What a product-led cloud migration means for 3 key teams in your organization

We all know how challenging it can be to work in a group–especially as remote work finds some form of permanence in our lives. Usually, though, the friction comes down to one thing: the team isn’t rallying around a common goal. A cloud migration, like any other group effort, requires collaboration from the entire company (in this case, a rallying around the product itself). 

Having the product team take the lead is the logical approach, but with this shift comes new opportunities for teams across the organization to leverage the product in new ways. Besides, there’s one objective that everyone can agree must remain top of mind: the customer. 

While cloud migrations present myriad internal changes, there isn’t a more important time to be tapped into to your customers’ wants and needs. Remember, this is a big shift for your existing users, and ensuring the transition is seamless will keep them from reverting back to the old version or abandoning your product altogether. As you pursue a product-led cloud migration, here are three ways other teams in your organization can leverage the product to improve the customer experience:

Sales: Personalized outreach at scale

Sales teams often encounter a few key pain points in their day-to-day, including: personalizing their responses appropriately, understanding prospect engagement, and determining outreach frequency. While these will likely never go away in full, a move to the cloud empowers salespeople to use insights from the product to revitalize out-of-date processes and ultimately bring in stronger results. 

With the availability of product usage data, sales can tailor their outreach based on what users are doing in the product (goodbye, generic pitches). Sales teams can also take advantage of the added transparency between them and their prospects and make more accurate forecasts. Which features are most widely used and which have become moot? Where are users spending the bulk of their time, and when do they tend to drop off? 

Having access to this data helps salespeople build a collaborative experience with their customers, especially as they move further in the sales cycle. By understanding how customers are using the product over time, sales can better identify the most promising contenders for cross-sell and upsell opportunities–bonus points if they’re able to communicate in-app to drive these conversions. The ability to leverage insights at every touchpoint along a customer’s journey cannot be overstated; data from your product can re-inform old practices, and putting it to use is a modern sales superpower.

Customer success: Amplified feedback

Customer success is, by nature (and name), the team most dialed into the customer experience. The switch from on-premise to cloud technology is not only a big change for the company, but it presents a challenge for existing customers as well. Chances are you’re moving quickly and constantly working to improve your product. Customer retention is now a key KPI, and it will hinge on how effectively you can guide users through these newest iterations and updates. 

Luckily, customer success teams are experts at turning hard-to-grasp findings into serviceable outcomes. The shift to the cloud puts quantitative and qualitative data at customer success’ fingertips, allowing them to track customer health over time and take action when they notice any dips. Not only does this make CS a reliable confidante to the user, but also a key collaborator with the product team to promptly hand off any meaningful feedback that requires immediate attention.

Product ops: Data-backed experimentation

Product operations is the ultimate liaison between the product team and their partners across the company, and therefore critical in a change as significant as a cloud migration. With an uptick of data available from your cloud product, product ops is responsible for ensuring that data is collected, combed through, and coalesced, ultimately to be translated into digestible insights that inform business strategy across the board. 

This data and feedback gathering gives product ops a deeper understanding of the product, end-to-end. Now, they can better identify priorities and advancement opportunities on the product roadmap. Product ops teams can also track user behavior as features go from beta to general availability, and identify power users who would be good candidates for references and case studies. 

Speaking of releasing new features, one of the main reasons companies move to the cloud is the ability to be more agile and iterate on the product continuously. The fast pace that accompanies this attitude needs to be matched with streamlined processes. Overseeing product experimentation, product ops keeps a pulse on every experiment to ensure that they are discrete, documented, and directive. These experiments are a catalyst for deploying successive iterations, all the more supported by the visibility provided by a cloud product.

The wealth of information and breadth of new ideas that a cloud product provides requires a company united by vision. This is not a time to simply dole out responsibilities, but a chance to collaborate around the product and use it to create a better experience for yours users–both new and existing. Teams that find unity in a shared mission will come out the other side of a cloud migration with a stronger product and, more importantly, more engaged customers.

For more on how to optimize the user journey for your cloud product, read our new e-book here.