In this episode of Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Ryan Miller, Head of Customer Success at Cogniss, the no-code platform that empowers entrepreneurs, researchers, and clinicians to build digital health apps without writing a single line of code.
Ryan shares how an unconventional path through business strategy, entrepreneurship, and no-code development shaped the way he built Cogniss’s CS function from the ground up.
He breaks down what it takes to run CS in an early-stage startup, how to support radically different customer types, why true success starts with defined outcomes, and how his team cut onboarding time in half while improving retention.
https://youtu.be/aUPxxwa2G1Q
What You’ll Learn
- How Ryan’s background in strategy, operations, and no-code shaped his customer-first leadership style
- How Cogniss built a CS function from “1.5 hires” to a global team supporting complex customer types
- Why success plans became the backbone of retention after losing two major accounts
- How the team cut onboarding time by 50% through curriculum design, productized learning, and embedded help
- The metrics Cogniss now uses to measure customer health across researchers, entrepreneurs, and clinicians
- How to align CS, product, and sales in a startup where customers are both creators and users
- What capacity constraints look like inside a high-growth CS team and how automation + AI relieve the pressure
- The foundational processes Ryan would build first if he were starting over today
- How AI reshapes the future role of CSMs in no-code product ecosystems
Key Insights & Takeaways
- Career detours compound into CS leadership strength. Strategy, consulting, no-code development, and account management gave Ryan a multidisciplinary advantage when building CS from scratch.
- Success metrics must be explicit. After losing two key accounts, Cogniss implemented success plans that now anchor every conversation and materially improved retention.
- Different customer types need different definitions of value. Researchers, clinicians, and entrepreneurs all measure success differently. One framework cannot support all segments.
- Education accelerates time-to-value. An Academy + embedded help library flattened the app-building learning curve, cutting onboarding time by 50%.
- Capacity is the hardest scaling challenge. With support, onboarding, paid services, and success under one roof, CSM bandwidth drives all strategic decisions.
- Internal CS = external CS. The same principles used to align with customers also strengthen cross-functional collaboration with sales and product.
- AI becomes the new leverage. Automating support, summarizing insights, and freeing up CSMs for advisory work elevates CS into a strategic function.
- Strong foundations matter. If Ryan were to rebuild CS again, he would start with success metrics, journey mapping, and foundational processes before anything else.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina (0:00 – 0:29)
Here at Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Ryan Miller, Head of Customer Success at Cogniss, a platform that helps entrepreneurs, researchers, and healthcare professionals build digital help apps without writing code. Ryan, I’m thrilled to have you here!
Thanks for joining.
Ryan (0:30 – 0:36)
Thanks so much. It’s really a pleasure and an honor to be here. I really appreciate the invitation.
Irina (0:38 – 0:56)
Let’s go back to the roots for a second. You started in business strategy, moved into no code, low code, and now you run customer success at Cogniss. That’s quite a mix.
What brought you here and why customer success?
Ryan (0:57 – 4:17)
It’s a good question. My career journey has never been very traditional or linear in that sense. It looks like there’s a lot of jumps, tangents and things like that.
Really, my career started in business strategy, frankly, because that’s where I could get a job at the time. And I started with an introductory sort of role, basically doing admin. I was able to automate a lot of my day-to-day, like administrative tasks to give myself a bit more capacity.
And I knew admin wasn’t where I wanted to stay. I was really interested in business strategy, solving problems, complex problems. Finding simple solutions for things is really something that excites me.
And so business strategy was where I wanted to get to. The agency I was working at, thankfully, gave me that opportunity. And it was really looking back a fantastic place to start my career.
I got to work within so many different types of industries here in Australia and Sydney and kind of all around the world in some ways. A range of different companies from startups all the way through to large enterprise corporations as well. And develop a lot of transferable skills, too.
So knowing how to think, how to solve problems, and how to affect change within an organization are really big skills. And those are things that I brought into a lot of my other roles. So after my time at that company finished up, I did a little bit of consulting on my own, and I decided that being my own boss wasn’t necessarily for me.
