Customer Success addict | Customer obsessed | CS Ops | Data lover | Top 100 Strategist @ Eptura

I did not choose Customer Success. Customer Success chose me.

In 2020, I took a step back from my leadership role to go all in on Customer Success. I believe the best Customer Success leaders are those who have walked the path, understand the role inside and out, and know what it takes to drive results. This is the journey I’m on, building expertise and laying the foundation for impactful leadership in the future.

In just four years, I’ve grown from an entry-level CSM to a Strategic CSM. Along the way, I discovered a deep passion for empowering other CS professionals to thrive in their roles. Through my newsletter and the two guides I’ve written—Onboard Yourself and Raising the Bar—I share actionable insights and strategies to help others navigate the complexities of this role.

As a Strategic CSM, I’m focused on helping global enterprise organizations achieve their goals by leveraging data-driven strategies and tailored solutions for their specific needs. Whether it’s fostering collaborative cultures, driving change and adoption of innovative tools, or solving complex business challenges, I thrive on guiding customers toward measurable results.

I’m a process addict with an engineering background, driven by curiosity and data. Numbers tell stories, and I love unraveling them to identify opportunities for expansion and growth. I believe in the power of people and data—track the right metrics, and improvement will follow.

Customer Success is where I’ve found my true passion—helping customers achieve their desired outcomes and seeing their growth is incredibly rewarding. I believe CS is the catalyst for any company's growth, and when done right, it unlocks new revenue streams, enhances product adoption, and creates long-term partnerships.

Every conversation is an opportunity to learn, problem-solve, and deliver results that matter.

When I’m not creating Success Plans or building executive relationships, I’m traveling. I’ve visited over 20 countries and am always planning my next adventure. My favorite country so far? Japan, hands down.

Erika Villarreal

Jan Young, MBA, CSPO, CSM

Project Manager

I help Heads of CS become VPs and get a seat at the Executive Table | Customer-Led Growth Advisor | 2X Top 25 CS Influencer | Top 50 CS Influencer | Top 50 Women Leaders in CS | Top 100 CS Strategist | Investor

Why do some CS leaders command executive respect, while others, despite strong results, keep fighting to be heard?

I've been in Tech for 20+ years and been through two exits as VP Client Services. Here's what I've learned:

✨ EVERYTHING has changed.

The speed. The AI transformation. The business models. The way we need to lead.

I see CS leaders working until midnight, delivering great results... and still getting told "we need to cut CS headcount."

Sound familiar?

The old playbooks stopped working.

AI is reshaping how we work, how we go to market, how we serve customers. Your 2023 playbook is irrelevant.

Today, you need SYSTEMS.

Here's what I know from coaching hundreds of CS leaders:

Those who break through have mastered The Modern CS Growth System, 4 pillars of executive impact:

💡 Modern Management & Change Leadership - Lead in the AI era  
💡 AI Fluency, Automation & Autonomy - Transform operations, pricing, GTM
💡 Business & Customer Economics - Speak profitability, not just retention  
💡 Repeatable Customer Revenue & Team Systems - Build scalable frameworks, not heroic firefighting  

This is a systematic approach to demonstrating executive-level impact in the language your fellow executives understand.

👉👉 This is what CS Business Leaders master. Not pieces. The whole system.

-----
WHO I WORK WITH

CS leaders who've built a department but aren't getting traction:

✔  You deliver strong results, but executives still see CS as a cost center
✔  You're excluded from strategic decisions where your insights would be valuable
✔  You’re told "do more with less" instead of getting resources
✔  You know modern CS should look different, but you're stuck in outdated frameworks

-----
HOW WE WORK TOGETHER

⚡️ CS BUSINESS LEADERSHIP ACCELERATOR - Master the 4 pillars and build the Modern CS Growth System specific to your goals/challenges through executive peer community + project-based frameworks + personalized coaching.  

