Customer Success (CS) is one of the most misunderstood roles in SaaS. As Saahil Karkera wrote in a widely shared LinkedIn post, one quarter CS teams are heroes; the next, they’re blamed for churn, adoption drops, and burnout.
This volatility exists because CS sits at the fault lines of Product, Sales, and Customer expectations. The solution isn’t hiring “miracle CSMs.” It’s treating Customer Success as a shift-left strategy—designed into product, GTM, and organizational incentives, not bolted on at the end.
Learning From Shift-Left in Security
In IT security, shift-left transformed how teams work. Instead of treating security as a gate at deployment, leaders embed standards and checks during design and development. Fixing vulnerabilities early is cheaper and more effective than firefighting later.
Customer Success needs the same treatment.
Too often, CS operates to the right of the timeline—absorbing missed expectations, shaky onboarding, or roadmap gaps. The result is that CSMs spend energy patching systemic cracks instead of accelerating value.
Shift-left for CS means:
- In Product Strategy: Define time-to-value and adoption as success criteria alongside revenue.
- In Product Design: Build for real customer workflows, not idealized demos.
- In Go-to-Market: Align sales promises with product realities and onboarding capacity.
When CS is part of those early conversations, it doesn’t play defense. It drives sustainable growth by ensuring customers realize value quickly and reliably.
The Visibility Paradox of CS
Churn metrics and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) dips are visible. Product gaps are visible. What isn’t visible are the hours of trust-building, escalation diplomacy, and behind-the-scenes fixes that keep customers afloat.
The problem is that most companies measure CS primarily on lagging indicators like renewals. These only show what has already happened.
A shift-left approach asks: how can we measure what predicts success, not just what records failure?
Leading CS metrics include:
- Onboarding completion rate
- Time-to-first-value
- Adoption depth across core personas
- Customer engagement in adoption programs
Embedding these metrics into product strategy creates forward-looking signals. This ensures invisible work is captured and acted on upstream, before it turns into churn.
The Structural Burden of CS
Customer Success often becomes the shock absorber for organizational misalignment. Sales oversells, Product ships with gaps, Finance adjusts pricing without adoption considerations—and CS is left holding the bag.
This happens because incentives are siloed. Sales celebrates closed deals. Product celebrates shipped features. Finance celebrates margins. CS is left accountable for outcomes no one else owns.
A shift-left strategy redistributes this burden by embedding shared accountability across functions:
- Sales owns customer fit
- Product owns value delivery
- CS owns the adoption and expansion
- Leadership owns orchestrating the system
This is where adopting a bets mindset helps. Instead of treating churn as a failure pinned on CS, treat it as a testable hypothesis. Was the account a poor ICP fit? Did onboarding fail? Did product gaps stall adoption? Each churn event should inform upstream fixes.
The Emotional Labor of CS
Almost 47% of CSMs report experiencing burnout at least sometimes, with 36% saying it happens often or constantly. Nearly half say it affects their sleep, and 39% report impacts on mental health, according to Vitally.
The fix is not pep talks or quarterly awards. It’s leadership practices that turn empathy into systemic relief:
- Redesign 1:1s to unblock, not interrogate
- Rotate PMs and executives into customer escalations
- Share “voice of the customer” exposure across teams
When leaders take part, they shift emotional labor left in the system rather than concentrating it on CS.
Impostor Syndrome and Strategic Value
Even great CSMs ask, “Am I good at this, or just winging it?” That doubt grows when leadership frames CS as reactive.
The antidote is reflecting back on the strategic impact:
- A customer reference that unlocked a new sales deal
- Feedback that shaped the roadmap
- Adoption programs that stabilized renewals
This mirrors the point from Beyond the Deliverable – The Strategic Product Mindset: strategy isn’t just about outputs. It’s about aligning to the why. CSMs are strategic when their work connects to long-term customer and business outcomes, not just quarterly renewals.
CS as Ecosystem, Not Department
Saahil captured this well—CS is often blamed for failures rooted elsewhere: broken handoffs, poor enablement, missing roadmap items.
The truth is that treating CS as a department is a category error. It should be an ecosystem that spans the lifecycle.
A CS Maturity Model:
- Reactive: CS as a firefighting team
- Functional: CS owns renewals and adoption, but is still siloed
- Ecosystem: Every function owns a piece of customer success, and CS orchestrates the system
The companies that reach stage 3 stop scapegoating CS. They become true customer companies.
Rethinking Outcomes
Renewal? “That was easy.” Churn? “What did CS miss?” This binary is misleading. Renewal may mask heroic effort. Churn may reflect mis-selling from day one.
Companies need churn attribution models that assign accountability across functions:
- Was the right customer sold?
- Was onboarding effective?
- Did the product deliver the promised value?
- Did adoption spread across stakeholders?
- Did executive sponsorship exist on both sides?
This lens echoes Jobs-to-be-Done and the Forces that Create Product Demand. Outcomes are the result of forces acting on the customer, not the performance of one role alone.
Why Retention Matters
Retention isn’t just about keeping customers—it’s a growth engine. SaaS companies with high NRR grow far faster than those without.
- In 2025, the median NRR is 106%, with top performers exceeding 120%. Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) medians are 90%, with top performers above 95%, according to Wudpecker.
- Bootstrapped SaaS companies with $3–20M ARR report a median NRR of 104% and GRR of 92%, with top 10% hitting 118% NRR and 98% GRR, based on SaaS Capital.
- SaaS firms with NRR above 110% grow 2.5× faster than peers with lower retention, according to High Alpha.
Embedding CS upstream isn’t just operational hygiene. It’s a revenue accelerator.
The CS Leadership Burden
CS leaders juggle retention, expansion, and team morale—often without resources. At startups, they’re in the trenches too.
Executives can ease this by:
- Elevating CS metrics into boardroom discussions
- Making NRR a shared KPI across CS, CRO, and CPO
- Personally engaging on key renewal calls
Shifting leadership support left—into proactive strategy—ensures CS leaders aren’t a last line of defense but part of the first line of growth.
Hiring for Capability, Not Logos
Resumes celebrate logos, not context. They don’t show whether a CSM inherited chaos, kept a shaky product alive, or juggled three jobs under one title.
Instead of hiring “miracle workers,” define what you actually need:
- Onboarding Specialists to accelerate time-to-value
- Expansion Drivers to grow accounts
- Strategic Advisors to guide executives on long-term value
Hire intentionally, then support them to win.
Conclusion
Customer Success isn’t broken because CSMs underperform. It’s misunderstood because companies treat CS as downstream.
By applying the shift-left strategy, leaders can embed CS into product strategy, product design, and GTM. Not as an afterthought, but as a first principle.
As Saahil’s post emphasized, CSMs aren’t miracle workers. They are the connective tissue of SaaS. If you shift CS left, they become enablers of growth, not scapegoats for structural failure.
The SaaS companies that win the next decade won’t just have CS teams. They will be customer companies where Customer Success is built in from the start.