I’m the Director of Customer Success At Doodle AG.

I run the Customer Success function at Doodle including free, b2c, b2b and enterprise.

How big is it?

‍1 Director (self)

1 Team lead/Enterprise CSM

1 CS Ops

3 SMB CSMs‍

Where are your teammates located?‍

I’m in NYC and my team is in Georgia, Idaho, and Berlin, Germany.‍

What does your team do? What are you responsible for?‍

Onboarding, adoption, expansion, renewal and advocacy of our product.  Responsible for NRR and CLV.

You can’t have a strong culture without trust, a sense of belonging, psychological safety, collaboration, and recognition.

When I first built the team, we discussed what was important to each of us, and what allowed us to do our best work. My team likes to be kept informed as decisions are being made so that they can contribute ideas, and they like to be able to take initiative and try things on their own. No micromanaging. The more you trust your team, the more you are rewarded with their best work.

We meet frequently – weekly team meetings, one on ones, and lots of asynchronous collaboration. They also meet as a team without me once a week. Everyone handles individual projects that benefit the whole team, and they each play to their strengths. We also start each meeting with a “win of the week” one personal, one professional.

We have also had non-work events just to enjoy each other's company and laugh a bit.

Having enough time to meet with my team members who are in Germany. We only have two hours that overlap daily, and the team member in Idaho doesn’t have any hours that overlap with them. Everyone has made an effort to remain flexible so we can meet as a team, and I make sure they know that they don’t have to work extra hours to accommodate this.

We have only been a team for three months, but we have built great momentum.  We started with a few ice breaker games, and have done Airbnb virtual events.  We’ve done an escape room, a line drawing class, and an improv class (all virtually).

Due to the time difference it can be tricky.  I don’t want to take up people’s time outside of work.  When covid numbers go down we will do something in person.

We had a game where we guessed each other’s baby picture, and one where we guessed little known facts about each other. We had one the other day where we had one minute to find out three new things we had in common with another person on our team and that was fun.

Not besides the ones above.  But we always do “win of the week” at our weekly team meeting.

We use slack for work but also for fun. In our team channel we share fun pictures (things like Halloween and Christmas decorations where we each live, pictures of pets, etc.)

The Customer Success community on LinkedIn has been great. The books “The Culture Code” by Daniel Coyle and “Dare to Lead” by Brene Brown.