The whole new business side of things, constantly bringing stuff in as you’re completing projects. It’s a lot to carry. And so the opportunity came to be one of the first hires at a no-code agency.
And I was like, look, I can’t write a line of code. So, no-code sounds interesting and I jumped in. And at first, there was probably about six months where I was literally one of the developers on the tools, learning how to build products.
And this was my introduction into tech. And while it was no code, it taught me a lot of the fundamental principles of how to build a good product. And I got to be a part of a lot of different sort of builds from two-way sort of marketplaces through to CRM and internal systems through to even digital health apps themselves.
And so, again, got a lot of experience really quickly in doing that. But my background and my skills were very much more in account management. And so I stepped into a relations management and operations role there, helping run that side of the business.
But after working in an agency, doing my own sort of consulting, and then kind of, again, working in another agency, I was ready to step into much more of the customer side. And so when there was an opportunity, it felt like the right fit. And being an early-stage startup, they weren’t necessarily looking for someone who had 10 years plus of specific customer success experience, but someone who was adaptable, who was excited to build something.
And thankfully, I fit the bill. So that’s how I ended up there.
Building CS at Cogniss: from the first hire to a multinational team
Irina (4:18 – 5:25)
I think you were the perfect hire. As I understand, you were the first person to join the team. Everything you’ve told us so far helped you take that job because you had the business experience. Even if it was for a short period of time, you were also an entrepreneur.
This helped you understand the challenges of running a business. You worked in account management and on the product side. All of those elements connected, and I’m sure they made you a better customer success person without knowing this was what you would step into.
Speaking of Cogniss, give us a quick snapshot. What does customer success look like? What’s the team setup? What does your day-to-day look like? Were you the only CS person, or did you expand the team?
Tell us more about the current role.
Ryan (5:25 – 8:02)
Yeah, absolutely. When I started, I was CS hire 1.5. They had brought in someone very junior for a short time who started to set some foundations, but later left, and I came in.
Without any formal customer success experience, I was learning on the job while applying a lot of the principles I had developed in previous roles. Looking back, I’d probably do a lot of things differently, but for me, it was always about getting good results for customers.
The function has changed a lot, and the team has grown too. It was just me for the first year, and that was a big role. It still is, because you’re managing a book of business while also trying to build out a function. The two responsibilities constantly compete for time.
As soon as we brought in another team member, a junior CSM here in Sydney, things really started to shift. We then led the launch of the company in the UK, which was fantastic. We’ve now hired a senior CSM in the UK who brings a lot of experience to the team, and I’ve found that really balances me out. He brings more traditional approaches, while I bring more out-of-the-box thinking. We’re kind of yin and yang in that way, and it’s brought good balance.
Day to day, we all still manage a book of business. At Cogniss, we pride ourselves on doing a lot with a little. We’re a small team of about 25 people and growing.
CS at Cogniss includes traditional customer success, but also customer support and onboarding. We all manage those areas, while also working to drive and scale the CS function.
Any day can involve putting out fires, success planning with customers, looking ahead, reporting, helping customers learn the platform, and finding efficiencies. No day is the same, and I think that’s one of the reasons I love it.
Managing time zones & multicultural teams
Irina (8:02 – 8:15)
For sure. I’m curious, how do you manage the time zone differences and how did you manage to build a multicultural team across the globe? How do you do that?
Ryan (8:15 – 9:46)
Yeah, I think there are seasons in everyone’s career where you need to commit to building something. Sometimes that comes with the sacrifice of what you’d consider work-life balance. But on the other side, the goal is to build and accomplish something you can step back from and feel proud of.
That’s definitely been the case in an early-stage startup. Anyone who works in a startup can relate to that. Working across multiple time zones meant I often worked into the night. Thankfully, Cogniss is a company that recognizes this, so there’s a give and take in terms of flexibility.
Before we built a team in the UK, I was managing a book of business there. That meant working three or four nights a week, which was taxing. But you learn a lot, especially about how different, yet similar, cultures operate, which is pretty cool.
