The next chapter in Qumulo’s Customer Success evolution — and why the best lessons came from unexpected places.

A few months ago, I wrote about what separates Customer Support from Customer Success — and why that distinction matters to everything we do at Qumulo. That post was about philosophy. This one is about execution: how we’ve actually built toward that vision over the past six years, what structural changes made the difference, and where we’re headed next.

When I joined Qumulo, the CSM role was predominantly service-focused and onboarding-heavy, which made sense for where we were. We had deep roots in hardware and on-premises infrastructure, with real ambitions to build a full SaaS Customer Success model and scale into hybrid and cloud simultaneously. That’s a tough combination — serving the customers you have today while building the motion for the customers you want tomorrow. 

A lot of what I learned along the way came from places I didn’t initially expect.

Conversations are the best classroom

Customer conversations shaped a lot of our thinking — that’s obvious, and it’s essential. But some of my most valuable insights came from the hiring process. When you interview candidates at every level of Customer Success — from early-career CSMs to seasoned leaders — you get an extraordinary window into how the industry thinks, what’s working elsewhere, and where the gaps are. I learned something meaningful from almost every conversation, including from candidates who didn’t make it all the way through the process.

My favorite example: one of our senior leaders, Cait, joined Qumulo after her interview process, only to discover that I had already taken something she’d said during her interview and was using it in my day-to-day conversations. I’d heard it, recognized its value immediately, and ran with it — before she’d even signed her offer letter. She took it as the compliment it was meant to be.

For me, it was proof of something I genuinely believe: great ideas don’t wait for the org chart to catch up. If you’re not listening carefully in every conversation — including the ones where you’re supposed to be doing the evaluating — you’re leaving insight on the table.

Building a better transmission

Armed with all of that, we set about the work. The goal was clear: evolve toward a true SaaS Customer Success model while ensuring our existing customers continued to experience the very best of Qumulo — reactive when they needed us, proactive wherever possible.

One of our most important structural moves was adding a dedicated renewals team, with CSMs staying closely involved as partners rather than sole owners. When CSMs aren’t carrying the full weight of renewal anxiety in every customer conversation, those conversations get better. They become about the customer’s world, not just the contract.

Around the same time, we introduced a new role: the Implementation Program Manager, or IPM. The purpose was to give onboarding the focused, disciplined attention it deserves — with a team purpose-built for driving time-to-first-value. And in our world, that’s not a simple thing to define, because the range of what “onboarding” looks like is extraordinarily wide.

At one end of the spectrum, a cloud customer can find Qumulo on the marketplace, self-deploy, and be up and running in minutes. At the other end, an on-premises deployment can take months — hardware has to be ordered and shipped, and in some parts of the world, that supply chain alone is a significant time drain. Then switches need to be configured, racks need to be ready, and the customer has to be organizationally prepared to deploy. For our hybrid customers, it can be all of the above — a staggered or concurrent go-live across on-premises and cloud environments, each with its own dependencies converging at once.

That’s a huge spectrum to serve well. Getting a customer live is one milestone. Getting them to value quickly — whatever their deployment model — is the real one. And that shouldn’t be a side task for a CSM who has fifty other things on their plate. The IPM role was created to own that complexity, so our CSMs can stay focused on what comes next: making sure the customer actually succeeds with what they’ve just deployed.

With that structural clarity in place, we’ve been able to shift our CSMs toward a genuinely proactive motion. Today, they’re focused on customer health, understanding use cases, discovering new workflows where Qumulo fits well, and stepping in when things need attention — all while working in lockstep with sales. A CSM operating at this level isn’t just a post-sales resource. They’re an extension of the sales team: building trust, surfacing whitespace, and opening doors that no cold outreach ever could.

In parallel, we’ve continued to scale both our Customer Success Engineering and Professional Services teams — the technical backbone of our customer experience, and a big part of what makes Qumulo genuinely different to work with.

Momentum into a new year

We just kicked off a new fiscal year, and the momentum over the last six months has genuinely surprised me. Not because I doubted the team, but because the pace of progress has been real and visible. A lot of hard work has compounded into something you can actually feel.

The shift from a service-to-sales-related motion is well underway. Our CSMs are no longer just the team you call when something goes wrong — they’re proactive partners in their customers’ success, and active contributors to Qumulo’s growth. That’s a meaningful cultural and operational change, and it doesn’t happen overnight.

The bigger evolution on the horizon is the move from Customer Success to Customer Experience. CS as a discipline has always been about outcomes — but CX is about the entire journey a customer takes with you, from first contact through renewal and expansion. Every touchpoint, every interaction, every moment where a customer forms an impression of who you are as a company. It’s a broader ambition, one that requires every team — not just CS — to be aligned around the customer. It’s something we’ll be exploring much more in the months ahead.

Finding high gear

This journey has been built on deliberate, incremental change — each structural move a shift in the gearbox. The IPM role put us firmly into the next gear, ensuring time-to-value is front and center. The dedicated renewals team lets our CSMs settle into the next, freeing them to focus on proactive value delivery. Now, with CSMs operating as true extensions of the sales team and driving growth alongside it, we’re moving into high gear.

To truly scale, you can’t just press harder on the gas — you have to build a better transmission. That’s exactly what we’ve been doing. And there’s plenty of road still ahead.