Smoke and mirrors, cliques and poor leadership
Pros
Good pay, sales incentives on renewal and upsells which is uncommon in CS. Talented, hardworking people on the front lines. Many teammates genuinely care about members/clients and try to do the right thing. If you like ambiguity and firefighting, you’ll get a lot of reps quickly, but there is a burnout culture.
Cons
CS took a noticeable turn about three years ago and has been on a steady decline since -- higher turnover, less stability, and more “cliques” driving how information flows and decisions get made. Lack of clear senior leadership strategy and consistent execution. Priorities shift frequently, and teams are left to interpret (or rework) direction without stable decision-making. Customer Success is treated as the catch-all owner for nearly every facet of delivery, renewals, upsells, plan changes, marketing execution, operations, billing/escalations, often without authority, resources, or cross-functional accountability to match. Direction can feel overly influenced by a small informal circle across Sales and CS. If you’re not in that inner loop, it can be difficult to get context, influence decisions, or challenge assumptions—even when you’re closest to the customer reality. There is an underlying fear culture within CS. Speaking up or pushing back on decisions can feel risky, and many people choose silence over candor because they worry about repercussions through performance management. Decisions are regularly made top-down and then reversed weeks later once frontline teams explain why the approach won’t work in practice. This creates churn, rework, and burnout. Leadership culture can feel more focused on optics and managing up than understanding day-to-day CS realities and enabling teams to succeed. Product and market competitiveness feel stagnant. Limited meaningful product innovation, uneven delivery for members/clients, and competitors have closed the gap, making value harder to defend at current price points. Commercial headwinds are visible: new logo growth has been difficult, and more clients are terminating year-over-year. Significant leadership turnover across business units, with insufficient backfills for critical roles that support client delivery. The load rolls downhill to frontline teams. No clear career path in CS. The ladder is essentially CSM → Sr. CSM, and internal mobility from CS into other functions is uncommon. As a result, many strong performers ultimately leave rather than grow within the company. There is a distinctive inner circle across Customer Success, Sales, and Onboarding that disproportionately influences decisions and too often those decisions seem driven by personal incentives rather than what’s best for clients or the broader CS team. The culture can feel performative and self-promotional (“look at me” leadership) instead of grounded in outcomes and collaboration. Adam Grant’s Give and Take distinguishes between “givers” who invest in others and “takers” who seek to extract more than they contribute. In my experience, much of senior go-to-market leadership at IH (AVP/VP/RVP levels) operates more like takers than givers. If you’re comfortable competing internally and stepping on colleagues to get ahead, you may thrive here. If you value humility, shared accountability, and team-first leadership, it can be a frustrating environment. You should know that CS leadership presents as supportive, but in practice it often feels self-serving and image-driven. If you’re not in the inner circle, you’ll have limited influence and you may be blamed for outcomes you don’t control. I wish someone had warned me.
