Author: Joshua Paul

Think about the ingredients that drive a product’s success in the marketplace. Salespeople sell on pain and/or pleasure (“With this product, you won’t have to work weekends to manually enter data!“). As a  product marketer, you market customer success (“This solution is designed to grow your bottom line within months!“). As a product manager, you have to keep a close eye on both of those factors. However, there is a critical third pillar, often overlooked during the product planning process…. User Success Often times, product managers develop products based largely on customer success, rather than adding equal weight to user success. So, what is the different between customer success and user success? While their definitions vary for different products, markets, or user personas, these concepts can be easily applied to your products and services once you understand the fundamental difference. To illustrate the delineation, let’s breakdown these two concepts in a B2B context, since consumer product success take into account fewer tangible elements and user success includes more emotional and physiological factors. Customer Success (or Client Success) In the B2B world, customer success is the outcome of helping organizations achieve their goals. Decreased costs, more leads, higher revenue, more market share are all examples of customer success. User Success User success brings the success down to the level of the individual. User success is the ability for a product to enable people to do their jobs and accomplish their tasks with...