Now it’s much more manageable. Our senior CSM takes care of the UK region and even some of the Americas, which is great. My evenings are now focused on catching up with him and planning ahead.
It’s much different now, but it was definitely a grind to get here, but in a good way.
Irina (9:47 – 10:03)
Speaking about recognition and being proud of the things that you’ve managed, I want to ask you, what are the key outcomes or metrics you’d like to understand whether your customers are successful? What’s important for you guys?
Ryan (10:04 – 12:49)
Yeah, to be honest, when I started, this was one of the things we didn’t have in place. To give you an answer on this, you need to understand a little about the different types of customers we work with. You got it spot on earlier: entrepreneurs, researchers, clinicians.
Each one of those customer types operates extremely differently. Researchers are typically awarded a grant. That’s a finite amount of money they have to spend, and they usually have one goal to accomplish.
Entrepreneurs and clinicians are more traditional customer types, where it’s an account you’re looking to renew and grow over time. Metrics for both of these differ. When we started, we didn’t have a set of metrics.
Essentially, the system was: what’s the gut feeling on this account? The dangerous part about systems like that is they work until they don’t.
It wasn’t until we lost two key customers in the same year that we realized we needed to shift the way we measure success with customers. These are hard lessons to learn, but they’re good lessons.
Looking back, it seems really obvious. Why weren’t we doing that beforehand? But when you’re managing a lot, sometimes things like this slip through the cracks.
We started a little left of field. You always hear about churn, NRR, ARR, year-on-year growth, NPS, etc.
But for us, because we had these different customer types, it came down to getting formal success plans in place per account and looking at what our customers define as success. We aligned ourselves with those metrics, and the results were almost immediate.
We had an account that was at risk while we were implementing these processes. Within a couple of months, the whole narrative with that customer changed, which was fantastic. They’ve now renewed.
It’s been a really good shift for the business overall and something our customers actually look forward to. It becomes a living agenda for every single touchpoint with that customer. We’re asking, how are we tracking in these areas?
This is what we’re doing, the value we’re providing, and how it’s affecting your business, your research, whatever that is. It becomes a tangible way to work with our customers, see the outcomes they’re achieving, and tie that back to ROI within the business.
Cutting onboarding time in half
Irina (12:50 – 14:06)
That’s super interesting, and I love that you shared two of the things you would have wanted to do differently. I wouldn’t call them mistakes, because those are usually the best lessons. They stick with you and show you why things should have been done differently. The impact is even bigger.
Speaking of that, I have a question at the end of the conversation about what you’d do differently next time, but we won’t have time to reflect on that just yet.
For now, I want to talk about one of the fundamental processes in customer success: onboarding. It’s the process that defines the journey you build with your customers. I know you managed to cut onboarding time in half while also improving retention.
I’m curious what drove that change. What were the ingredients of your successful playbook?
Ryan (14:08 – 17:21)
Yeah, look, frankly, this is probably one of my prouder accomplishments in my almost four years there. It was quite a strategic move in the CS function here. Cogniss is a no-code platform for creating digital health applications.
We really want the customer, the user, to be the creator. What we found hard is that many of these people, clinicians, researchers, are not people you would necessarily attribute to being highly technical or knowing how to create an application. There’s a learning curve to using the platform.
There’s a learning curve to understanding app development and all that goes into it, because there are some fundamentals to app development that you need to grasp to build a successful app. Once we understood that anything we could do to help flatten that learning curve, to make it easier to learn how to develop on Cogniss, would help shorten the onboarding process and reduce the frustrations of creating that app.
We see our onboarding starting from the moment the contract is signed to when the app is live and being used. For us, it was about creating a lot of learning resources. One was an academy, teaching the fundamentals of Cogniss. This is how you do simple things to get yourself started. The second was the development of a help site that later became embedded within the platform itself.
A really searchable resource where people can find answers to their questions. The way this impacted retention is clear. People learning how to use the tool quicker lets them build their app quicker, more efficiently, more effectively. They get better results themselves, turning into faster onboarding time and faster time to value.
