Our first Customer Success Manager Liz Taistra joined Rutter at the start of this year and has dived right in to helping our team make our customers more successful! From streamlining our onboarding process to helping our product and engineering teams prioritize our roadmap, Liz has worn various hats in her first few months at Rutter! Learn more about why Liz decided to join Rutter and her journey into the world of Customer Success.

1. Why did you decide to join Rutter?

I am obsessed with the ‘How I Built This’ podcast learning about the ideas of ordinary people and how they transform their ideas into businesses.  In early 2021, I had an app idea that I was very passionate about and tried to get it off the ground. Around the same time as I was exploring my startup idea, I learned about Rutter through a mutual friend and was excited to be a part of a fast growing startup and team full of energy.

When I learned that I could be part of Rutter in these early stages of the company, I was excited to experience building a business from the ground up first hand.

Our cofounders Peter and Eric are so open about their experience at Y Combinator, all the different ideas they tried before pivoting to this current iteration, and what it has been like running a real business with employees.

The entire team at Rutter is extremely passionate and that is what really drew me in to join them. I have learned a lot about customer success at the other start-ups I have worked for and I was excited to lay the ground work here at Rutter and help make our customers more successful.

2. What was your journey to becoming a Customer Success Manager?

After college at Northeastern University, I went into Equity Research Sales at the Bank of Montreal (BMO). This was a great first job that allowed me to learn about a lot of different companies across industries and why or why not people invest in them. When I became an associate, I managed several relationships with investment managers at funds on the West Coast in cities from Seattle all the way down to San Diego. However, after doing this for 3 years, I realized I wasn’t passionate about the Equity Markets and wanted to try and transition into the start-up world...I was living in San Francisco after all!

Enter Tribe Dynamics, an influencer marketing software platform that had a relationship with BMO where they shared influencer data on companies such as Mac Cosmetics as a data point for predicting future sales. Given the mutual connection to my previous company BMO, Tribe took a chance on me and I was hired as a Senior Account Manager.

At Tribe, I managed relationships with the influencer teams at brands within L’Oreal and Unilever and helped them grow their campaigns while also measuring the impact of them. In this role, I realized how much I love being customer-facing, building strong relationships, project managing customer requests, and problem solving when issues come up!

3. What does your role as the first CSM at Rutter entail?

My first couple of weeks at Rutter have been really fun and challenging! Whenever you start a new job, you remember how hard it is to be new and experience the steep learning curve first hand once again.

The first thing I have tried to tackle is the onboarding process. If you have a strong framework for onboarding, the customer is able to started quicker and experience the value that Rutter provides. I am also working through implementing more process around managing customer feature requests, and triaging bugs.

Lots of opportunity ahead!

4. What do you love most about working at Rutter?

The new challenges and the people! In my previous roles the products were more front end heavy. Now that I am at Rutter I am learning more about API’s and all the technical aspects of Rutter. I get to work closely with our product and engineering teams and helping inform how we prioritize our roadmap based on customer feedback as well.

The small team is making it really easy to learn and I enjoy coming to work everyday. Rutter culture is driven by young, exciting minds who are motivated to build a product that impacts our customers challenge of getting real time data and building the future of commerce data!

5. What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

I love spending time with my labradoodle, Lucky! He takes up all my time outside of work. We will go on hikes through Marin and short runs! I really love going to wine country with family and friends too!

6. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Just do it, because if you don’t, no one else will.

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We're hiring across functions. Come work with Liz. Join us!