The Upstream Principle

There is a common parable which has become loosely known as "the upstream principle". There are several variations, but generally they all describe the following situation:

🌊 You and a friend are enjoying a relaxing day down by a river, when suddenly you hear a desperate shout for help coming from the water. Alarmed, you both rush to the shore and see a drowning person in the river. You both rush in and safely pull them from the water. 

Not a moment after you've reached shore, you hear another shout for help, and both dive back in to save another struggling person. Then another person floats into view, and another, and another... until the two of you are utterly exhausted from trying to help them all. 

Without warning, your friend suddenly swims towards the bank, leaving you alone to retrieve several more oncoming drowning people. In frustration, you shout after him, wondering why he is giving up. He replies, "I'm going upstream to see why so many people are falling into the water and stop them." 🌊 

This story reveals a challenging paradox in business - specifically around customer experience design. 

🤔 Do you focus on the urgent need by helping the drowning people, thus individually making a huge difference to them, but in doing so, you commit yourself to unsustainable reactive work? 

🤔 Or, do you allow some of the drowning people to float by and instead turn your attention to what is causing the problems, and through preventative measures save many more people before they even fall into the river in the first place?

In short: do you prioritize preventative measures or recovery efforts?

As companies, we tend to prioritize the reactive work. They are easier to identify, tangible, are urgent to solve, and tend to get more recognition. 

However, if not enough attention is paid to preventative work, the resulting problems compound and soon you are spending so much time putting out fires, that you don't have time to grow the business. It's a vicious cycle, and it is steadily killing your post-sales teams like Customer Success and Support.

On the other hand, we can't focus on completely eliminating upstream causes of downstream problems. Friction is inevitable, and in fact, a necessary bi-product of innovative and growing companies.  Companies that are too cautious don't expand.

📉 The declining revenue performance of SaaS companies today shows us that customer experience must remain a top priority for sustainable, long-term growth. Poor CX increases the headwinds during down markets because customer retention is the outcome of what has preceded it. The renewal results you will achieve in Q2 are largely already determined by your strategies from prior quarters.

Which means your teams are exhausted in the river right now, fighting to save drowning customers. Make sure you are also allocating enough resources towards stopping future churn by moving upstream.