We built this because we needed it—and it didn't exist

I was running product for a growing company when I got handed a problem: two dysfunctional client success teams that weren't working together. Open conflict. Confusion for clients. Not good.

The first thing I had to do was understand WHO was doing WHAT. Nobody really understood their lane, so they kept stepping on each other's toes.

I took a product approach: I mapped all the people and all the work. Since our client work was repeatable, I could assign effort scores to every task—basically story points. Once we agreed on what each task was worth, we could see the total workload for each client.

I looked at pay for each individual and organized the team into role levels based on what they were doing and conversations about their capacity. Suddenly, each person had a clearly defined scope of work, understood where they were in their career progression, and knew what they had to do to advance.

We reviewed our effort scores each month. As our processes and tools improved, certain tasks got easier, so we reduced their weight. This opened up capacity—and team members discovered they could fill their own pipeline with upsells to current clients instead of waiting for sales.

Now we had two functioning teams with clearly defined roles and a self-motivating, transparent structure.

Once we understood how much work we were actually doing, we could compare that to our defined capacity. We could chart out how capacity would change over time if we kept upselling, if sales brought in new clients, and if we invested in making processes easier.

I showed this to the C-suite and planned for hiring at the right times based on the sales pipeline. That gave leadership and the board the confidence to hire new team members based on projections, not panic.