The way it’s impacted retention is that now they’ve stepped into the role of product owner. They can take ownership of it. They can manage it. Traditionally, they’ve worked with developers, whether a dev team in-house or outsourced to an agency.
They were relying on somebody else to make changes or updates. The beauty of Cogniss is we make it easy to make those changes and updates. Researchers can hold lived experience workshops with people they’re trying to affect and sense-check different options with them.
Entrepreneurs can iterate really quickly. Clinicians can deploy different interventions at different times to get better results with patients. That skill, knowledge, and know-how has kept people really a part of Cogniss and part of our ecosystem, because they then hold the power to manage their own product, which is game-changing for a lot of these customers.
Cross-functional alignment: sales, product, and CS
Irina (17:25 – 18:10)
Now, besides the processes, you also have the team, not only the customer success team, but also the extended team. Aligning with other teams or peers is not always easy. I’m curious, how do you reach alignment between product and sales?
And how do you make sure the promises around the customer journey are consistent? How is it in your case, or in Cogniss’s case?
Ryan (18:11 – 19:46)
Yeah, in many ways. I’ve found that a lot of the principles that work in customer success externally also work internally. It’s about finding common ground in different ways.
In the time I’ve been here, we’ve revisited the entire sales process, including how CS is involved in pre-sales, at least two to three times. I like to think we have a really close relationship with our product team, which is great. They’re always leaning on us to understand how customers are interacting with the product.
We’re always taking issues, bugs, and ideas to them. It has become a very collaborative way of working. First, it’s about establishing the right relationship with the right people.
We have a really open culture at Cogniss. We can give each other feedback and have hard conversations. Nothing is taken personally because we know, at the end of the day, we’re all working toward the same goal of growing the company.
I’ve found that the more I can tie things back to tangible business value like how this benefits a customer or the business, the better those conversations go. It’s always about looking at the bottom line.
How does this affect the business? How does this affect the customer? What value does it add? How many customers will this positively affect?
Those are the things that make conversations and processes move faster and drive change more effectively
The realities of scaling CS in an early-stage startup
Irina (19:47 – 20:05)
And when it comes to that, do you have a formal or traditional sales team or is it more product-led motion? And there’s no formal sales team to basically do the handover between sales and customer success?
Ryan (20:05 – 22:07)
No, we do have a formal sales team, a formal commercial team. There are three people working within that function in the UK and two here. The CEO jumps in and out as needed.
There is definitely a formal function. Handovers are always tricky, and it’s something we know will continue to evolve. We try to make it clear what we need from the sales team to ensure the best start to the customer journey post-sale and during onboarding.
We’re even starting to look at success metrics at the point of sale. What matters to the customer? Why are they buying? Where is their line in terms of value realization?
These things take time to implement, time to understand, and time on both sides to grasp why they’re important.
Sometimes things just happen quickly, or sales need to move fast, and details get left out. I would never point fingers. They’re doing their job, and we’re doing ours.
We try to put as many processes in place as we can, as well as documents to capture this information. But ultimately, sometimes you just have to know what has and hasn’t been captured. That’s where handovers are really important, so you know what to cover in the kickoff call.
Anything that might have been missed can be uncovered and addressed quickly. We’ve learned through experience, from good handovers and some poor ones. But thankfully, when handovers haven’t gone well, we have a team that cares deeply about the customer’s success.
People step in, and we figure out what needs to be done to make it right. That collaborative culture is what ultimately drives a lot of wins.
Irina (22:08 – 22:39)
What has been one of the toughest challenges when you scaled the CS team? So now I think you are three or four in the team. So basically you started as the first or one and a half resource in CS and now the team has grown.
What has been the toughest challenge when you scaled? What was the complicated part in your case?
Ryan (22:40 – 25:02)
Yeah, I think the most complex part, besides aligning with other teams, has always been capacity. Every single one of our CSMs manages their own book of business. They all help with support.
They’re involved in customer onboarding and, at times, even helping with other customers. There’s also the paid services side of the business, which sometimes the CSM supports in terms of delivery.
Capacity in the team can be really tight. But the team has a deep understanding that there are times we have to put our heads down and put in extra time to help scale.
