Valentina Thörner for Future of SaaS Festival

Speaker: Valentina Thörner, Head of Remote and Support Quality, Klaus

Valentina Thörner: Hello everyone. This is Valentina Thörner, previously Empress of Product, now Head of Remote and Support Quality at Klaus Customer Support Quality Management Platform. I have been living at the intersection between customer support and product for quite some time now, and that's why one of my missions is to bring these two closer together.

Valentina Thörner: I'm going to talk about the spider web, or rather how you can leverage change management in product teams for the entire organization. Because product teams are pivotal in their role, not only in product-led organizations, but in general, this is where everything comes together: sales, customer support, marketing. It all actually revolves around product. When you change something in product, this will ripple through the organization, which means that when you introduce change into your product team, we're going to look at how to do that best so that it actually works out for the team, and for the broader organization.

Valentina Thörner: There are two ways that you can do this change management business, you can either change something and then run with it or you can prepare and then do the change. Either way, you're going to need a narrative. Sometimes the narrative comes before, because you're prepared for it, and sometimes you actually have to come up with a narrative after the change has already happened. And this narrative needs to include more than just your specific team. But actually also you can use this to put your priorities and your views into the other teams so that they can actually support you as the product team lead. So that's what I hope you're going to get out of it. If change just happens, it's fine, you're going to survive. Just make sure that you find a narrative that fits your overall goal.

Valentina Thörner: What I really love about SaaS is how it actually allows for flexibility, for remote work, for people creating their own work life balance, whether it's employees or as founders. And I think the better we can actually explain how SaaS works and how you can be successful, the more balance we can bring to people who are in this industry. Because if you have more examples on how to do things well, you are a lot more likely to actually do things well yourself.

Valentina Thörner: I'm really looking forward to the panel discussion,'Why customer support should be the hub of a SaaS business strategy. Because with all my experience in product and in customer support, I still believe that customer support is the main driver for insights of the customers you already have. It's absolutely crucial to have a really, really good relationship between the customer support team and the rest of the business. They should not be the last one in the pecking order, but they should actually be, from the very beginning, a crucial part of how you develop your strategy.