retention-feedback

Retention Feedback

The loop that keeps the post-sale half of the motion connected to product — the half the funnel forgets. Sales→marketing is the loop everyone can see; this is its mirror on the right side of the bowtie. Field intelligence from onboarding, adoption, and renewal flows back to product and CS on a cadence, instead of dying in a QBR. This is the four-function version of the alignment thesis in docs/why-align.md — made concrete as a tagged line in the same shared log the marketing-feedback skill writes to.

From a source — an onboarding note, a usage review, a support thread, a renewal call, a deal update:

1. Scan for the four signal types:
   • Adoption friction — where customers stall between signing and getting value (the workflow they never turned on, the setup step that blocks them).
   • Churn risk — the real leading indicator: usage trending down, a champion gone quiet, a single-threaded account after a reorg.
   • Expansion blocker / signal — a missing feature that's holding back a renewal or a second department; or, the opposite, a customer asking for more unprompted.
   • Renewal-loss reason — the real one, logged, not remembered (people misdiagnose why accounts leave as often as why deals are lost).
2. Log each as a tagged line in ops/feedback-log.md — the same single home marketing's tags use — so product and CS can act without a meeting:
   • RETENTION-RISK: [account] — [the adoption/churn/blocker signal] → [product or CS action]
   • EXPANSION-SIGNAL: when a healthy account is ready to grow (hand to sales with the CS context attached).
3. Route, don't dump. A feature request that blocks adoption goes to the roadmap, not the backlog void. A churn signal triggers the renewal motion early — day 60, not day 85. Don't tag every quiet week as a risk; tag it when usage, the champion, or the value story is actually slipping.

The tag is the hand-off. One file — the same one marketing reads — now carries both loops, so a post-sale signal can't quietly die any more than a field objection can. Product's job is to clear the RETENTION-RISK lines that are really roadmap; CS's job is to keep them honest and act on the renewal clock.

Depth

• quick: scan one note, emit any RETENTION-RISK / EXPANSION-SIGNAL lines.
• standard: the full four-signal scan across recent post-sale notes, tagged and routed to product vs. CS.
• deep: + a one-line "what this means for the buyer" for the top signal, and the renewal-clock implication (when the motion should start).