This results in a culture that promotes outcomes over outputs and a decision-making framework that delivers both customer and business value.

As a company grows, it is common to experience a loss of both customer- and product-centricity. The values that drove the team's early success seem to wane, and leaders may find themselves asking questions like:

• Why are we so reactive, and why do we no longer anticipate customer requirements?
• Why don't our new capabilities make the same impact as before?
• Why doesn't the product team understand the customer? Why doesn't the marketing team understand the product?
• Why don't we make as many big, ambitious bets as we did before?

These challenges often arise because rewards (e.g., budget, headcount, promotions) greatly influence behaviors.

Enterprise SaaS applications all focus on ways to support and report on the project management aspects of a job function, but they fail to provide a reward framework that ties the impact of work back to the customer. These apps nudge individuals and teams to rely on a “project-thinking” mindset vs. a “product-thinking” mindset, and the by-product of doing so is the creation of organizational silos reliant on internal metrics to measure success.

In contrast, DevRev strives to provide an intuitive experience that promotes the highest-value functions of product and customer-centricity. The DevRev Methodology promotes a balance between product thinking and project thinking, enabling all of our users to adopt a product-led mindset across an organization.

The inverse of a “project mindset” is a “product mindset.” Product thinking abstracts the deliverable as the goal and substitutes it with an understanding of the impact, measures, and options.

Instead of emphasizing when work will be completed, who is responsible, and the path to completion, product thinkers debate the “why.”

• Why is this a priority?
• Why is it important to do now?
• Why do our customers want this?

The result is better alignment on the problem being solved, the metrics to measure success, and the goal and outcome that we hope to achieve, along with deeper discussion of the solution sets to address the problem, differentiate the product, and delight the customer.

Project thinking still holds an important place in software development, but a DevCRM strikes the balance between both mindsets to reinforce long-term behaviors.

Enterprise apps today cater to the manager, promoting behaviors that are purely output-driven. While product-thinking applications and tools are gaining in prominence, they are too far decoupled from developers and work management to reinforce equality between product values like “empowerment” and “effectiveness” and project values like “efficiency” and “action.”

By unifying the tools that enable product- and project-thinking processes, DevRev transforms how organizations operate and enables them to:

• Gain more thoughtful understanding of the problems that they are solving
• Reward positive outcomes over output
• Prioritize based on goals and welcome pivots if their impact is greater
• Create product value propositions that are both functional and emotionally inspiring
• Connect their work to customers and customer-impacting experiences
• Build a unified and aligned team, confident that thoughtful qualitative and quantitative data support product decisions

By bringing together project thinking and product thinking in a single tool, DevRev ensures that a harmonious and iterative culture drives team priorities, execution, and results.

PLuG doesn’t just cover the interaction between an end user and a support agent, it empowers both parties to become active participants in product growth and evolution by integrating it into the broader development ecosystem.

Traditionally, “Support” has been a siloed, a cost center whose primary function was to answer end user inquiries as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, when you bring Dev (engineering) closer to Rev (end users) you empower your customer facing teams like support and customer success to become more active members in the development process, leveraging their unique insights from constant contact with the end user to in turn empower developers with greater context enabling them to make more user centric development decisions leading to both a better outcome for your end user and the developer who can now see the impact of their work more clearly.

The transition to a PLuG centric development model may sound like a big cultural and logistical undertaking however our platform encourages these changes organically. We built this with some key concepts in mind:

• Customer Success/Support are often the only teams your end users interact with directly
• These interactions are some of the richest sources of end user sentiment data you will receive
• Important insights can be gained through deflection activities to help drive growth and adoption
• The Why is just as important as the What and the How to your development team

Rev and Dev Interactions#

Your Customer Success/Support teams are often the only teams your end users will interact with directly. Things like marketing campaigns or even survey requests are one sided interactions and aren’t initiated by the end user (Rev).

When a current or potential end user reaches out, this is often a make or break interaction. More than initial discovery of your product, if they have a positive interaction with a knowledgeable Customer Success/Support team you have likely prevented a user from dropping off. If the interaction is tedious and requires multiple reassignments the chance of drop-off increases significantly.

With your PLuG platform built directly into the same platform used by your developers, the information a customer facing team member may need is already available, therefore eliminating the gap between traditional CRMs, user facing knowledge bases, internal facing knowledge bases, and your project/product management tool.

Empowering your customer facing teams with this information not only improves CSAT by reducing the time it takes to get an answer, but reduces costs associated with a multi level support group.

Rev Interactions as Data Sources#

Because of the typically isolated nature of a traditional CRM, information from problem tickets may make it to a project management platform, however a huge amount of potentially useful data from individual conversations is never utilized. Things that make it into a problem ticket and then transferred to another platform for Dev are typically only significant issues that troubleshooting can’t fix. But what about the issues that are fixed with some easy troubleshooting steps? Just because they’re simple to fix does not necessarily mean that they can’t be prevented from happening at all. But without this information in a ticket forwarded to Dev, how will they know about a potential improvement?

With all of your data in one place, the possibilities for data driven product improvement are amplified by orders of magnitude. With this data in hand (and a little ML magic), you can do things like deduplicating tickets and ticket clustering with ease. You can also see if your product roadmap matches up with what users are requesting when they write in.

Deflect to Improve#

Often when thinking about how to reduce overhead from customer facing teams the default response is automation and deflection. Chat bots, more knowledge base articles, and macros to insert the same paragraph into conversations over and over again. When focusing our efforts on Product Led Growth, however, we should instead be asking, how can we prevent the end user from ever having this question? Every time we need to create an automation to reduce human contact with the user, the question that goes along with it should be how can we heal the underlying wound so the bandage is no longer needed?

In addition to having your end user interaction data all in one place, your customer facing teams also have more context and information to work with putting them in an excellent position to help you answer these questions. With the workspaces unified, they can now become active members in the development process, serving as the voice of the end user so the underlying cause of the question is addressed therefore improving end user experience and removing the need for an automated response altogether.

This happens naturally in the PLuG portion of our platform, allowing customer success teams to surface these types of interactions either manually or automatically without creating documentation debt or consuming additional Dev time.

Giving Dev the Why#

Completing a list of tasks can be satisfying in its own way however the work doesn’t carry the same meaning if you don’t understand why you’re doing it. In the shuffle between CRM and project management tool, a lot of context around the work is lost. By using a unified system, this information is readily available alongside the work item.

Giving your developers the context around why they are working on a specific item not only leads to higher job satisfaction with the knowledge that what they’re doing is contributing to the overall goal, but can also lead to better outcomes for your end user as each developer has the information needed to suggest alternative solutions.

Why DevRev PLuG#

Simply put, we will help you power a truly customer and dev centric approach to growth by bringing all of your resources together empowering your users and team members to become more active participants in the product development process leading to better solutions and outcomes for Rev and Dev.