What if CSMs are just a symptom of mediocre software?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of Customer Success lately.

Somewhere along the way, CS stopped being about solving real problems — and became a patch for weak products.

You see it all the time:
A tool gets sold. Adoption lags. So we throw people at the problem — CSMs, QBRs, sentiment trackers, and a bunch of other processes.
Not to make the product better, but to manage the perception of value.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If your product actually solved something critical, it wouldn’t need hand-holding. It wouldn’t need managing. Customers wouldn’t need to be “nudged” into using it. They’d just use it — because it works.

Retention shouldn’t be something you have to campaign for. It should be a natural consequence of building something people actually need.