🔗 https://go.stepupxchange.com/csbl-accelerator

📬 NEWSLETTER:  I publish a weekly newsletter on modern CS strategies

📧 DM me and I'll share which resources fit you

-----
RESULTS

✅ Become an award-winning executive
✅ Reposition your team as a strategic revenue driver
✅ Transition from firefighting to repeatable, scalable systems
✅ Innovate with AI to drive profitable customer revenue growth

The modern CS leaders who succeed aren't keeping up with change: They're leading it. 

-----
📬 Newsletter: janyoungcx.com/#newsletter  
📧 DM me: discuss your challenges  
🎯 Follow for daily insights

Founding Member

RevRoom is a trusted space where curious revenue leaders are collaborating on the future of B2B Go to Market alignment and GTM-Led-Growth.

Something unexpected happened after yesterday’s CxXchange SuccessHour.

Some context:
I showed the group how I turned a static PDF assessment into an interactive app using Lovable. No coding. No developer. The static assessment PDF took 3+ hours in Canva. The interactive app with personalized results took 4 hours in Lovable.

I walked through the behind-the-scenes: 
How I built the prompt, how Lovable works step by step, and how this applies to CS use cases like onboarding tools, health score assessments, and client-facing deliverables.

People asked questions: 
We dug into the how. It felt like what we do in the StepUpXchange CS Business Leadership Accelerator. Learning by doing, together.

It felt like a good session.

BUT 
Then I checked our community Slack channel a few hours later.

Nothing about "great session" or "thanks for sharing."

INSTEAD
Someone shared what they'd BUILT. That afternoon. A tool their team was already using.

💃 I didn't expect that.

This is what innovation looks like. 
Not waiting until you have it all figured out. 
Building something small. Publishing it. Using it. Learning from it.

When we learn together, everything ACCELERATES.

Watching someone do it makes you believe you can too. And being surrounded by people trying the same thing? That's when you actually do it.

AI skills aren't optional anymore in CS.
But they're also not as hard as they seem. 
You don't need a coding background. 
You don't need to be technical. 

When you see someone else do it, you're more likely to try. 
When you're talking about it with others, you build momentum. 
And right now, we need to move faster.

✨ Aha moment:
The barrier isn't skill. It's isolation.

If you've been watching from the sidelines, wondering if you can really do this, you can.

WE CAN DO THIS. 🚀

What have you been putting off because tackling it solo felt like too much?


********************************
When you're ready, ask me what's right for your next steps:

CxXchange: Free, DIY, all volunteer led community of 4k+ CS Pros
or
StepUpXchange:  CS Business Leadership Accelerator, VIP Inner Circle, NexGen CS Leadership Masterclasses
or
JanYoungCX: 1:1 coaching for CS leaders

Customer Success Leadership Coach | Transforming CS Leaders into AI-First Business Leaders | Modern CS Strategy + AI + Systems | 3X Top 25 CS Influencer | Get weekly CS strategies: Subscribe to my newsletter

A CS leader said this to me recently:  "How am I supposed to learn AI when I can barely keep up with what I'm doing now?"

I felt that.

She's bouncing between Gainsight, Salesforce, and Slack just to figure out which accounts are at risk. Then manually building reports in Excel to show leadership what's happening.

Meanwhile, everyone's telling her to chase AI trends. Restructure her team. Build agentic workflows. Become "AI first."

It's exhausting.

Here's what crystallized for me after that call:

👉 There are 7 trends reshaping CS right now:

1. Data Readiness > AI Tooling
2. The New Tech Economics
3. Outcomes by Design
4. Restructuring CS Teams
5. Agentic Workflows
6. Human Judgment as the Premium
7. Leaders as Builders

👉 But they're not 7 separate problems to solve.

👉 They're symptoms of 3 massive realities you need to navigate this year.

If you try to chase all 7 individually, you'll burn out. I've watched it happen.

But once you see how they connect, the path forward gets a lot less overwhelming.

🗞️ My first LinkedIn newsletter breaks down each trend, how they synthesize into these 3 big shifts, and a quick 2x2 framework to figure out where you stand.