One of our biggest projects recently, which is about to go live, is the introduction of an AI agent into the platform to take a lot of the load off support. To get that over the line, we had to turn our existing help resource into a language model and update a lot of it. That was a massive task. On top of our current workloads, I think we completed that in about three months.
We’re not finished. There’s still a lot more to do, but we’ve made strong progress. Then there’s the actual setup of that system and everything around it.
The team understands that sometimes we have to work a little harder to see the benefits later and hopefully make things easier in the long run. One thing we always do is look at bottlenecks and capacity coming up, especially with where the business is going, potential deals closing, and new ways of working.
Then we take that back to CS and strategically look at how our function needs to evolve to support where the business is going.
What’s on the horizon? What deals are coming in? What do the customers need?
That’s how we’ve always approached it and how we decide when it’s time to push versus when it’s time to focus on managing the day-to-day.
Advice for first-time customer success leaders
Irina (25:04 – 25:12)
And now the moment of reflection. What’s something that you would do differently if you were to build the CS function again from scratch?
Ryan (25:13 – 25:54)
Yeah, that’s a good one. I’m very big-picture focused, naturally. I like looking at where we can go, what’s out there, what’s happening.
I think what CS needed at the very start was more of a foundation, more of those foundational processes. If I were to go back, that’s what I would put in straight away. We covered it earlier, but how do we measure success per account? What does that look like?
Even getting as granular as mapping the customer journey in detail. It would really be about spending more time putting those processes in place early on.
Irina (25:56 – 26:09)
And what’s one piece of advice you would give to someone who is stepping into their first CS role, regardless of the industry, the product, the go-to-market motion?
Ryan (26:11 – 27:58)
Yeah, it really depends on the stage of the company they’re joining. If it’s an early-stage startup like Cogniss, and they’re one of the first CS hires with maybe just a small team doing CS, the piece of advice I would give is not to rush into things or think you know better, but to get a lay of the land straight away.
That’s priority number one. Get in there, do the job, but also strategically look at what’s working well and what’s not. Talk to the CSMs, talk to customers, understand where the most impact or the lowest-hanging fruit is, and use that to decide where to focus.
I think sometimes, and I’ve been guilty of this, you jump in, think you know best, and start building something that seems great, only to find that a piece of the foundation is missing. In my case, it might have been something like a success metric.
If you don’t take the time to get the lay of the land, you can miss that piece. Then what you’re building might have to be paused, or in the worst case, fall apart and create a bad perception of what’s happening.
Information is always helpful. Especially for CSMs, there’s power in knowing how your account is doing across many different areas. So take your time, get into the company, understand what’s going on, and then apply your effort where it can have the most impact.
Irina (27:59 – 28:12)
And last but not least, to wrap things up, how do you see the role of CS evolving in companies like Cogniss where customers are both creators and users?
Ryan (28:13 – 29:44)
Yeah, this is one that really excites me. I think what’s on the horizon and what’s coming and I’d be a miss not to mention AI in this answer. It can carry the weight of many mundane or repetitive tasks that we all do, like preparing for QBRs or distilling large amounts of customer data. It starts to free up the CS, CSM, or CS leader to take on a more strategic role, where AI can’t necessarily fill in the gaps.
When you’re talking about a company like Cogniss, where customers are both creators and users, it creates space for the CSM to embed themselves in that creation process. They can become more of a trusted advisor or consultant, helping customers build solutions and apps that have real impact and staying close to those builds as well. They’re not spread thin with monotonous tasks but can spend more time helping customers create a bigger impact, acting as a consultant and strategic advisor.
That’s a place where a CSM can become really invaluable to that business. So that’s what I see.
Irina (29:45 – 30:13)
Ryan, this was a great conversation. Kudos to you and the whole team because you managed to connect strategy, no-code, and customer success into one solid approach. Congratulations, and thanks again for joining and sharing your story with us.
And to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and keep mastering customer success.
Ryan (30:14 – 30:16)
Thanks so much, Irina. Appreciate it.
