There are so many questions to answer when considering how to scale a customer success team. How many people should one report to one manager? When is it time to add frontline managers? What about team leads? When do I split my one team into two teams? How do I split one team into two?
Oof. Sorry, I didn’t mean to stress you out with all those questions. I know it’s a lot of pressure.
The impulse: “many hands make light work”.
This commonly uttered idiom goes all the way back to the 1300s, although English playwright and poet John Heywood is often credited with the phrase during the 1500s. Whatever the decade it originated, if you fast forward to today, this concept certainly crosses many customer success leaders’ minds as they’re considering growing their teams. More people equals more hands to scale a customer success team with, more minds, more ideas, more effort. Right?
Well…maybe.
Certainly, two people together can do more work than a single person alone. But is it actually double the amount? Probably not. This phenomenon, where the more people you add to a team, the less productivity you get from each individual, is known as social loafing.
French engineer Max Ringelmann discovered social loafing in 1913, by asking a number of people to tug on a rope. He found that although groups outperform individuals, the individuals within a group tend not to work at maximum capacity. In his experiment, the more people that were added to the group, the further below potential each would perform. If two individuals could pull 100 “units” separately, together they pulled 186, not 200. Eight people working together could only pull 392, less than half of their total potential of 800.
Now, I realize that we’re talking about pulling a rope here, not completing the complex, knowledge and experience-based work of a customer success team. On top of being a completely different type of effort, other factors such as coordinated timing and exhaustion from previous physical exertion could have played a role in these results.
That being said, I don’t necessarily take Ringelmann’s metrics at their face value, but I do think there’s value in keeping the concept in the back of our minds as a counterbalance to that of “many hands make light work.” Similarly, I think it’s worth considering that “teamwork and group work aren’t the cause of reduced individual contributions,” as project management platform Asana argued in an article earlier this year. Instead, the article states, lack of clarity is the real culprit.
So, why does any of this matter in customer success? Because the two sides of this coin are in fact, the same dynamics at play when deciding when and how to add new roles, management layers, and teams to your organization.
And I know you want to scale your customer success team in the right way. A way that adds necessary capacity as your business grows, prevents or relieves overwork and burnout from those already on the team, adds new skill sets and new ideas, all while maintaining the team culture and dynamics you’ve worked so hard to develop and the superb customer experience your customers have come to expect.
Shoot, I definitely stressed you out again, huh? Let’s take a little of that stress and pressure off by talking about how to actually accomplish these things.
The alternative: “go light to go fast”.
The words to act and live by in this situation are “go light to go fast.” This might sound counterintuitive, but trust me here. If you’ve had the opportunity to work at both small and big companies in your career, which one allowed you to move faster? I can almost guarantee it was the smaller company. Similarly, smaller teams within big organizations can move faster than their peers.
While there’s no hard and fast rule about team size, I like to keep Jeff Bezos’ now-infamous “two-pizza rule” in mind. It’s pretty simple: no team should be big enough that it would take more than two pizzas to feed them. Generally this means keeping teams to less than 10 people. When you reach that threshold, it’s time to add another frontline manager.
If that number seems small, consider the fact that the number of lines of communication within a team increases exponentially as the team size grows. So too does the difficulty in coordinating tasks and sharing important information across the team.
While a team of three (including a manager) has just three connections or lines of communication, a team of five increases to 10, and a team of nine (just under that 10-person two-pizza rule limit) jumps up to 36. A bigger team, one of 15 for example, has a whopping 105 connections. Take a look at the visual representation of all those lines of communication – no wonder life and work just get more complicated as your team grows! (Image source: Sync.)
Team communication isn’t the only benefit to keeping team sizes small. These “small but mighty” teams also tend to foster closer working relationships, leading to enhanced collaboration and higher levels of engagement. I’ve already alluded to faster decision-making and increased agility.
The final benefits tend to be more personal for the individuals on the team – things like a deeper sense of ownership over projects and clients, individualized development through more personalized mentorship, and increased focus, often due to greater clarity in responsibilities and broader organizational goals.
When should you add or create customer success team leads?
Team leads are another dynamic to consider when it comes to team size and structure. Adding a team lead may help you (at least temporarily) stretch the capacity of a single manager by a couple more direct reports.
Moving an existing customer success manager (CSM) into a team lead role can also be a great way to reward high performers, develop their leadership skills, and even help them get ready for additional future promotions. Just be wary of asking that individual to sit in a player-coach role for too long a stretch, as this may result in the opposite of the desired effect: too much work, not enough help, burnout, and even moving on from the company.
Whether you utilize team leads as an interim step or not, when it finally comes time to add a new team manager to your organization (somewhere around that rule of 10, give or take), how exactly should you go about it?
The two key components are identifying the right leader and determining how to split the team. I could write an entire article on just the process of interviewing and selecting the best leader to guide your CSMs (hmm…maybe you’ll see that in a future blog!), but for now I’ll keep my thoughts on that topic very brief. At the very highest level, you must consider the strengths and weaknesses of your existing team members and existing manager(s), alongside the expertise of your candidates in order to make the best decision for your organization.
As for splitting the team into two, there are several ways you could go about it. It certainly can be (and has been) done through randomization, although I wouldn’t recommend this. More viable options are to divide by competencies, tenure, geography, or book of business/segments served.
To be sure, deciding when and how to scale a customer success team is no simple task. And while there are guidelines and principles that can help you evaluate your options, as I’ve laid out in this article, there is no step-by-step manual that can make these decisions for you. After all, this kind of challenge is exactly why you were chosen to be the leader of this particular team! To evaluate all factors at play – from individual team members’ needs and team dynamics, to broader business context and the needs of your customers.
Go light to go fast. Trust your instincts. Build a team you’re proud of. You’ve got this.
Marley Wagner is a freelance Digital Customer Success Consultant and Fractional Chief Marketing Officer. Her work centers on helping B2B tech companies increase revenue and accelerate growth with both prospective and existing clients through organic channels that emphasize brand reputation and trust. Read more from Marley Wagner at ChurnZero here.
