The Thread Podcast

Catherine Blackmore has spent nearly two decades building the programs that wrap around technology, from the early days of customer success in 2007 to her current role as Group VP of Customer Programs and Employee Success at Oracle. In this episode she sits down with Justin to unpack what the discipline got right, what it got wrong, and what survives the shift to AI.Catherine makes the case that the high touch model was right all along. It buys a company time to build its moat. But the obsession with the golden record, bridging every data silo, and the red, yellow, green health score was a costly detour, because customers live in their own tools and every account ends up yellow anyway.From there the conversation turns to the question on everyone's mind. If agents can scale the work, what is left for humans? Catherine's answer is that human connection becomes the scarce, valuable thing, and the next generation of CS leaders will manage teams of agents while doing the relational work no agent can fake. She also reframes customer advocacy as the true end state of customer success, the double funnel where your strongest customers become your most believable salespeople.She closes with the career advice she is giving her son as he enters a reshaped workforce. Adaptability beats raw talent, the sum of your experiences equals your existence, and you should always watch the game within the game.What we get into: The high touch model and defending the moat Why the golden record and the red, yellow, green health score never delivered Human connection as the new scarcity model The CSM of the future leading a team of agents Customer advocacy and the double funnel Outcomes over seats and consumption Career advice for the next generation entering an AI-shaped workforceGuest: Catherine Blackmore, Group Vice President of Customer Programs and Employee Success, Oracle

Andy Mowat has run RevOps at four unicorns, and between every role he's gone out and built something new. His latest is Whispered, an AI platform that helps top GTM execs build their careers through shared insights, warm introductions, and access to the roles that never get posted.In this episode, Andy and Justin get into why the entire GTM tech stack is heading for a two-year rebuild, what the move to a data-warehouse-first model means for RevOps teams, and why smaller companies are suddenly more nimble than the enterprise. Andy shares hard-won lessons from scaling Culture Amp, including the speed-to-lead system he built around time-critical leads and the market-maturity question he buried in the win-loss forms. They also dig into whether the fractional exec wave is real, why thoughtful gifting and distinctive events still beat automated outbound, and what it actually feels like to run a proactive job search at the VP level for the first time.A candid conversation between two friends about category strategy, positioning, and building a career in go-to-market when the ground keeps shifting.Buzzsprout Chapter Markers00:00 — Intro: how Justin and Andy met around Culture Amp 01:40 — Andy's background: RevOps at four unicorns, and why he keeps building 03:30 — Founders as a hiring profile, and the trap of "ambiguous roles" 05:30 — Rebuilding the GTM tech stack: data warehouse first, the semantic layer, and two years of turmoil 07:00 — The give-to-get ratio and why AI-era outbound still comes down to better emails 08:30 — Strategic gifting, distinctive events, and the Wisconsin business school cold open 11:00 — Podcasts as relationship engines, not just content 11:30 — Inside Culture Amp: 180 events a year and the speed-to-lead system 13:00 — The multi-prospect demo experiment, and the market-maturity question that predicts a category's breakout14:45 — The fractional exec wave: real shift or euphemism for "between jobs"16:15 — Why early-stage marketing needs people to "grok what you do" before top of funnel 18:00 — What's next for Whispered: the network, the community, and the roles that get whispered

Justin sits down with Nils Vinje, business growth guide and longtime customer success leader, to talk about the single biggest thing holding most growing companies back: everything still depends on the CEO.Nils spent the early part of his career on the leading edge of the customer success movement — convincing his first employer to ditch the "account manager" title back in 2011 — and has since coached hundreds of CS and CX leaders through the challenge of making their function legible to the rest of the organization. These days he works with CEOs and their leadership teams using the Pinnacle system, a five-principle framework built around people, purpose, playbooks, performance, and profit.In this conversation, Nils and Justin get into what running a CX org teaches you about leadership that no other function can, how to read the label from outside the bottle, and why the hardest decisions in any company are usually the ones everyone already knows need to be made.He also shares what he'd ask anyone standing at a crossroads in their career — and why the answer has nothing to do with money.Chapters[00:00] Intro and What Nils Does Now [01:42] What Leading a CX Org Teaches You About Leadership [03:30] The Single Biggest Challenge Every CS Leader Faces [05:01] Who Nils Works With and When to Bring in Outside Help [07:08] The Pinnacle System — Five Principles for a Well-Oiled Machine [09:38] Delivering Hard Truths with Grace [11:00] The People Problem Most CEOs Won't Solve [13:08] Why Being Inside the Bottle Kills Objectivity [14:29] The First Question Nils Asks Anyone at a Career Crossroads [16:25] What's Next for Nils and the Growth Bottleneck Blueprint [18:34] Never Stop Adding Value