Startups that sell B2B products often need a post-sales CS team around the time their customer base is starting to grow rapidly. Usually when the customer base hits 20 accounts or $10M in revenue, a need for a focused and dedicated team to help those accounts grow and secure renewals is key. Most startups will secure a hiring budget and start looking for CS professionals who will likely come from similar companies so the talent pool can be limited and competitive. Thanks to a creative recruiting agency and an open-minded hiring manager who was willing to look beyond the typical candidate pool, I was able to make a career change from IT Services to a B2B product startup when I joined Vercel in 2022. Here are a few reasons why I think this is a good idea that can yield great results.

Many teams in Services and Consulting companies are dedicated to account management, delivery, and client success. These teams are responsible for ensuring the success of the accounts post-sales and delivering amazing results for clients/customers and the business. They are great at:

Understanding new deals, capturing business objectives, and sometimes even designing the solutions that the client is hiring.

Planning project kickoffs, onboarding delivery (development) teams, and coordinating the interplay and collaboration between the client and the company.

Keep project delivery on track, provide detailed metrics and project status, and continuously improve quality over iterations.

They nurture stakeholder relations and create new ones across different client seniority levels (Managers, Directors, VPs, C-level).

Can scope expansion whitespace by leveraging organic growth or through sales/marketing campaigns.

Are incentivized to be creative and innovative to improve operations, delivery, efficiency, etc both by the client and the business.

All of these can be easily transferred to a B2B startup product or platform as long as the candidate is given enough time to ramp up in product knowledge to learn all the ins-n-outs in detail; this is an area where services individuals tend to fall short as ultimately the client owns the product IP.

Attract candidates looking for a career change

If a startup is looking for an individual with 10+ years of experience, chances are that professionals in the services or consulting industries who are also looking for a career change might be interested in trying out a startup. In my personal experience, after I hit the 12-year mark in Services, I wanted to explore a company with more end-to-end product ownership and a tighter grasp on product success. Vercel offered this when they were expanding their CS team and needed a CSM leader, they had a clear and attainable quota and needed to improve their VoC (Voice of the Customer) program to help shape the product. As long as startups can offer compelling opportunities like these, they will attract great talent that can quickly adapt to the startup world.

When Services and Consulting companies sell development teams that code solutions for customers, they have a lot of sway and influence on the dev tooling and products that clients should use. Assuming that services and consulting professionals who join startups also bring in their stakeholder contact network with them, they can boost partnership deals by working with dev agencies, consulting firms, and services companies to re-sell the B2B products and platforms. There's also an opportunity to create certifications specifically for partnerships that resell and give the customer assurance that these products and platforms will be used and implemented in the best way possible.

They know how the enterprise customer journey works

If the startup starts taking on larger enterprise and strategic deals, it's useful to bring in talent who knows the nuances of managing big deals. It's not the same to offer customer support for a B2C product as opposed to a 1000-user base for a Fortune 500 company. The complexity and interconnection of multiple business units, cost centers, architectures, and legal and compliance requirements are the bread and butter of Services and Consulting deals. These will come second nature to professionals in this field and they will be able to navigate these quicker than a CS professional that never had to worry about this before.

Context switching and multitasking is an innate talent

easily Services and Consulting professionals have built high resiliency and adaptability over the years as they have worked with a diverse set of clients and industries. Every time a new deal comes in, it's almost as if they are starting a new job. This makes them develop quick learning skills and capable of context switching. As startups are expanding their customer base and chasing bigger deals, they will benefit from these qualities as opposed to CS professionals who come from a product-focused startup with a product that has evolved in the same space and vertical.

It's worth noting that there are many things that Services and Consulting candidates need to learn and adapt to besides the product and platform:

More accountability and ownership over the revenue

Learning how product planning and design work and how to couple into it to shape product roadmaps

How to make the most out of the innate autonomy and self-governance over processes, playbooks, and outcomes; how to not crash without any guardrails

A direct involvement in product support; sometimes these have strict SLAs that require being on-call and available during non-work hours

Pivoting efficiently as landscapes suddenly change

A crash course into board management, funding, a path to acquisition, etc can help navigate the unique intricacies of a startup journey

B2B startups should hire more services professionals

 as a Customer Success leader, dev productivity and DevEx were at the core of our work helping customers get the most value out of our dev tools and platforms; most of them were interested in measuring ROI and how their investment in a particular dev tool made their teams better overall. 

