1. Invite support to product/eng meetings where you are prioritizing. Add them to the agenda by default so it's natural to expect them to speak. This is huge and helpful.
2. Consider baking in "Support gets a MINIMUM of X things" on priority. Tough conversations will be had, but support/product/engineering will learn how to get what each other need. This one falls apart and "when the going gets tough". Support gets the short end of the stick usually. (That's why I advocate for a Support Engineer, so those things don't even need to leave support, they just get fixed and when support speaks, the teams know it's big.)
3. Make sure whomever is heading support knows what other stakeholders need to see, so they can deliver. Some would call this "data driven" but in some orgs, "data" is just 3 angry users.
4. We currently use this term "Stable Counterparts" and that's vital, figure out who should regularly be talking to support and about what, and once that relationship forms, things get smoother. Until then, support will be yelling into a void.
Thanks for this rundown! I'm especially attuned to your (3) and (4); we've run into a lot of CS teams creating "liaison" roles with sales/product/engineering, and even in some cases with finance teams re: categorizing causes for churn and such.
2. Consider baking in "Support gets a MINIMUM of X things" on priority. Tough conversations will be had, but support/product/engineering will learn how to get what each other need. This one falls apart and "when the going gets tough". Support gets the short end of the stick usually. (That's why I advocate for a Support Engineer, so those things don't even need to leave support, they just get fixed and when support speaks, the teams know it's big.)
3. Make sure whomever is heading support knows what other stakeholders need to see, so they can deliver. Some would call this "data driven" but in some orgs, "data" is just 3 angry users.
4. We currently use this term "Stable Counterparts" and that's vital, figure out who should regularly be talking to support and about what, and once that relationship forms, things get smoother. Until then, support will be yelling into a void.