Startup CXO

Chapter 130Fractional Chief Customer Officer

Amy Mustoe

I have been in customer‐facing roles my entire career, leading teams in customer support and product to customer experience and success. In my fractional roles I was working as a principal consultant for The Success League. I love building up and building out customer‐obsessed teams for startups and growth companies.

One thing I've learned as a fractional executive, is that you need to move fast and make the right moves. There is typically no time to do experiments. Your honeymoon period is condensed, and you need to get the lay of the land and show your value quickly. It does help to have done this a few times and have experienced successes and failures with certain models. There is no one‐size‐fits‐all solution, so you have to be able to look at the puzzle pieces and figure out where the customer success team needs to go and make swift decisions. You won't have all the time in the world to sit down and interview people and ask lots of questions. You have to hit the ground running and have a pretty good track record and instincts about how things could work. Although it has a VP or a CCO title, this interim role may not have any management or director level support. You are the executive, the director, and the manager. You don't just attend meetings and give orders. You are the strategic arm and the doer and trainer.

For the customer organization there are a lot different ways that you can work with Sales, Product, and ...