👇 Read it below.

What's hitting you hardest right now? Drop a comment. I'm genuinely curious where you're feeling the strain.

Quick Note: This article was first shared with my email community. If you want strategies and systems like this as they're released, join thousands of

Open article: The AI-Driven CS Rebuild: 7 Trends CS Leaders Need to Watch for in 2026 by Jan Young, MBA, CSPO, CSM • 6 min read

The AI-Driven CS Rebuild: 7 Trends CS Leaders Need to Watch for in 2026

A promotion. A raise. A seat on the executive team.

Here's the shift that got Virginia there.

Her CS team was scaling fast. But the work wasn't.

→  Manual workarounds that couldn’t scale with the team
→  CSMs building custom reports instead of driving outcomes
→  High-growth accounts getting whatever time was left over

Virginia talked about it before. The stories made sense to her. But they didn't land.

Not because leadership didn't care. Because she wasn't communicating it in a way they could act on.

Stories without data are easy to dismiss. 

Virginia was in the first cohort of the StepUpXchange CS Business Leadership Accelerator. One of the pillars is Business Expertise. 

✅  And this is how she put it to work…

She stopped telling stories. She started doing the analysis. And showing the numbers.

She started small.

She reframed their manual work problem as operational efficiency and aligned it with the product roadmap. Now her CTO could act on it.

Then she went deeper.

She pulled Revenue and Cost to Serve by account. Analyzed segments. Found where the growth opportunities were, and where they could cut, to improve profitability.

But these weren't small changes. The stakes were real.

→ It meant retraining Sales on a new motion
→ It meant giving the board a different story about growth
→ It meant shifting the product roadmap to new segments

Virginia backed it up with detailed data. The data made it undeniable.

The results:

✅   Marketing and Sales doubled down on the highest-performing segments
✅   Engineering accelerated features for power users
✅   Onboarding got shorter. CAC dropped. NRR climbed.
✅   More advocates. More referrals.

Virginia's team moved from manual and reactive to strategic.

And something else changed too.

Now when she brings the data, it anchors the conversation. She earned a seat at the table by proving the business impact of the CS function.

Big results for the company. 
✨ And for Virginia: A promotion, a raise, and a seat on the executive team.

The steps that got her there:

1. Reframe the problem in terms leadership cares about (efficiency, profitability)
2. Back it with data the executive team can act on
3. Start small, prove it works, then go bigger

Nobody asks you to do this work. You just start doing it.
And somewhere in the doing, you find the data that changes the conversation.

This is Business Expertise in action, one of the three pillars of the Modern CS Growth System.

It's not about knowing more. It's about translating what you know into the language executives use to make decisions.

We work on this together in the StepUpXchange CS Business Leadership Accelerator.

I'm walking through the full system at the StepUpXchange NexGen CS Leadership Masterclass:
📆  Tuesday, Feb 24
🕘  9am PT / 12pm ET
👉  Register here: https://lnkd.in/gsETU8a2

📝  I'm writing about the cost of gap filling in my newsletter this Saturday.
👉  Get it here: https://lnkd.in/gBrhN3As

StepUpXchange
JanYoungCX

A lot can change in a year. Last spring, Nathan Spear was just starting to learn AI tools. Last week, John Gleeson held him up as an example for the entire CS community.

Nathan is a member of the StepUpXchange CS Business Leadership Accelerator and he’s in between roles. But that doesn’t keep him from building. 

His most recent creation:
An interactive resume website that shows how his achievements and experience will impact the hiring company’s customers and help them achieve their goals. 
-->  Hiring managers can even upload their JDs to see if Nathan is a match and how he will help their business.

✨  This is classic SHOW Don’t Tell. Modernized for age of AI.

It’s really cool.

It’s so cool, John Gleeson clicked the link and was inspired to write a LinkedIn post challenging CS leaders to stop talking about change and start building it. 

