Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity

by Frank Slootman

At all three companies, we made our technical support people the organizational owners of customer issues from end to end. We also moved technical support organizationally under the umbrella of engineering, so they all reported up to the same executive, our head of engineering. It is not desirable in our experience when engineering is removed from, or does not feel the effects of, decisions by tech support. Engineering has de facto a support role: tech support has to work with the engineering department whenever they exhaust the limits of their own abilities. It is another form of organizational alignment. While technical support owns customer issues, sales own the customer relationship, which cannot be relinquished to a customer success person. Our business is relationship oriented, not deal oriented or transactional. It is important that salespeople do not delegate part of their role to customer success types.