First four of the SalesForce Mafia leaders taken out of their Transformation roles at CX abruptly. Is this change in people or change in strategy?
Hoping the new leader listens to layers that are atleast 3-4 levels deep to get the real pulse. Otherwise, it will be the fox guarding the hen house paradigm.
If the new leader is listening and is getting the feedback, she will be well served to set up an internal anonymous feedback portal. Get the feedback from Sales and people who have vested in the company for atleast 10 years. Hope we get back to our winning ways soon and stop the spin machine. Answer fundamental questions… are we a software company? What is the value add from the CSS and CSE? Why so many VPs in CX? Are we not sacrificing innovation, and our customer facing capabilities at the cost of funding non productive teams. Why our renewals are declining and shrinking in size? Why have we not grown the top line revenue in the last six years? Finally, what is plan to fix this?
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CSSs on 60k lead to renewals of 100,000s and upsell that likely wouldn’t happen without them. The problem I see is with management of them and the disconnect between them and sales teams, making joint interests more difficult.
CX Engineering has to work and no value add. Need to chop the whole group and fire all brainless engg directors. When All the work is done and carried by engineers why Cisco needs high paid Engg managers and directors.
Cisco can optimize by firing 50% engg directors and managers in CX and PX
I think our VPs and above need to pass the "Green Belt" training. We need leadership caliber not water bottle carriers for their bosses. Little buddies need to go and be replaced with people who can command respect "beyond the spin". Stop the Coffee Chat madness please! Let's have a Business Chat about what ails us what are you doing about it. Anyone upto it? Any Leaders?
Engineering has been trying to wrest some of the "maintenance contract" dollars from CA/Services/CX for decades. Only a company that doesn't actually understand software would take all of the recurring revenue and give it to the services organization so there is no reinvestment in the software/product.
This has inflated the actual worth of the CA/Services/CX organization for so many years that no one really understands what the right investment/ROI needs to be for that organization.
You know what we should do… merge tac and “as” or ps or whatever it is…. Let’s get rid of the boundary between what is break fix and design and make cx more like an MSP, bring the value back into support.
Keep whatever roles are worth a fa-t from AS and any competent engineers/communicators, purge the useless redundant roles.
Staff teams enough so case volume is manageable enough that engineers can be engaged enough.
Have “spec ops” groups of guys who can take on special contracts to do deployments for cu or optimization or whatever.
If you structure this right and spread the work out enough with a clear path to grow technically and financially, plus direct money to engineering so we have less bugs / fns etc we can rake in money…
When you have a group of Cisco folks that still gives a sh-t, knows their stuff, and knows how to communicate and execute in a delivery for a cu it’s a beautiful thing
If you enable us to work behind a system that makes money with our best folks in sales we can get our whole monies again
CX is where careers go to die, or where old inefficient blow hard middle managers who can’t make it anywhere else, like Larry U., go hide or make problems for otgers. Cx is awful. CSEs are a big waste.
CX is a cost center and should be funded like one, the revenue from CX is a function of the revenue and products that come out of the bu’s. As others noted, dissolve all the redundant functions like CX eng, biz ops, strategy, solutions, architects, prod mgmt, etc. that don’t add value. When you have more CX architects, engineers, prod mgmt, solutions people vs actual engineers building new products you have a problem.
Also dissolve following useless, "non-contributing" and "non-business impacting" roles such as Business Solutions Architect (BSA) masquerading as CTOs at CX and elsewhere.
Dissolve following "non-contributing" and "non-business impacting" organization:
CX Strategy and Planning, CX Engineering, CX Product Management, CX Oversight, Customer Success Executives and Customer Success Manager.
who are the 4 transformation leaders ?
The reason for so many VPs in CX is that VPs are actually doing the real work (NOT), while real workers are sent packing by continuous LR’s. VP doing laborious work of monitoring NCE/Architects, setting strategy, checking delivery quality, and sending customer satisfaction surveys to customers.
It’s about time someone breaks the layers of inefficiency.
That is so true, too many VP’s in CX, why is that? It is indeed very odd
CX is filled with people who have very little knowledge of the products they support and provide no value other than misguided advice making sales more difficul. CX does the opposite of what they are supposed to do.
Starting almost two decades ago people in engineering were taken off programs they had great experience with to work on things they knew nothing about to demonstrate VERSATILITY and ADAPTABILITY. It appears to have taken a while to reach the rest of the company. The management that later fully adopted Chambers' "don't fall into the trap of helping other people" gave incentive to everyone else to starve the newbies into a position to be laid off.
The irony is at well managed companies you introduce people to new work through background tasks with modest guidance from experts to help train them so you still get most of the work people are best at and over time all your people grow.
New heads of CX are rodeos who are known to be jumping from BU to BU for the 15 years.
Who is responsible for poor management and decision making ? Executives above them !
CX is filled with people who have very little knowledge of the products they support and provide no value other than misguided advice making sales more difficul. CX does the opposite of what they are supposed to do.
Focus on innovation, take care of engineers at the low level.
Well said! There is clearly a big hole to climb out of and I don’t see how any change of strategy can be accomplished with the current group of VP’s in CX. They clambered to be the little buddies of the execs just let go. They aided and abetted in the downturn of the culture and the implementation of some pretty lame brain ideas. Real change will happen after a clean sweep.
Too late too little. Plus the tac point of cx will be plunged into uncontrolled chaos in the coming weeks. As change is good and change is needed.
finally something constructive. totally agree.
Liz and Leaders should know this website and read it constantly.
Only a surgical operation can bring this big heavy ship back to its lean and efficient mode. Too many leaders in strategy, planning and oversight - guiding others.
They should be instead contributing to bottom line. Lessons from IBM.