Most product companies don't have a shipping problem. They have a problem turning what they ship into money. In this solo episode, Jay Nathan, CEO of Balboa, breaks down product success: the loop that connects building, launching, adopting, and renewing, and the 5-step method his team uses with 200+ clients.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Goals aren't strategy: "Grow 30%" is a goal. Good strategy has a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent actions.
• Name the real problem: Year-one churn usually means customers never activated. Diagnose first, then act.
• Find your Herbie: Every system has one constraint. Improvements anywhere else are the illusion of progress.
• AI moved the constraint: Engineering is no longer the bottleneck. Adoption, enablement, and selling are.
• Product success is a loop: Market needs, launch and release, adoption, and customer lifecycle feed each other.
• Departments are the problem: The loop works when teams share one view of the customer and one strategy.
• Segment before you solve: A grid of segments by product turns "adoption is low" into a specific, fixable gap.
• Climb the measurement ladder: Signals feed leading indicators, then lagging indicators, then KPIs tied to the P&L.

ABOUT YOUR HOST

Jay Nathan is CEO of Balboa, which helps product, CS, and go-to-market teams turn product data into growth. He has led CS and go-to-market teams for 20+ years. Connect with Jay on LinkedIn

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 - Why shipped software doesn't turn into money
• 01:29 - Good Strategy, Bad Strategy primer
• 02:24 - Four signs of bad strategy
• 03:47 - The kernel of good strategy
• 05:19 - Example: fixing year-one churn
• 08:51 - Patterns from 200+ Balboa clients
• 11:57 - The Goal and finding your Herbie
• 15:59 - AI moved the constraint to adoption
• 17:03 - Defining product success
• 19:02 - The product success loop
• 24:40 - Why departments are the problem
• 25:20 - The Insights to Impact method
• 26:45 - Step 1: Segmentation
• 30:58 - Step 2: Prioritization
• 33:59 - Step 3: Strategy definition
• 35:57 - Step 4: The measurement ladder
• 38:35 - Step 5: Deploy, measure, iterate
• 40:16 - Beyond product analytics
• 42:19 - This week's challenge

About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it.

Your Hosts:

• Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io
• Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

Jeff is back from Junction's Portugal offsite with a reminder: most of your company knows far less about your customers than you think. Jay and Jeff dig into pushing customer insight into the business, why AI-built internal tools are now table stakes, and what Salesforce's reported $2B Listen Labs deal says about AI talking to customers.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Your company doesn't know your customers: A half-day "who are our customers" session gave engineering a clearer view of how the product is actually used.
• Push beats pull: A Slack channel of customer quotes builds context but rarely drives action. Shadowing rotations, all-hands stories, and planning meetings do.
• Make insight capture a button press: Summarize calls daily and let CSMs approve what becomes a ticket, with a human in the loop.
• Internal tools are table stakes: Anyone can build them now. Alignment, strategy, and consistent communication from a leader are the differentiator.
• People stop reading AI: Jay cites a stat that 78% of readers quit when they detect AI, and most never come back. That includes agent-sent job applications.
• Weeks of work in minutes: Jeff built an interactive segmentation and account-transition tool in under 10 minutes. Rolling it out is still human work.
• Enterprise AI deployment is the opportunity: Agent-to-agent work gets complicated fast at scale, and public-company CEOs will soon face pressure to prove adoption.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 - Intro and Jeff's Portugal offsite
• 01:45 - A half day on "who are our customers"
• 04:09 - Operationalizing customer insights
• 05:10 - Call-to-ticket workflows and all-hands rituals
• 07:32 - The customer quotes channel and finite attention
• 10:10 - Push vs. pull and shadowing rotations
• 12:07 - AI is just technology: the factory robot lesson
• 13:38 - Junction's company-wide support rotation
• 15:05 - Leadership is the differentiator
• 17:49 - The 78% stat and agent-sent job applications
• 20:32 - Building a segmentation model in minutes
• 22:01 - The future of customer success
• 23:24 - A tool for CSM-to-CSM account transitions
• 25:37 - Salesforce acquires Listen Labs
• 27:50 - The harness race and the work/home AI divide
• 30:14 - What personal AI assistants actually cost
• 32:15 - Would you talk to an AI moderator?
• 33:44 - Agents as necessary friction
• 34:53 - Agent-to-agent work and enterprise AI deployment
• 37:04 - Wrap-up and The Goal

About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it.

Your Hosts:

• Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io
• Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

Ziv Peled, Chief Customer Officer and Chief AI Officer at AppsFlyer, joins Jay to unpack how a $500M+ ARR company moved everyone to Claude, built its own AI stack, and now measures every role by "AI leverage." Plus: why Salesforce should resell Claude, and why FDE really means net dollar retention.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Everyone is a builder now: Building isn't writing software. It's workflows, skills, and automations, and leaders have to be hands-on to know what their teams need.
• Work 24/7 without working 24/7: Split work between you and AI, keep agents busy around the clock, and step in for a quick eval when a human is needed.
• Agents from a central place: AppsFlyer built an MCP, semantic layer, and data lake over 29 data sets so 800 people inherit agents instead of each building their own.
• Classifiers power automation: Fast, cheap, typed models make agent decisions like routing a customer request reliable in under a second.
• Build near the system of record: Own your Salesforce, NetSuite, and billing developers. Buy at the application layer.
• FDE is NDR: Forward-deployed engineering isn't professional services. It's about outcomes the customer judges, tied to retention.
• Measure AI leverage: If an SDR goes from 5 to 10 meetings a month, that's 100% leverage. Measure end-of-funnel, quality KPIs.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Ziv Peled is the Chief Customer Officer and Chief AI Officer at AppsFlyer, where he leads AI strategy across go-to-market while guiding a 170-person CS org. He previously served as VP Product and CCO at AppsFlyer. Connect with Ziv on LinkedIn

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 - Catching up: Israel's tech moment
• 06:08 - AppsFlyer's strategic investment from Meta, Google, Moloco, and Unity
• 07:04 - From CCO to Chief AI Officer
• 09:45 - Why every leader needs to be a builder
• 10:13 - Assistants vs. automation and the new adoption curve
• 13:24 - Multiplayer AI for teams
• 15:14 - Inside AppsFlyer's internal AI stack
• 19:56 - Splitting time between CAIO and CCO
• 22:53 - The 24/7 mindset and human-in-the-loop evals
• 25:44 - The AI budget equation
• 27:01 - Teaching people to think like designers
• 29:57 - Classifier models and go-to-market use cases
• 34:59 - Build vs. buy
• 39:08 - Salesforce, Anthropic, and the GRR play
• 44:33 - The value era for customer success
• 46:07 - The sewing machine story
• 48:07 - FDE is net dollar retention
• 52:25 - The AI leverage scorecard
• 54:52 - Goodhart's Law and wrap-up

About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it.

Your Hosts:

• Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io
• Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io