I had an interesting discussion with a startup team this week about whether a one-hour weekly post-sale meeting was worth the investment.
It was a fair question.
When you're a small team, every hour spent discussing onboarding, customer health, handoffs, or the overall customer experience is an hour that isn't spent directly helping a customer. That's a real tradeoff, and I don't dismiss it.
But I think the discussion was framed the wrong way.
The assumption was that the meeting wasn't customer work.
In reality, improving the customer experience is customer work.
An hour spent identifying why onboarding keeps slipping, why customers take too long to realize value, or why health risks aren't visible isn't an hour lost. It's an investment in every customer who comes after.
That's one of the hardest balances to strike in a growth company. You have to help today's customers succeed while continuously improving the system that helps tomorrow's customers succeed.
Those two responsibilities will always compete for your time. The mistake is believing only one of them is customer work.