The CSM-PM relationship breaks down because organizations set these teams up to fail from day one. Let's break down why.

CSMs Are Stretched Too Thin

Most CSMs manage ratios of 1:50 or higher—often across completely different industries, use cases, and problems that each require deep expertise. They're buyer-focused by necessity, spending their days working around product limitations to help users extract value.

User adoption should be their sweet spot. CSMs are perfectly positioned to showcase features and connect them to specific use cases. Instead, they're constantly in reactive mode, firefighting product gaps and bugs rather than driving strategic growth.

This challenge intensifies in enterprise environments where products are highly customized. Cindy Huang, a Solutions Consultant with years of CSM experience at enterprise companies like Sprinklr, describes the reality: "Setups are so customized to each customer's needs that it often requires a human to actually decipher the intended setup and why it is the way it is."

What this means in practice: a CSM can't just guide a user to Feature X. They first need to understand why Customer A configured their permissions this way, why Customer B customized their workflow differently, and whether Feature X even appears in Customer C's modified UI. Each customer implementation becomes its own unique ecosystem that demands deep institutional knowledge before effective adoption work can even begin.

PMs Have Limited Discoverability

Having CSMs theoretically gives PMs a direct line to customer insights. In practice? It does the opposite.

PMs do less discovery than they normally would, relying on secondhand information filtered through the CSM-client relationship. And when that relationship is strained—which happens often—PMs can't even jump in to do their own customer interviews. After all, showing up without the ability to promise features can be more damaging than helpful.

The result: PMs build in the dark, making assumptions about problems they've never heard directly from users.

Mismatched Incentives Drive Misaligned Priorities

CSMs are incentivized to expand accounts and secure renewals. In many organizations, they're financially rewarded for doing so. PMs? They're salary-focused, incentivized to think holistically about the product's long-term vision and scalability.

When parties optimizing for different outcomes sit at the same table, agreement becomes nearly impossible. What gets one big customer to renew this quarter might completely derail the product vision that serves hundreds of customers long-term.

This dynamic cuts both ways. CSMs push for features that serve immediate account needs but may not scale. PMs build for the future market, not the current customer base—shipping sophisticated capabilities to customers who haven't mastered the fundamentals. Neither perspective is wrong, but without a shared framework for deciding what to build and when, both teams end up looking foolish. The CSM can't explain why the 'critical' feature isn't being used. The PM can't understand why their innovative feature is collecting dust.

No Playbook for Collaboration

We talked to leaders across dozens of organizations and discovered something shocking: even having a regular CSM-PM sync is a rarity.

Smaller organizations tend to do this well out of necessity—everyone's in the same room. But as companies scale, these insights disappear. Teams stop talking directly—usually communicating up and down the chain instead. The gap widens. And nobody notices until churn numbers force the conversation. The adoption ownership problem builds.

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