Customer onboarding and implementation

The period between signature and first real use is where the largest share of preventable churn is created, and where a customer's opinion of the product is formed permanently.

Agree what live means before the contract is signed

The most common implementation failure happens in the sales cycle: nobody wrote down what success would look like, so the project has no finish line and every party quietly holds a different one.

Define the go-live criteria concretely — which teams, doing what, with what data in place — along with the date, who does what on each side, and what the customer must supply. Put it in the contract or an agreed plan before the deal closes, not after.

Sales commitments become implementation scope. If a deal was won on something the product does not do yet, the implementation team inherits it. Route that decision back to whoever can make it rather than absorbing it silently.

Plan the implementation as a project with a customer-side owner

Nothing predicts implementation failure like the absence of a named, empowered owner on the customer side. They need authority to make decisions and time genuinely allocated. If the customer cannot name that person, the project is at risk before it starts, and saying so early is a service.

Set a cadence from the beginning and hold it — a stalled implementation almost never announces itself; the calls quietly stop being attended.

Sequence for early value, not for completeness

Get one team doing one useful thing quickly, then widen. A phased approach produces a customer who has seen the product work, which changes every subsequent conversation.

The alternative — configure everything, migrate everything, launch to everyone — pushes all the value past a long window during which nothing works and the sponsor is defending the purchase.

Data and integrations are where the time actually goes

Both are routinely under-scoped because both depend on the customer's environment rather than yours. Profile their data early; expect it to be worse than described. For the mechanics of moving it, technology:data-migration covers the discipline.

Integration work depends on the customer's other vendors, their change windows, and their security review — none of which you control. Establish those constraints in week one rather than discovering them in week six.

Train for the job, not for the product

Feature training teaches people what the buttons do. Task training teaches them how to do their actual work in the new system, and only the second changes behavior.

Train close to go-live, not months before, and train the people who will use it rather than only the project team. Leave behind material they can use without you.

Hand over deliberately

An implementation that ends when the project ends leaves the account with nobody. Hand over with context — what was configured and why, what was deferred, what is fragile, who the people are — and confirm the receiving side has it rather than assuming.

Sources

references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.

Never

• Start an implementation without written go-live criteria both sides agreed.
• Proceed without a named, empowered owner on the customer side.
• Discover the customer's integration and security constraints after committing to a date.
• Close an implementation on configuration complete rather than on people using it.