The Customer Success Glossary

A customer success playbook is a documented, repeatable set of actions a CS team follows when a specific event occurs in the customer lifecycle. Playbooks standardize engagement at critical moments like onboarding, churn risk, and renewal, driving consistency and enabling CS operations to scale.

Product adoption is the process by which customers move beyond initial setup to actively and consistently using a product in ways that deliver real business value. Unlike simple activation or login frequency, true adoption means customers have embedded the product into their daily workflows and are achieving the outcomes they signed up for.

A product roadmap is a strategic plan that outlines the vision, priorities, and timeline for how a product will evolve. For customer success teams, the roadmap serves as both a communication tool and a retention lever, giving CSMs a way to set expectations, demonstrate long-term value, and channel customer feedback into product decisions that drive renewals and expansion.

Product stickiness is a measure of how frequently and consistently users return to a product because it delivers ongoing value in their daily workflow. Typically calculated as the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users (DAU/MAU), stickiness indicates whether a product has become habitual for its users or remains something they can easily walk away from.