Nobody asked John to do that. Nathan's work just made him want to.

Now other CS pros are reaching out to Nathan for advice on how to build their own version of an interactive resume.

This isn't just a cool one-off project. Nathan's site connects everything we work on in the Accelerator:

Business Acumen: 
Shows how his work impacted past companies' bottom lines AND his clients'. Translated to how he can help yours.

Repeatable Customer Revenue Systems: 
Shows how he's driven expansion and renewals. Translated to how he can help yours.

AI Fluency: 
He literally shows it. And shares links to other projects so you know this isn't a fluke.


That's what happens when you're in a community of builders. You share ideas and use cases, your growth is accelerated, you build momentum you wouldn't find on your own.

What would it look like if you showed your value instead of explaining it?

👉 Nathan's interactive resume: https://lnkd.in/gM3HHnpn
👉 John's post:  https://lnkd.in/gJNVdKXx

If you want to learn more about the StepUpXchange CS Business Leadership Accelerator, I’ll share some info after my next Masterclass where I’ll be sharing the same Modern CS Growth System that Nathan has used to accelerate his growth.

👉 NexGen CS Leadership Masterclass, Feb 24:  https://lnkd.in/gsETU8a2

StepUpXchange
JanYoungCX

If you've ever found out about a pricing change, product pivot, or go-to-market shift in an all-hands meeting, along with everyone else, you know this feeling.

Sound familiar?

You're hitting your numbers. Building relationships. Retaining customers.
And you're still not in the room when the strategic decisions get made.

This is the C-Suite Impact Gap.

And Q1 2026 is when it matters most. AI is reshaping investor expectations, and companies are locking in strategic decisions right now about where to invest, where to cut, and which teams get influence.

I wrote about the four questions that determine whether CS leaders get heard in these conversations, and the system that connects them.

Question 1 is about why your insights get dismissed (even when you're right).

The other three? They're in the article below.

If you're tired of being excellent at execution but invisible in strategy, this one's for you.

🗞️ Read it below 👇

Open article: Invisible in the C-Suite? How to Get Heard as a CS Leader  by Jan Young, MBA, CSPO, CSM • 7 min read

Invisible in the C-Suite? How to Get Heard as a CS Leader

I used to think being available for fires made me a good leader.

My calendar had gaps. On purpose. So when my team needed me, I could jump in. Save the account. Calm the customer. Be the one who fixed it.

I thought that was human-led leadership.

Turns out, it was the problem.

My team didn't have a system. They had me. And every time I stepped in, I reinforced that pattern.

React. Resolve. Repeat.

When I finally looked at the fires we kept fighting, they weren't random. The same types kept coming back, just wearing different client names.

Most CS fires come from 4 places:

1️⃣ Customers who weren't set up well from the start.

Onboarding focused on product features instead of business goals. Three months later, the customer doesn't see value. Now it's a save conversation that could have been prevented.

2️⃣ Handoffs that dropped context.

Sales promises something. Implementation interprets it differently. CS inherits a customer who expected something they're not getting. Nobody finds out until the customer is frustrated.

3️⃣ No early warning signals.

By the time someone raises a hand, the problem has been building for weeks. The customer has already made up their mind. Now you're in damage control instead of prevention.

4️⃣ Work your team does that isn't really theirs.

Features that don't exist or don't work the way the customer needs. Your CSMs become the manual workaround. That's not customer success. That's filling gaps for another team's roadmap.

When I started building systems to prevent these instead of just responding to them, things shifted.

Fewer escalations. My team focused on work that moved the needle. Customers trusted us more. Renewal and expansion rates went up.

You can't stay strategic if your team is stuck in firefighting mode. And being more available won't fix it. Building prevention will.

📝 This week's newsletter goes deeper and includes a quick 2x2 exercise to map your fires by frequency and control, so you know where to start.
🔗 in my profile

👉  Which of these 4 is eating most of your team's week?

StepUpXchange
JanYoungCX

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