Lifecycle of CSM engagement

This page is the day-to-day. For the role overview, see the customer success team page.

When you start as a Technical CSM, you're assigned a book of business with ~30 accounts. Customer engagement falls into three stages.

Stage 1: Getting started

See getting started with customers.

Stage 2: Establishing trust

Once you've worked through your book of business, focus on building trust with your champions.

• Show, don't tell. When a customer has a question or goal, build the solution rather than linking to docs. Create the insight or dashboard, then share what you did so they can do it themselves next time. Don't create dependency — they should be able to do it without you.
• Be timely on alerts. Our automated alerts flag event spikes, drops, and other unusual behavior. Reach out quickly so the customer can investigate. If a customer's company raises funding or gets press, send congrats.
• Push beyond the basics. Look at what they're not using yet. Have they set up tracking funnels for key metrics? Created alerts on important actions? Tried PostHog AI? Implemented error tracking to explain conversion drops? Cross-sell here, but frame it as helping them get more value.
• Regularly invite new users to the Slack channel. The more people on the customer side who know you exist, the more come to you when they hit issues. Monthly is a good cadence — Vitally shows you who's new.

Offer recurring calls with your champion so you have a touchpoint and can stay close to what's happening.

Stage 3: Getting deeply embedded

At this stage, dig into the customer's goals and help them build on top of their existing PostHog setup.

Two examples:

• Custom recommendation engine. An ecommerce customer used PostHog to track key metrics, then wanted us as the source of truth for personalizing returning visitors' feeds based on past views, searches, and purchases. That meant custom event tracking, pushing data to their backend, and more.
• Real-time alerts. Customers have wanted notifications when a visitor abandons a purchase, when a download fails, or when high-value actions happen. Each needed custom implementation work.

If your champion can push these changes through, great. If not, ask for an intro to the decision maker — or reach out directly to the head of engineering or product with their quarterly goals and offer to help. Either way, showing you understand their goal helps them justify prioritizing the work internally.