The Founder’s Guide to Building a V1 of Customer Success

vector research partners ( aka V4RP )

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The Founder’s Guide to Building a V1 of Customer Success

Customer Success (CS) always starts as part of a founder’s job. You talk to users, you handle their issues, you make sure they’re getting value. But eventually, the math changes.

“When you start to build a meaningful volume of customers, you can quickly find yourself spending more than half your day resolving problems,” says Stephanie Berner, SVP of Customer Success at Atlassian. “Customer success is about getting your product into customers’ hands and helping them succeed as fast as possible. If founders are spending all their time solving support issues instead of driving the mission forward, it’s time to formalize CS.”

CS isn’t just a support function. Done right, it’s a growth lever: connecting product, sales, and go-to-market into a tight feedback loop. But building CS from scratch is its own skillset: Who do you hire first? Where should the org report? What systems and metrics matter?

Berner has led CS at LinkedIn, Box, Medallia, and now Atlassian. She’s built the function from the ground up multiple times and knows exactly where founders get stuck. In this exclusive with v4rp, she lays out a playbook for building your first CS org — from the first hire to metrics to rituals that scale.

Step 1: Get the First Hire Right

Your first CS hire is leverage. Make the wrong call, and you’ll just create more work for yourself.

Who you hire depends on the type of customer problem you’re solving:

• Hire for industry knowledge if your customers need deep guidance (e.g. retail workflows, accounting, sales ops).
• Hire for technical skills if success depends on integrations, data migrations, or backend setup that customers can’t do alone.

Berner’s rule of thumb: start with a doer, not a manager. An individual contributor (IC) who can go deep on product, roll up their sleeves, and fix things fast.

“Ideally, you can find someone who’s been a manager before or has leadership potential,” says Berner. “But at the beginning, you need someone who will jump straight into the weeds.”

The exception: if you’ve waited too long and know you’ll need a team of 5+ hires immediately, start with a manager who can recruit and build.

Traits to screen for in CS V1 hires:

• Speed + curiosity → Learns the product fast and wants to understand the customer.
• Clear communication → Acts as the feedback loop to product and leadership.
• Bias for action → Sees a broken workflow and fixes it without being told.
• Customer empathy → Has chosen customer-facing roles before, not by accident.

Some of Berner’s best hires came from unexpected backgrounds — a Broadway actor, a nonprofit fundraiser — but they shared these traits.

Warning: Don’t over-index on empathy. You want someone who cares about the customer, but also balances business needs.

Step 2: Design the Interview Loop

CS hires will work cross-functionally from day one. Your interview loop should reflect that:

• A founder (closest to customers).
• Head of product or engineering.
• Someone from go-to-market (sales, marketing).

Go beyond generic interview questions. Berner’s favorites:

• “Tell me about a time you saw a problem and fixed it.” → Bias for action.
• “What’s the most impactful piece of feedback you’ve received?” → Self-awareness.
• “Your boss quits, you take over the team. What would you change or keep?” → System-level thinking.
• “What does great customer service feel like vs bad?” → Empathy.

Berner also recommends scenario-based questions (“A big customer is angry about a bug — what’s your plan?”). The goal isn’t the perfect playbook answer, but whether they can break down the problem calmly and build a plan.

Red flag: candidates who scoff at hypotheticals or get flustered when faced with messy customer issues.

Step 3: Align Compensation with Behavior

Don’t copy a sales comp plan. CS works best on base + bonus tied to outcomes, not heavy quota.

Berner’s guidance:

• Tie incentives to renewal %, adoption, or expansion metrics.
• Only attach explicit renewal quotas if CS is directly responsible for transactions.
• Be intentional: “If you put 80% of comp on renewals, that’s where the team will focus — even if adoption is tanking.”

The principle: design comp to reflect where you want CSMs spending time.

Step 4: Avoid the Top 3 Hiring Mistakes

From Berner’s experience, CS hires fail for three predictable reasons:

1. Customer aversion → They don’t actually like working with people.
2. Over-indexing on customer pain → They advocate so hard for the customer that they can’t balance company priorities.
3. Can’t take feedback → CS is high-velocity and cross-functional. People who can’t adapt quickly won’t survive.

Spot these patterns in the first 90 days and address them fast.

Step 5: Place CS in the Org

Where CS reports determines how it’s perceived:

• Report to CEO → Best early on. Keeps customer signal in the CEO’s direct line of sight.
• Report to CRO → Works if most growth comes from existing customers. Aligns revenue + retention in one place.
• Don’t report to CPO → CS is a GTM function, not product. Align it with revenue, not roadmap.

Step 6: Figure Out Team Size

There’s no magic formula, but here’s a starting benchmark for CSM-to-account ratios:

• Strategic (> $500k ACV): 5–10 accounts / CSM
• Enterprise: 20–25 accounts / CSM
• Mid-market: 40–50 accounts / CSM
• SMB: 80–120 accounts / CSM

Dial ratios up/down depending on product complexity, onboarding effort, and renewal difficulty.

Step 7: Build Systems Early

Your first hires will be firefighting, but you need repeatable systems to scale. Berner recommends starting with two:

1. Support tickets → Have a structured way to log and categorize customer issues (even if it’s just a shared inbox or Slack channel).
2. Onboarding checklist → Codify the 8–10 steps every customer goes through to reach value. Keep V1 lightweight (Google Sheet is fine).

Without these, you’ll scale chaos.

Step 8: Track the Right Metrics

Early CS teams often forget measurement. Don’t. Metrics give clarity and focus.

Start with these:

1. Customer health = usage (seats purchased vs deployed vs active).
2. Renewal rate (retention of customers, not just revenue).

Add later: NPS, CSAT, time-to-value, onboarding milestones.

On churn: Treat it as a symptom. Run structured interviews to categorize churn reasons into controllable (adoption, onboarding, missing features, poor support) vs non-controllable (budget cuts, acquisitions, strategy shifts, champion leaves). Then fix what you can.

Step 9: Create Rituals That Scale Culture

CS isn’t just a team — it’s a company-wide habit. Berner recommends:

• Always ask: “What’s in it for the customer?” before major decisions.
• Regular cross-functional meetings → CS with product, sales, eng. Keep the customer visible everywhere.
• Celebrate wins → When a customer launches or gives great feedback, spotlight your CS team.

Small rituals build customer empathy across the org.

The Playbook

To recap, Berner’s zero-to-one CS framework:

1. Hire ICs first (curious, fast, empathetic, action-oriented).
2. Use cross-functional interview loops and scenario-based questions.
3. Align comp with outcomes, not quotas.
4. Avoid the three hiring pitfalls.
5. Place CS under the CEO (or CRO, depending on phase).
6. Use benchmark ratios for team sizing.
7. Stand up support + onboarding systems early.
8. Track usage and renewals before fancy metrics.
9. Build rituals that put the customer at the center.

Founders will always own customer success at the start. But once it starts eating your day, it’s time to build the org. Get the first hire right, put systems in place, and orient around customer outcomes. Done well, CS won’t just reduce churn — it’ll drive growth.

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