Representation Matters
Representation in Customer Success matters A LOT. CSMs are the 'Voice of the Customers', helping to guide how business-to-business software is developed.
They gather feedback from end-users, executives, and administrators. They prioritize, summarize, and bubble up the most important needs to the product team.
Product Managers then further refine which asks to focus on and when. And engineering brings the ideas to life.
Decisions made by CSMs can improve software to better support a diverse user base, or they can suppress ideas that don't resonate with them.
Software companies are faced with difficult decisions as Benedict Evans recently wrote in his newsletter:
"Today, if you asked an image generator for images of doctors and got mostly men, you would know that there was something wrong with the training data: about 37% of US doctors are women, up from 28% 15 years ago. But what if you asked for images of CEOs? Inmates in US prisons? Do you want to get a picture of what’s in the data, or of what should be in the data for it to be an accurate reflection of the world, or of what you wish the world was? It depends.
Now suppose you want to be sure - really sure - that your image generator will never claim that only white people can be doctors, or only black people go to prison? Do you make a list of hundreds or thousands of reserved categories… or tell the site always to produce a diverse range of people in the results? That seems safe - until someone asks for pictures of Nazis.
It’s easy to make fun of Google, and it may be that it went too far down the road of wanting ‘representation’ of the world as we would like it to be, rather than the world as it is. But there is not an easy and correct alternative. ‘Just show the truth’ might be wrong, or bad, or both. If I Google for ‘reasons that the holocaust was a hoax’, pages denying the Holocaust do exist, and by default might be the best match for the search, but Google doesn’t show any of them on the first few pages of the results. Something similar will happen if you search for methods of suicide. Google won’t just tell you the answer. The data might be wrong, or the right answer might be the wrong thing to show. "
Companies make thousands of decisions about how they will build software every day. These decisions can have cascading impacts.
These can impact things like
-Medical research
-Political polls and marketing
-Healthcare
-Access to capital which impacts housing, education, and entrepreneurship
-Hiring
Many of these decisions are filtered through the lens of the CSM and how they interpret and prioritize customer feedback.
CSMs who have walked a mile in your customer's shoes are going to have a different take than the typical white 78%, college-educated 97%, urban 76%, straight 93%, person that makes up the majority of the industry. Although individual contributors are split 55% male/ 45% female, leadership and executive roles are still overly male-dominated. Women earn $.88 for every $1 earned by men in Customer Success, which is better than other insdustries, and still unacceptable.
Everyone deserves fair and equitable software, this is why RecastSuccess' mission is to diversify the Customer Success industry. We are proud that 90%+ of our community identifies with at least one dimension of diversity.
