Simon Johnson: Customer Success, Leading Global Teams, Falling Into Tech
This week's guest is Simon Johnson, Senior Director of Customer Success for Asia Pacific and Japan at DocuSign. Simon leads a team of around 35 people across the region, but his career did not start with a clear plan. He missed the marks for the degree he wanted, fell into tech almost by accident, and built his way up through Macquarie Bank, JP Morgan, MYOB, EMC, Google and Okta.
In this episode:
- Simon explains what customer success actually means in a software business, and why making sure people get value from what they bought is its own discipline.
- He describes leading a customer success team across Asia Pacific and Japan for a US-headquartered company, and the realities of managing across time zones.
- He talks about what he looks for when hiring and developing managers: commercial experience, genuine curiosity, and the confidence to hold a room of senior people.
- He shares his non-linear route into tech, from wanting to be a physiotherapist to starting out in a junior role at Macquarie Bank.
- He reflects on the leadership lessons he learned the hard way, leading an inside sales team at MYOB as a first-time manager.
- He looks back on the culture at Google, where noble failures were celebrated and moonshot thinking was the norm.
- He explains why he thinks about work life blend rather than work life balance, and how he weaves family time into a demanding role.
Simon's career advice:
"Doing what you said you would do is important. But being consistent with that means that you build some real credibility and trust with the people that you've got around you."
All opinions are the guest's own.
New episodes on a Wednesday, with interviews with leaders or experts every week and a monthly discussion on what we've heard in the last week of the month.
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Creators and Guests
Host
Dr Luella Forbes
Dr Luella Forbes is a consultant specialising in Organisational Change and founder of The Career Library and it's podcast, Career Stories.
