Stop Apologizing for Your Product
CS Strategies That Actually Work
Every SaaS company faces this fundamental challenge:
How do you maintain customer satisfaction, drive renewals, and prevent churn when your product has significant functionality gaps?
The answer is not about making excuses.
You need to create solid systems that work despite product limitations.
Why This Problem Is So Common
In a SaaS environment, products often launch with minimum viable functionality (MVP) and evolve over time.
This reality is something every CS team must learn to navigate, as I explore in my guide on overcoming product challenges in customer success.
This approach makes sense for development.
However, it creates significant challenges for customer success teams.
Several factors contribute to this reality:
Pressure to release products fast
Sales cycles that outpace development timelines, creating what I call a "balance challenge between sales and customer success in SaaS"
Competing priorities between new features and fixing existing functionality
Resource constraints in product and engineering teams
For CSMs, the impact is immediate and often stressful.
You become the messenger delivering disappointing news, the creative problem-solver finding workarounds, and sometimes the emotional punching bag for frustrated customers.
As one CS leader shared with me:
"Our team was spending 40% of their time explaining delays and creating workarounds. We were perpetually stuck in damage control rather than driving strategic value. It wasn't until we implemented a structured approach to managing these gaps that we finally broke the cycle." — VP of Customer Success at a mid-size B2B platform
The #1 Mistake CSMs Make With Unfinished Products
Most CS teams focus exclusively on managing individual customer expectations without addressing the systemic issues causing the problems.
Understanding these customer success challenges and how to overcome them is key to long-term success.
This reactive approach leads to:
Repetitive conversations with multiple customers about the same issues
Inconsistent messaging about product roadmaps and timelines, which could be improved with better CS and product teamwork
Custom workarounds that become unsustainable to maintain
Burnout among CS team members
The Strategic Alternative: Creating Systematic Solutions
A Customer Success Director I recently coached discovered this firsthand.
When her team shifted from individually managing disappointments to implementing a systematic approach to product lack of functionalities, they saw a 22% improvement in their NPS scores within one quarter—despite having the same product limitations.
This approach aligns with my Ultimate CS Value Discovery Framework, which shows how to uncover value beyond basic product functionality.
Upgrade to premium now to get my complete framework for managing customer success with unfinished products below, including:
🔐The Systematic Approach to Product-CS Collaboration
🔐 The tiered escalation system that gets product issues prioritized and resolved faster
🔐 An exclusive “Preview, Position, Plan" framework that transforms difficult conversations
🔐 Four proven tactics for creating Sales-CS alignment that prevents overpromising
🔐 Data collection templates that quantify the true cost of product gaps
🔐 Word-for-word scripts for handling the 5 most difficult customer conversations
What CS Leaders Say About The CS Café:
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