Top 10 Product-Led Questions To Ask At Your Next Interview
1. What is your retention rate?
Holy grail of the CSM role. How well are you serving your customers and do the customers return / repeat buy your product. Best in class retention rates are approximately 90%+.If you want to go deeper on the topic to include expansion you can ask about NDR or Next Dollar Retention. NDR is a crucial and foundational metric for a growing SaaS business with 120%+ marking best in class rates. Ultimately this means that the business is growing and retaining customers at a high rate. These are rare so count yourself lucky if you work for an organization today achieving 120%+ NDR.Listening for... how are things going this quarter, year, last few years with specific retention rates (eg. 78%, 85%, 92%). You want to understand the trend (up/down).Follow up question: How has the product hurt or helped this metric in the past 12 months? This question flows nicely into the next question.
2. What product features from last year did you release that customer’s absolutely love?
This is a game changer for a manager and a CSM. For a CSM you will want to know what you can show off to your customers that really solves their pain so that you can show value and continue to develop a relationship with your customer.
3. What product feature would you deprecate if you were made CPO for the day?
Listening for...
a) how attached/invested the person you are interviewing with is to the product / customer experience and
b) the structure of decisioning at the organization. The latter is about how they first respond to the exercise in holding the power over the product and how this is a keen reflection of how the organization makes decisions about the product roadmap (eg. HIPPO or customer obsessed).
4. What is your customer's #1 complaint about your product?
What type of problems are you going to be dealing with and how much of a frustration are these problems with customers?Follow up question: Does the solution require engineering to solve? or how many customer problems require engineering to solve? Engineering is awesome though, they have a core job and it tends not to be fixing the product. You will want to understand the turnaround time for engineering to get involved. The more engineering has to be involved the worse the customer experience because delays are built in to the process. There will always be a product push, an end of quarter need to hit a milestone and that means that you may have to hold on to a steaming bag of problem for weeks or months without a customer solution.
5. What is your support SLA?
SLA or service level agreement is the #1 metric for Support organizations in SaaS businesses. Best in class.
6. What is your product's North Star metric?
A north star metric helps to drive your company's growth by highlighting a number that best demonstrates how your product is delivering value to customers.Listening for... Revenue is a lagging indicator of success and not a fit for customer value and how an organization can rally around a single metric - plus it is is terribly demotivating to only work for a revenue goal.How is the organization rallying around delivering customer outcomes? There is a maturity curve to having a North Star metric and frankly, there's a lot of organizations operating without this metric. As a product-led CSM it's important you are aware of this topic...
More...
- what is the support experience like?
- SLA %?
- what do customers say?
- What is your growth rate?
- What’s on the product roadmap?
- What determines the work that product and engineering teams work on?
- a lack of product growth means little excitement or career opportunity growth for csms. how can your business expect to thrive if its not changing to reflect the needs of your customers