However as I got closer and built stronger relationships with customer stakeholders, I quickly realized that they have very different views and opinions on how to measure dev productivity and DevEx. Most of it is rooted in the intrinsic differences of their core business objectives, but at the same time, a lot of discrepancy is based on a lack of standard frameworks or models to measure it. Sure, a few customers had some DevEx programs established and we were happy to couple into that to tie our own usage/adoption/consumption metrics to paint a value realization picture together. But most times, customers were looking up to us to help them define this. 

They had a vague idea of what good dev productivity looks like, but when it came down to measuring it to create improvement plans, most customers couldn't commit to a reliable methodology or process.

As I researched further, I found good resources out there that can help build a customizable toolkit to use with customer dev teams.

Dev Productivity and Developer Experience (DevEx)

According to Gartner, many organizations (

) are adopting trends and findings from taking a more developer-centric approach to improving dev productivity known as DevEx. DevEx as a term started gaining traction in early 2018 when some papers like "

What happens when software developers are (un)happy

" were published. It describes how developers feel, think, and value their work in building software.

Some factors that improve or impact DevEx

Effective CI/CD and SDLC processes that lead to pain-free releases

Google, Microsoft (including GitHub), and the University of Victoria ran research and presented two frameworks that define metrics and dimensions that can be measured to get a sense of developer performance and productivity:

Google spearheaded the first widely adopted framework of 4 metrics 

. Although a lot has changed since, just a year later Google revised it to 

, keeping it relevant and still holding a lot of ground as a foundation.

Deployment Frequency 🔄 — How often an organization successfully releases to production.

Lead Time for Changes ⏳ — The time it takes a code commit to get into production.

Change Failure Rate ⚠️ — The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production.

Time to Restore Service ⏲️ — How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production.

(🆕)Reliability 🤝 — The ability to meet or exceed reliability targets such as availability, latency, performance, and scalability.

DORA stands for Google Cloud's DevOps Research and Assessment.

A year after Google's DORA framework, a team from GitHub, Microsoft, and the University of Victoria published a framework with 5 dimensions to measure developer productivity:

atisfaction and wellbeing 🧘  — How fulfilled developers feel with their work, team, tools, or culture; wellbeing is how healthy and happy they are, and how their work impacts it.

erformance 🏃 — The outcome of a system or process.

ctivity 🔢 — A count of actions or outputs completed in the course of performing work.

ommunication and collaboration 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 — How people and teams communicate and work together.

fficiency and flow 🏄 — The ability to complete work or make progress on it with minimal interruptions or delays, whether individually or through a system.

 (The Pragmatic Engineer), Abi Noda (DX), Margaret-Anne Storey (University of Victoria), Nicole Forsgren, (Microsoft Research), and Michaela Greiler (DX) who took part in compiling DORA and SPACE wanted to take another crack at a framework that is based on surveys to have a better grasp of data from the field; the theory is that this approach is more likely to yield more trustworthy data about the success of the measurements. They published the paper called 

25 sociotechnical factors that affect DevEx

 previously identified by this research team. This model greatly simplifies the complexities and nuances of the many factors that influence DevEx into 3 friction types that devs often encounter:

Feedback Loops 🔁 — Reducing or eliminating delays in software delivery (shipping code fast and frequently). Studies show that companies that deploy code more frequently are 

 as likely to exceed performance goals as their competitors because it allows for quicker feedback loops that empower course correction. 

Shortening feedback loops or the speed and quality of responses to actions performed is a key factor in improving DevEx.

Flow State 🎧 — Possibly the most elusive concept 🦄 as it encompasses concepts like immersion, focus, feeling energized or inspired, enjoying the work, positive team culture, interruptions, delays, autonomy, clear goals, stimulation, and feeling challenged. 

DevEx will improve when companies work on creating the optimal conditions for flow state.

Cognitive Load 🏋️ — The ever-growing number of tools and technologies in software development constantly makes the practice more complex and adds to the cognitive load that devs experience. The amount of mental processing to perform a task directly impacts the performance and experience of software development. 

Companies that aim to reduce cognitive load by simplifying tools, environments, docs, requirements, and processes will directly impact DevEx.

