Mentorship in Motion

When I think about the leaders and colleagues who shaped my early career, a smile forms across my face. I look back on those years quite fondly. Life felt simpler then, when we didn’t all take ourselves so seriously. But I digress, the people who had the most impact weren't part of a formal mentorship program.

They weren’t delivering carefully packaged corporate wisdom or walking me through a playbook. Instead, they gave me something far more valuable.

They gave me room to grow.

My first taste of Customer Success was at a start-up. The environment has a kind of energy that’s difficult to replicate. Titles exist, but they don’t define the boundaries of your contribution. When something needs to get done, the team rallies around the problem. 

You learn quickly how to lean on each other’s strengths while stretching your own capabilities. Everyone is building something together, and that shared momentum accelerates everything — learning, growth, and responsibility. It’s one of the fastest ways to develop professionally because you’re forced to grow in real time.

Later I was hired at another start-up to build their Customer Success department from the ground up — and I happened to be the first woman hired into the business. Imagine that. It also just so happened to be where I met my life partner and best friend. Life's funny that way.

At that particular start-up, I was given the time to learn the customer journey and develop processes that bridge the gap between pre- and post-sales activities. As those processes took shape, new gaps became visible and we kept iterating.

No one criticized the work when we uncovered areas for improvement. They allowed me to course correct and keep building until we had a viable workflow that strengthened the customer experience.

Eventually I moved into the enterprise space. While the Customer Success department was still being formalized, the organization had seasoned business leaders. They knew how to own a business conversation.

I immediately understood I could learn from them. And yet, even here, they gave me space to develop.

Sometimes that meant letting me lead a call while they quietly observed. Other times it meant stepping in at exactly the right moment when things started to drift off course. And occasionally it meant redirecting my thinking afterward — asking the hard questions that help you see the folly of your ways. Cue Steve Urkel: “Did I do that?”

At the time, none of these experiences felt like mentorship.

It felt like someone trusted me enough to try.

Much of Customer Success has been learned this way — through exposure. By watching experienced practitioners navigate complexity in real time. It is best described as professional apprenticeship.

Monkey see. Monkey do.

You learn which tools accelerate business outcomes. You start to recognize process issues and how to resolve them. You observe how someone approaches a difficult conversation. Over time, those patterns start to take shape in your own thinking.

But as Customer Success matured and scaled, the environment around the discipline began to change.

The apprenticeship model quietly began to disappear.

Teams grew larger. Expectations accelerated. Dashboards multiplied. Processes became formalized. The discipline began teaching tools and workflows at the very moment when the work itself was becoming more complex.

The result is that many practitioners today are asked to navigate ambiguity with far less opportunity to observe how experienced leaders actually think through it.

Mentorship once scaled through proximity.

Today we need a way to scale the thinking behind it.

Customer Success Intelligence, amplified through the SPIN methodology, offers a path forward — a structured way to navigate complex customer situations.

Perhaps most importantly, it is teachable, methodical, and portable. In a discipline that once relied heavily on apprenticeship, this kind of framework helps scale the thinking mentors once cultivated.