Document Value Drivers

Your Product Has More Value Than You Think—Documenting Value Drivers Helps Unlock It

When companies build products, especially in complex or technical domains, they often focus on the core function—the "main thing" the tool was designed to do. But if you’re in Customer Success, you know your product often provides different types of value to different stakeholders, across the customer journey.

We call these Value Drivers.

Value Drivers represent the distinct ways your product creates positive outcomes for your customers. They are essentially different use cases, ways your customers use your product to generate value. Some are obvious, and others are hidden beneath the surface, waiting to be unlocked. Documenting and communicating them offers several benefits which will improve adoption, retention, and expansion.

Let’s break this down with a real life example: back when I led CS for Greenly North America, one of our core offerings was an LCA calculator - software that companies use to measure the carbon footprint of physical goods.

The Obvious Value

The most immediate value driver often comes from downstream customer demand. In this case, our customers’ own clients were asking for product-level carbon emissions data. This LCA enabled our customers’ marketing and sales teams to confidently respond to those requests with credible, ready-to-share datapoints.

For most buyers of LCA software, this use case is immediately intuitive: it’s about meeting customer expectations, removing friction in sales conversations, and avoiding lost deals due to missing sustainability data.

The Additional Value Drivers

But stopping there means leaving value (and impact) on the table. My team got together for a 45 mins workshop session, where we identified additional value drivers:

1. Design Optimization
   The LCA Calculator can also be used earlier in the product development process to guide design decisions and reduce emissions before a product ever ships. This empowers R&D and product teams to build with sustainability in mind.

2. Sales Enablement
   This was the primary value driver—but did you consider the sub-value drivers that can significantly amplify its impact? Originally, the goal may have been to provide emissions data reactively, supplying numbers when customers asked. But what if you went further? By developing an interactive, visually compelling calculator that your sales team can use during demos, you transform sustainability data into a proactive storytelling tool.

3. Marketing & Brand Positioning
   The emissions data generated can feed into marketing campaigns and ESG reports. It’s a tool not just for compliance, but for storytelling—helping your customers position themselves as responsible, forward-looking businesses.

4. Cross-Functional Alignment
   When value drivers are documented, internal teams (from sales to customer success to product) can speak the same language. This improves onboarding, customer education, and account planning.

The result of this exercise which took less than an hour to do? Our Sales and Customer Success teams were better equipped to have richer, more strategic conversations with clients—allowing them to unlock new use cases and therefore increase the overall value delivered from our LCA software.

Takeaway for Customer Success Teams

Your job isn’t just to ensure product usage. It’s to ensure product value realization—which starts by identifying all the Value Drivers your product enables.

So here’s a quick exercise:

• Make a list of 3–5 Value Drivers your product enables.

• Document examples, use cases, and which personas benefit.

• Share it with your team—and your customers.

The more clearly you can articulate your product’s full value, the more deeply it will be adopted, and the more likely your customers are to renew and grow with you.

Your customers will thank you too, as you’ll surface ideas they might not have thought of themselves.