A joint success plan is something used by most customer success organizations. It streamlines the process of documenting your customer's primary goals, mutual expectations, and ways to measure success. It’s part of the onboarding process where you get to talk with your key account customer about their most important goals. I use it as a communication tool to confirm or illustrate why they (the customer) are buying this product or service.

It basically allows CSMs to keep track of an idea's viability. It also gives customers a detailed breakdown of the expected progress and outcome, reducing the risk of unexpected shifts.
I can’t tell you how many times it’s helped me say no to certain feature requests, or realign projects, or make sure that we have visibility of how we're meeting customer expectations or not. It's also really great for doing discovery work and for aligning on what the product or service offers that end customer.


This particular joint success plan is a one pager evaluating how the SAM model impacts annotation time in comparison with the company models. It’s specifically for the team who sells machine learning teams.


One of the things that came up was that the data science team and the data ops team disagreed with what this Facebook SAM model can actually do and benefit in their workflows. So I put in the outcomes, developed a shared understanding, and communicated these things to both sides to build alignment.
Then we talked about challenges, what's pushing them to actually experiment or set up this project? My goal is to use this document to help them really understand how they want to evaluate this new technique on our product and platform.


So I would have weekly discussions with them as the CSM. Sometimes the conversations would happen on slack, other times during our weekly calls. But the purpose of these conversations was discovery - or figuring out what their challenges were, what experiment they wanted to run and why, and how they would measure success for that experiment. Basically, they were conversations to help me fill out this document accurately and in a way that would align everyone. Showing them the finished document and results helped me confirm and verify that these are in fact their challenges, and that I understood their input correctly. We then set up follow up meetings to align on progress, and I always bring this document.


In the end, I discovered that the new type of feature they wanted on the machine learning (ML) model didn’t actually help them prove that they’d save them more time, so then I was able to offer them a different solution.
It forced them to be a little bit more thoughtful about what they’re asking.

This one pager is supposed to be a live document that's revisited throughout the year. So you do it during onboarding, then touch on it again in the first quarter.

There's a lot of art and science on how to do discovery. For example, how do you ask the questions, or knowing what to include on the document.


The most difficult situation to get alignment is when you don’t have direct contact with a stakeholder – for example, if they’re unresponsive, or not very detailed, or if I’m trying to revive a relationship with a customer. In these situations, I like to use this one pager as a guide to the types of discovery questions I ask.


One of my tactics is to actually purposefully put something wrong on there so that they’re more inclined to identify the “mistake” and start talking about what the real challenge or item is. From there, I'll ask them to tell me more about that.

Yasmeen Kashef

This particular joint success plan is a one pager evaluating how the SAM model impacts annotation time in comparison with the company models. My goal was to use this document to help two teams really understand how they wanted to evaluate this new technique on our product and platform.

Joint Success Plan at Dataloop AI

Joint Success Plan - SAM Model

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