Models and Plays
I had three slide decks from a job I loved: an introduction to Customer Success, an introduction to the customer journey, and an introduction to business reviews. I wrote them for a leadership team and new hires at a software company where I ran the customer organization, and like most internal decks they were two-thirds pictures and one-third labels, because the person presenting them was going to say the rest. Then I left, and the rest left with me.
When I started putting my playbooks on this site, the obvious thing was to redesign the three decks and post them. I sat with them for an evening and decided that would be a mistake, for a reason that turned out to be more useful than the decks themselves: they were not three documents. They were two kinds of document, and the shelf needed to know the difference.
A model and a play
A model says how the organization is built. What the discipline is, who the customer is, how the teams are shaped and sized, how a customer moves through them. You read a model once, when you are building something or have been handed something, and you argue with it. The first two decks were a model that had been cut into slides — the definition, the segmentation, the journey — and apart they were a textbook and a diagram. Together they are The Customer Success Operating Model: eighteen pages, five parts, written out in full for the first time, because there is no longer a person standing next to them to say the rest.
A play says what a person does on Tuesday. It has an agenda, a runbook, a checklist you print. You do not read a play once; you read the relevant page before every time you run it. The third deck was a play, and folding it into the model would have buried the most useful thing I had. So it stands alone, as the first play on the shelf: The Business Review — what it is and is not, the agenda in three movements, the executive runbook, and the checklist.
The distinction sounds obvious written down. It was not obvious in the decks, and I think it is not obvious in most organizations, where the model lives in someone's head and the plays live in someone else's calendar and the two have never been introduced. Putting both on the same shelf, labelled, is the point.
Corrected 28 October 2026. Two words were one too few. The shelf now has a third: an instrument says what to measure, how to ask, and what to do with the answer — neither how the organization is built nor what a person does on Tuesday, but the signal both of them read. The first is The Voice of the Customer. The test for all three, and where each new document goes, lives on the shelf; this essay stays as it was written.
What the Board report added
Halfway through, I found the quarterly strategy I had reported to the leadership team that same year, and it had the richness the introductions lacked — the things you only say to the people who have to approve the budget. Four of them went into the model: the customer profile, three traits of the market and the thing each one forbids you to do; the value curve, which is the customer's view of the journey — a line that rises or does not, with a churn exit at every node; the rule that milestones have signals, a start and an end that a system can see, or they are a hope; and a quarter in the model, what ninety days of actually running it looked like.
And one went into the play. The business review's agenda says "evaluate the joint scorecard of our relationship," and for years I knew what that meant and never wrote it down. It is the Partnership Maturity Model: six dimensions, each a question both sides can answer honestly, five levels of maturity, one radar chart of the account against its peers. Score it twice — once by us, once by the customer's champion — and the gap between the two sets of scores is the agenda for the middle of the meeting. That is now pages eight and nine of the play, and it is the part I would have wanted most as a new CSM.
What is gone
The company's name, its product, its numbers and its people. The frameworks keep their rules — the top ten percent of customers earn half the effort; dedicated at one to seven, shared at one to thirty, digital at one to a hundred — with the thresholds flagged as the ones I set for that price list, to be scaled to yours. I am proud of the work I did there, and the people I did it with; this is the part of it that was never theirs, written so that it can be yours.
The shelf now has three things on it: a model of people, a model of the organization, and a play. The Competency Model measures a person against their potential; the Operating Model says what the organization is for; the Business Review is the first thing it does. Three more plays follow in the same shape — adoption workshops, feedback cycles, success initiatives — and the Partnership Maturity Model is big enough to be one of its own. Take them, run them, and tell me where they are wrong.