Quick Summary: As a new customer success leader, approach your first 90 days in three phases: listen and build trust (days 1–30), plan and align strategy (days 31–60), then execute and demonstrate impact (days 61–90). This ensures early credibility, team alignment, and measurable results.
Starting a new job is always a little bit thrilling and a little bit intimidating. When that job is leading a customer success team, the stakes are even higher. You’re expected to inspire a team, win trust quickly, learn the product inside and out, and show impact before the next board meeting hits the calendar.
Whether you’re walking into a well-oiled CS machine or stepping into a rebuild, the first 90 days are your proving ground.
What you do (and don’t do) in this window will shape how you’re seen, how your team operates, and how quickly you can drive results.
A practical 30-60-90 day framework for new customer success leaders.
How do you make those first 90 days count? This practical, people-first framework is designed to balance listening with action so that you can lead with clarity from day one.
Days 1-30: Listen, learn, and build trust
The first 30 days are all about observation and understanding. Your job in this window is to listen: to your team, your customers, and your peers. Fight the urge to jump into solution mode. Instead, focus on building relationships and gathering context.
Key objectives for days 1-30
Understand your customers. Dive into customer health data, read churn reasons, NPS feedback, and talk directly with customers across segments. Shadow customer calls, ask about pain points, and start identifying recurring themes.
Meet with your team. Conduct 1:1s with every member of the team. Learn their career goals, their challenges, and what they believe is working or broken. Ask what they would prioritize if they were in your shoes.
Map your customer journey. Review lifecycle stages, onboarding processes, success plans, and renewal workflows. Identify gaps or inconsistencies. (Yes, even if this has already been “done”. That document is probably old, and this is more about learning than the map itself.)
Get to know your peers. Meet with stakeholders in sales, product & engineering, marketing, support, and RevOps. Understand how each team engages with CS today and where there’s friction or overlap.
Assess tooling. Learn your CS tech stack (e.g., ChurnZero, Salesforce, Zendesk). Identify what data is reliable, what workflows are automated, and where the gaps are.
Build credibility. Share not just your background, but your leadership philosophy. Be transparent that you’re in listening mode, but start identifying opportunities to make small wins.
Deliverables by day 30:
- A simple summary of what you’ve learned so far: current state, what’s working, pain points.
- Relationship maps of your team and cross-functional stakeholders.
- A preliminary list of opportunities, broken into quick wins and longer-term bets.
Days 31-60: Plan, prioritize, and align
Your second month is where you shift gears from discovery to planning. You should begin to synthesize what you’ve learned and turn it into an actionable roadmap. The key is alignment with your team, your leadership, and your cross-functional peers.
Key objectives for days 31-60
Define your CS vision. Based on what you’ve learned, begin drafting a vision for what customer success should look like in this unique environment. Align it to company goals, culture, and your ideal customer and their outcomes.
Identify team structure needs. Do you need to hire, restructure, or define new roles? Are current segments and ratios sustainable?
Refine your customer journey. Start mapping a future-state lifecycle with clear stages, outcomes, and owner accountability. (Again, do this even if it’s been “done”. There’s always room for continuous iteration and improvement as your customers, company, products, and competitors evolve.)
Collaborate with operations. Partner with CS operations or RevOps to evaluate core metrics: NRR, GRR, NPS, onboarding duration, time-to-first-value, and renewal forecast accuracy.
Build your roadmap. Outline what you want to accomplish in the next 6-12 months. Include technology improvements, process changes, program launches, or new playbooks.
Start small. Identify one or two small pilots or process changes you can implement to create quick wins. Communicate your progress and early results.
Deliverables by day 60:
- A documented CS strategy or charter
- An updated team org chart (if changes are needed)
- A revised future-state customer journey map
- A prioritized roadmap for the next 6-12 months
Days 61-90: Execute, scale, and share results
In your final 30 days of your new leader window, shift into execution and start putting key elements of your roadmap into motion. By now, you should have a strong foundation of trust, and enough insight to make informed decisions.
Key objectives for days 61-90
Implement new programs. Whether it’s a new onboarding framework, QBR structure, or health score formula, begin the rollout of your highest priority changes.
Measure what matters. Use your tech stack to track leading indicators. Establish dashboards or reports to monitor progress and flag risks.
Enable your team. Run training or enablement sessions to support new workflows or tools. Clarify expectations and empower CSMs with the right playbooks to incentivize the behaviors you want to see.
Formalize customer feedback loops. Build mechanisms to capture, analyze, and act on customer insights (e.g., close the loop on NPS and other surveys, as well as structured feedback sessions).
Communicate success. Share wins with your team and across the organization. Transparency builds credibility and helps others see the value of your changes and leadership.
Refine and adapt. As you execute, gather feedback. Be open to iterating and adjusting course based on what you learn.
Deliverables by day 90:
- Executed pilot(s) or program launches
- KPIs and dashboards to track leading metrics
- Feedback summary from team and customers
- Presentation or readout to CS team and/or leadership on early progress and next steps
My final thought: customer success leadership is equal parts art and science. The perfect 30-60-90 day plan is never one-size-fits-all, but a well-structured framework gives you the foundation to lead with clarity and confidence. Focus first on understanding your people, your product, and your customers. From there, align your team and strategy to the outcomes that matter most. With the right balance of listening, action, and iteration, you’ll build a high-performing CS function and help your company retain more customers, unlock more value, and grow stronger relationships at scale.
Ready to make your first 90 days count? Let’s get to work!
Hear more from Marley Wagner at ZERO-IN 2025
There’s a hard truth at the heart of digital customer success and revenue enablement, says Marley: you can’t automate a broken process, and too many revenue teams try and fail to scale through systems that don’t match how people work. Learn why success in digital CS hinges on the operational empathy to build around real workflows, not idealized ones, at ZERO-IN 2025.