Most companies are already good at collecting development data from systems such as lines of code, number of Pull Requests (PRs), time spent in code review, bugs & defects in production, etc. 

Adding surveys as an additional data layer for feedback is very useful for uncovering friction points in software delivery

. The research team proposes to measure the 3 pillars above against examples of perceptions (attitudes and opinions) and workflows (systems and processes):

They also share some recommendations about how to conduct these surveys:

Define benchmarks before starting — Initial surveys will allow to record the initial state of all measures. Make sure these are shared widely across teams and orgs.

Design surveys carefully — Avoid confusion by testing surveys with small groups before sending them more broadly. Consider hiring expert consultation.

Break down results by team and dev persona — Consider using persona buckets such as role, tenure, and seniority to analyze results in addition to aggregate results to avoid diluting specific pain points experienced by smaller cohorts.

Compare results against initial benchmarks — Perform comparative analysis to contextualize results not only within your team and org but against other companies in the same vertical/sector/business. 

Add milestone surveys — Send additional surveys (besides the regular schedule you have already defined) whenever there is a big milestone such as code migration, platform, pivot, etc to capture possible friction points and how they impact DevEx in particular. 

Avoid survey fatigue — Surveys with no action or follow-up break down trust in the practice and lead to fatigue. Keep a close eye on engagement and don't be afraid to play with cadence as long as it increases responses.

Every customer engagement will be different but by compiling a toolkit of diverse ways to measure DevEx, any account manager can build a reliable and impactful methodology. DORA can give you hints about what data can be collected from SLDC or CI/CD systems to be analyzed with BI and create automated reporting, alerting, and monitoring. SPACE can give you foundations to build DevEx surveys that focus more on the dev perception of efficiency and satisfaction. The 3 pillars will allow you to articulate more concisely what factors are impacting DevEx positively or negatively that can lead to better value realization and ROI on dev tool spend. 

In the end, it has become clear that a complimentary mix of data from systems and people (devs) centered around the user (the dev, again) is the approach that as of now has yielded the best results to measure DevEx with a high level of confidence.

Dev productivity, the elusive creature

I have to admit that I was always worried about the prospect of taking a career break. There never seems to be a right time to do it, especially when the economy and the markets are in constant flux and the US has not yet fully decided if we are in a recession or not. Regardless, I decided to take the plunge and embrace my free time with open arms and willing to try out a few things that I have always put on hold, like volunteering.

I knew that I wanted to share some of my skills and experience working in tech so that was my first step to narrow down the available volunteering options. Websites like 

 have useful filters called "Cause Areas" with an option for "Computers & Technology". I was able to find a few tech lab and tutoring opportunities in my community. Other cause areas include (directive) board development, education & literacy, and employment which might be useful in tech.

Tech-based volunteering opportunities in the Bay Area (and remote)

" which listed 15 options for tech industry professionals and students looking to empower others via technology. This is how I found out about 

, an education company that partners with tech companies to offer 6-month tech apprenticeships (with living and childcare stipends) with additional job placement support. Volunteers can sign up to be mentors who work 1-on-1 with the mentee that they are matched with. You are expected to commit at least 2 hours per week over 5 or 11 months, depending on your availability.

 - Volunteers can support Hackbright Academy by serving as technical mentors, industry mentors, mock interviewers, guest speakers, or alumnae mentors, typically requiring relevant experience and a commitment of about 2 hours per week.

 - Volunteers can support Mission Bit by serving as classroom volunteers, participating in one-time events, assisting with administrative tasks, or contributing to projects, all aimed at bringing computer science education to under-resourced high schools.

 - Volunteers with strong computer science backgrounds can partner with high school teachers through the TEALS program (a Microsoft Philanthropies program) to help expand students' career horizons and provide equitable access to computer science education.

 as a mentor for the upcoming 2024 cohort this week. I am aligned with their mission to bring more diversity to the tech industry and had the opportunity to meet the team that is running the program which made me feel confident that this is the perfect volunteering opportunity for me. Not only will it empower Techtonica's mission and help their students with their career transition into tech, but it will also allow me to learn from our students and keep improving my mentor and coaching skills for any future roles I embark on. 

David Medina

How I found a volunteering opportunity in tech

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