" ("The written career matrix says I need to do XYZ at this level") back to "unwritten but reality-tested" rules. This third phase becomes more important as you get into more senior, leadership, and unique roles... like, for example, a lot of roles in Scaled CX. Dee and Adam talk through some unwritten rules we've learned in our careers. Things like: * What it means to make work lighter for other people * Why emotional regulation is so important in crucial career conversations * Who you need on your side in a promotion panel * How to navigate the feedback vs. the "feedback behind the feedback" * How to balance craft skills with organizational savvy * Why promotions don't always go through the first time * How to avoid letting ratings and promotions affect your identity Hopefully you find this helpful in annual performance season!

Are you actually customer-centric?

Do you even customer, bro?  A lot of us in CX feel like we end up being the champions of the customer in our orgs, or even the heroes. But that's not a good thing, right? We shouldn't be relying on heroics to make sure that customers have a good experience with us. The better we are at retaining customers, the better it is for our bottom line (and even our top line, if they expand with us). That's why businesses are obsessed with Net Revenue Retention, Gross Revenue Retention, and churn rates. So you'd think we'd be better at understanding what actually makes our customers tick, right? But a lot of businesses have a hard time making the leap from looking at NRR, GRR, and churn rates on a spreadsheet to actually understanding what customers are trying to do with our products, what they get value from, how they prefer to interact with us, and what frustrates them. The antidote to this is to build a truly customer-centric organization. The "bad" news is that it's hard to cultivate that without total leadership buy-in and having customer focus in your DNA. But it's not impossible. In this episode, we're walking through the signs that show whether a company is customer-centric. You could audit your current company to see how it stacks up, or use this to evaluate a company you're considering joining. To make this harder, companies often do things that SOUND customer centric but actually aren't, so we're diving into some of those false signals too. Look for things like: * Are the company's OKRs and goals customer-centric? How much do they reflect whether you're building for and serving the customer adequately, vs. focusing purely on topline revenue? * What programs does the company have to capture and represent the voice of the customer in product development? Are they being given lip-service or are you actually developing things that customers find useful? * Does your release process take customers into account, or are you shipping in a way that doesn't prepare them for success? * Do end users actually like using your product, or do you mainly develop features that the economic buyer wants, and end users hate? * How do prioritization decisions get made? Are execs citing actual customer data, or customer names? Or are you hearing more about what [insert name of senior stakeholder] wants? * Where do teams like Scaled, Digital, Community, and Customer Education sit? In Marketing or in a Customer org? We get into these, and more, in the episode. But let us know what you think: what are the signs that you think differentiate a truly customer-centric org from one that's not, or just giving it lip service? Or tell us from the POV of businesses where you're the customer! What is your experience like working with orgs who are truly customer-centric vs ones who only claim to be?

What's up with our relationship to work?

No, really, what's up with it? Is it a good thing that our jobs create so much of our purpose in life, our communities, and our sense of worth? Is work becoming a RELIGION? In this episode, you can skip out on Berghain because we've got tickets to the hottest club in town: the CXetera book club. And in this edition, we're sharing our takeaways from the short-but-profound "On Work" by Derek Thompson. He takes a sociological look at why work has come to be such an important part of our identities (at least in America), and how recent factors like automation, AI, and remote work are all shifting our relationship to work. And we use the opportunity to talk about our own relationship to work and our careers. As two people who have been lucky enough to find success in our careers, we've seen that to succeed, we need to work hard. To work hard, we need to find meaning. And to find meaning, we need to bring a lot of our identities into the job. And that's worth unpacking. If you're like us, and you're wondering if you have the right relationship to work or whether you should take a different tack, this might be the episode AND the book for you.

What do you need to know about SaaS?

Are you looking to break into the CX field in SaaS (software as a service) or AI companies? Maybe you're new to the field altogether, or maybe you're trying to enter the tech world from another industry. If so, get ready for a bunch of new terms and assumptions about how things work! But worry not - Dee and Adam are here to help. We're going to walk you through some of the most common SaaS terms, describe how many SaaS leaders and execs (not to mention their board members!) look at revenue, and talk about the assumptions that many SaaS professionals make that might not be super obvious to you. We also recommend registering for this course by Jay Nathan if you're looking to dive much deeper into SaaS metrics and revenue: https://www.chiefcustomerofficer.io/coveryoursaas

Does CX need thought leaders?

How do you know which thought leaders to listen to? How do you approach sharing your own thought leadership? Can one lead with thoughts if one doesn't have a thought with which to lead? What are thoughts? In this "-etera" episode, we're tackling the deep thoughts around thought leadership. We trace the roots of thought leadership as a marketing strategy and how, with the rise of social media and particularly LinkedIn, the idea of personal branding and expertise have wrapped around each other like some sort of algorithmically driven ourobouros. Thanks to the rise of inbound marketing as a top-of-funnel lead generation tactic and personal branding becoming more critical to career opportunities, many of us feel the pressure to be louder. We need to post our cutting-edge practices on LinkedIn and share perfect-sounding frameworks and maturity models at conferences. And let's face it; when we do that, we sound smart! But these same tactics get abused by marketers and consultants with something to sell you, who haven't actually worked in the field. This means they often end up sharing things that sound good and intuitive, but don't work in reality. It's also difficult, if you're new to a field, to tell the difference between someone who is sharing earned insights and someone who knows the form of storytelling. So how can you tell the difference? In this episode, we share some of the signs of good and bad thought leadership, and also offer some suggestions to people who are looking to build their own careers. And if that's you, we're not trying to gatekeep. We promise. We came up in our careers at a time where things were a bit different, but we've also faced the temptation to share slick-sounding revelations. But paradoxically, now that we are your CX uncle and auntie, we want to offer you some encouragement in a different way: the stuff you actually don't find that interesting or maybe even are a bit embarrassed about? That's the stuff we want to hear about. That's the stuff that makes you and your program unique. Those are the thoughts that lead, because they're based in real experiences and real things you've tried and learned. When you're early in your career or new to a field, many of the frameworks, models, and even prepackaged concepts can seem like real revelations - because they help you make sense of a complicated landscape. But the best of those are based on nuanced experience. Focus on building that experience, and share what you're learning along the way.