OnboardSuccess planHuman review required

Mutual Success Plan

Draft a joint success plan with the outcomes, milestones, and owners both sides sign up to, not a vendor wish-list.

A success plan is mutual only when the customer owns half of it. The version that works states the outcome in the customer’s own words, puts their name on real milestones, and names the risks out loud instead of burying them under “we are committed to your success.”

The template

Copy it, swap the {{marked}} variables for your account, and run it.

prompt.txt

Draft a one-page mutual success plan for a new customer. It has to be
something the customer will co-own, not a vendor to-do list.

Customer: {{customer_name}}
The outcome they bought, in their words: {{business_outcome}}
How they will measure it: {{success_metric}}
Timeline they expect: {{timeline}}
Known risks to the outcome: {{known_risks}}
Who owns what on their side: {{stakeholders}}

Produce:
1. The business outcome, stated in the customer's language, not our features.
2. Three or four milestones toward it. Each has a date and a named owner.
3. The metric that proves each milestone is actually done.
4. The top risks, each with a named mitigation and who holds it.

Rules:
- At least half the milestones are owned by the CUSTOMER, by name or role.
- Measure their business outcome, not our license utilization.
- Name each risk with a real mitigation. Do not paper over the hard ones.
- One page. A success plan nobody can hold in their head is decoration.

Variables

{{customer_name}}: Customer namee.g. Bellwether Retail
{{business_outcome}}: The outcome they bought, their wordse.g. get store managers off spreadsheets and into live inventory dashboards before the holidays
{{success_metric}}: How the customer measures successe.g. all 9 store managers building their own dashboards weekly
{{timeline}}: Expected timelinee.g. live before the holiday season, about 8 weeks
{{known_risks}}: Known risks to the outcomee.g. POS data integration stalls teams; only a regional lead is engaged so far
{{stakeholders}}: Who owns what on their sidee.g. regional ops lead sponsors; store managers are the daily users; IT owns the POS connection

Worked example

A CSM is onboarding an account that bought a specific, dated outcome. She has watched too many onboardings die because the plan was really the vendor's plan, so nobody on the customer side felt accountable. This time she wants a plan the customer co-signs, with their own name on half the milestones.

filled-prompt.txt

Customer: Bellwether Retail
The outcome they bought, in their words: get store managers off spreadsheets and into live inventory dashboards before the holidays
How they will measure it: all 9 store managers building their own dashboards weekly
Timeline they expect: live before the holiday season, about 8 weeks
Known risks to the outcome: POS data integration stalls teams; only a regional lead is engaged so far
Who owns what on their side: regional ops lead sponsors; store managers are the daily users; IT owns the POS connection

Good output vs bad output

GOODStates the outcome in the customer's words and metric, puts the customer's own name on the majority of milestones, and names the two real risks with a mitigation and an owner instead of hiding them.

OUTCOME (their words): Store managers off spreadsheets and into live inventory
dashboards, live before the holiday rush.
SUCCESS METRIC: 9 of 9 managers building their own dashboards weekly.

MILESTONES:
1. POS data connected (week 2). Owner: their IT lead. Proof: live data in one
   test store.
2. Pilot store live (week 3). Owner: us + the regional lead. Proof: the pilot
   manager builds a dashboard unaided.
3. Half the fleet live (week 5). Owner: their regional lead. Proof: 5 of 9
   managers active weekly.
4. Full fleet live (week 8). Owner: their regional lead. Proof: 9 of 9 active
   before the season.

RISKS:
- POS integration stalls (the usual killer). Mitigation: IT books the 15-minute
  connection session in week 1, not week 2. Held by their IT lead.
- Single-threaded on the regional lead. Mitigation: name a manager champion by
  week 3 so it survives one person being out. Held by us.

BADLooks fine at a glance. Here is why it fails.

BELLWETHER RETAIL SUCCESS PLAN

Goals: Drive product adoption and maximize value realization.
Milestones:
- Week 1: Complete onboarding and training.
- Week 2: Achieve 80% license utilization.
- Week 4: Full adoption across all users.
- Week 8: Identify expansion opportunities.

Our team will provide best-in-class support and ensure Bellwether achieves
full value from the platform. We are committed to your success!

Generic filler"Drive product adoption and maximize value realization" could be pasted onto any account; it says nothing about Bellwether or the holiday deadline they actually bought.
Missing contextEvery milestone is owned by "our team" with no customer name on any of them, so nobody on the customer side is accountable and the plan is not mutual.
Wrong registerMeasures "80% license utilization," a vendor metric, instead of the customer's own metric of managers off spreadsheets and building dashboards.
Over-promising"Ensure Bellwether achieves full value" commits the vendor to an outcome it cannot deliver alone, which is exactly why the customer never picks up their half.

Guardrails

When NOT to use this

Do not build a formal mutual plan for a small, self-serve, or transactional account; the ceremony outweighs the value and nobody will maintain it.
Skip it if you cannot get a customer owner to accept at least one milestone; a plan only you signed is your to-do list, not a mutual plan.

Responsible use

The customer must see and agree to their half before you call it mutual. An internally-drafted plan presented as joint is a quiet fiction.
Keep internal revenue targets and expansion math out of the shared document; the customer's copy is about their outcome, not your quota.

A human must review the output before it reaches the customer.

Model + settings

Model: Claude Sonnet handles this well; it is structured drafting, not deep reasoning.
Temperature: 0.4 (moderate, you want clean structure with some phrasing help)
Settings: Feed it the customer's own words for the outcome, or it will default to your feature list and adoption metrics.
Require a customer owner on at least half the milestones; if the model cannot assign one, that is a real gap to fix, not a formatting quirk.

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