Feature Story
I was onsite with a client recently, let's call her Dana, VP of Customer Success at a growth-stage SaaS company. We were prepping her Q4 forecast and the board deck for her upcoming board meeting. We started with customer health, since we wanted to understand what we were working with, and that's when we noticed something was off. Scores had shifted quite a bit over the past few quarters. As we dug in, we noticed it was adoption doing most of the damage, and there were a lot of red flags we needed to explore.
We started to peel back the onion.
First observation: the adoption number itself had moved because the product had moved. Her team shipped so many new features and functionality in the last two quarters that the thing they were measuring adoption against had changed underneath them without anyone updating the baseline. Same customers, same usage, same adoption, but a completely different scorecard.
Second observation: support tickets. Overall volume had increased, and the bug category had climbed, steadily, for months. We didn't just take this at face value, we went into the tickets to see what the issue actually was. We immediately noticed the bugs directly correlated to new features or adjacent features connected to what was shipped. Bugs everywhere.
Third observation, the one that actually confirmed what we were suspecting: I asked Dana how conversations with customers had been going lately. She got quiet for a second, then said her team was focused on enablement and education, but that was pulling time away from other project discussions. There were also account managers in these accounts, actively trying to sell everything the company just shipped, and customers were starting to sound tired instead of excited.
That's when we knew. The pace of innovation was creating more friction than value, and there was no plan for it.
I took that story and started asking around, other clients, peers, people I trust in this industry. Same pattern, different companies, different products. Faster shipping meant more bugs, more account manager time spent explaining instead of listening, and adoption falling apart underneath teams who thought they were doing everything right.
This sent me down a new path of thinking. Are we shipping for our customers, or for our own egos?
If customers can't keep up with the pace of innovation, if it's creating more friction using the products they already have, and if new ideas always come with new invoices, have we deprioritized the customer entirely just to stay competitive in the market? Or to be able to say "yeah, we have XYZ"? Have we missed the plot completely?
If our customers aren't benefiting from this fast pace of innovation, then who is?
The Takeaway: If your adoption score drops right after a wave of new releases, don't assume your customers got worse at using your product. Check whether your baseline moved before you assume they did. Pull your last two quarters of feature releases next to your last two quarters of bug tickets, and ask your CS team one direct question: are we spending more time explaining new things than reinforcing what customers already use and love. If the answer is yes, you don't have an adoption problem. You have a pacing problem, and it's yours to fix, not theirs.
THE RESOURCE
Think of this like technical debt, except it's the debt your customers are carrying, not your engineers.
Pull your last two quarters of product releases and lay them next to four numbers for the same period:
- Adoption score movement (up, down, flat, and by how much)
- Support tickets tagged bug or defect
- CSM/AM time spent on "here's what's new" calls versus "here's how to get more value from what you have" calls
- Net new features shipped versus features actually used by more than 25% of your customer base
If releases are increasing, enablement conversations are climbing right alongside them, and bug tickets are climbing too, you're taking on adoption debt faster than customers can pay it down. The fix isn't slowing the roadmap for the sake of it, it's building an enablement and QA gate into your release process so nothing ships without a plan for how customers learn it and confidence that it actually works. Run this audit quarterly, right before every board deck, not after.
AI in CS
Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: AI didn’t just speed up engineering, it removed the natural friction that used to protect customers from too much change at once. Building a new module used to take a quarter. Now product teams ship AI-assisted feature drops every sprint, sometimes every week, because tools like Cursor and internal LLM agents compress months of dev work into days.
Here’s where it shows up in your CS org right now. Your onboarding checklist is out of date by the time a new hire finishes reading it. Your health score model is scoring against use cases that didn’t exist when you built the model. Your CSMs are fielding “what’s this new thing” messages from account managers who found out about a release in the same all-hands as the customer did.
The reframe: velocity is not the same as value delivered. Before anyone cheers the next fast-ship metric in a leadership meeting, ask what it’s doing to the number of things a single human customer now has to learn, remember, and actually use. Then ask the harder question: did we ship this for the customer in front of us, or for the logo on a competitor’s homepage. Innovation speed without an enablement plan attached is just future churn on a delay.
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
A NEW CS EVENT
AI is redrawing the commercial landscape.
Frontier by Planhat brings together 400+ commercial leaders for one day focused on deploying AI to win. Hear stories direct from executives and builders at OpenAI, Wiz, Framer, Granola, Fyxer, 20VC and more as they trade market-tested tactics and explore the technologies powering tomorrow's post-sales winners.
November 10, 2026, London
Get your tickets at planhat.com/fontier
HEAR ME SPEAK
Come join me at Obsession in NYC on October 14th and 15th as I talk about The Duality of Advocacy: How Humans and AI Work Together to Drive the Sales Flywheel.
Customer Success is at the heart of all things customer advocacy, but that doesn’t mean their isn’t room for AI to support us. If you’re struggling to figure out how to best leverage your CS team and AI to drive customer advocates you’ll love this practical and tactical session.
JOIN ME IN NYC
Planning to attend Moment in NYC this October? If not, you should.
I've been named part of Inflection Voices at Moment 2026 in NYC on October 6 - a one-day conference for CS and post-sales professionals navigating the industry's current inflection point. Not a gradual evolution - a structural break that's asking people to reinvent themselves while still doing the job.
This conference is for those who want to own the change, not manage it, not survive it, not wait for it to settle. I’ll be there. You’ll want to be in that room too.
Use my code KRISTI25 for 25% off registration: https://momentannual.com/#tickets
A FINAL NOTE
CLOSING WITH KRISTI
None of this means stop innovating. It means stop confusing motion with progress, and start being honest about who you’re actually building for, the customer in front of you or the competitor in your head. I’ll be talking about exactly this, AI, adoption, and what happens when we build for ego instead of the customer, at a few places this fall. Come find me if you’re there, the hallway conversation is always better than the sessions. Until next week, go check your own adoption debt before your board asks you to.
See you next Tuesday,
Customer Success. Revenue Follows.