Startup CXO

Chief Customer Officer

Welcome to the New World

Nothing in my background would ever lead you to believe that I am a passionate advocate for customers—not even my part‐time job working in a bagel shop during college. Most of my roles have been quantitative and analytical, from my first job as an economic analyst, to my role in consulting, to all of my roles within startups. Over the past 20 years I have been a General Manager, a Product Manager, and had a variety of roles on the service side of the business. It wasn't really until the last few years of Return Path (before our exit) that everything came together and I became the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) with the global service organization reporting to me.

I've learned that to be an effective CCO, you need to think like a generalist because you'll be collaborating across the organization, and also externally with channel partners, distributors, and sales reps, and constantly reminding employees that the company exists because of customers. The purpose of any business is to do the jobs that the customer is hiring them to do. It's easy to lose sight of that as you grow. A big part of what the leaders of a business need to do is stay laser‐focused on what that job is, and make sure that you're doing it better than anyone else and making it as easy as possible for your customers to do that job. If you lose sight of that, you'll start to see your churn increase, you'll see customers defect to competitors and leave space in the ...