Customer Success Manager Capstone

The idea: Knowledge becomes skill only when you do the work. In the capstone you take one B2B SaaS customer at the start and carry it through the entire Customer Success lifecycle, producing the real artifacts a CSM makes at each stage. By the end you'll have a portfolio that proves — to yourself and to employers — that you can drive time-to-value, demonstrate value continuously, prevent churn, and grow an account: the full CSM job, not just the vocabulary.

How it works: Each deliverable unlocks after the syllabus topic that teaches its skill. You produce the artifact (a template is provided), submit it, and the app's AI reviews it against a rubric, gives you specific feedback, and lets you revise until it's solid. Finished deliverables assemble into your portfolio.

Your account: Own it end to end — from handoff to renewal

You don't choose a product here — you inherit an account, exactly as a real CSM does. The whole capstone runs on a single scenario, and every deliverable is something you'd actually produce for this customer in the field.

The scenario. You are the newly assigned CSM for Brightline Logistics, a 120-employee regional freight company that just signed a 12-month, $48k/year contract for "RouteIQ," a SaaS route-optimization and dispatch platform. Sales closed the deal on a promise to cut Brightline's empty-mile rate and give dispatchers real-time visibility. The champion is Maya, the Head of Operations who fought internally for the budget; the economic buyer is the CFO, who is skeptical and wants proof of ROI before the renewal. Brightline has 15 dispatchers who currently live in spreadsheets and are wary of yet another tool.

You inherit a thin sales handoff, a 90-day window to prove value, and a renewal date 12 months out — and you must move Brightline from nervous new buyer to a renewing, expanding advocate. Every artifact you build is about this account, so they tell one coherent story: the same champion, the same success criteria, the same outcomes, traced from the kickoff all the way to the renewal-and-expansion conversation.

The deliverables (your capstone arc)

#	Deliverable	Unlocks after	The skill it proves
1	Account handoff & success plan	Topic 4 (Onboarding new customers)	Capturing the sales-to-CS handoff and defining what success means
2	Onboarding kickoff & first-win plan	Topic 4 (Onboarding new customers)	Driving time-to-value with a goal-anchored 30/60/90
3	Quarterly Business Review (QBR) deck	Topic 5 (Building relationships and driving adoption)	Making value visible and acting as a strategic partner
4	Health-score read & churn-save play	Topic 7 (The metrics of Customer Success)	Reading risk signals and intervening before churn
5	Renewal & expansion proposal	Topic 6 (Renewals, churn, and expansion)	Securing the renewal and growing the account
6	Tough-conversation response script	Topic 8 (Tough conversations and escalations)	Handling escalations with empathy and ownership

Each builds on the last: the handoff defines the success criteria, the onboarding plan drives the first win, the QBR proves the value, the health score catches the risk, the renewal proposal grows the account, and the tough-conversation script protects it under pressure. Together they trace one account through the lifecycle Topic 3 lays out.

What "done" looks like

A complete capstone is six artifacts about one account, each passing its rubric, assembled into a portfolio you can link from your resume and walk through in interviews. This is the same portfolio Topic 10 (Landing the CSM job) tells you to build — and the case round of a real CSM loop asks you to do exactly these things: build an onboarding plan, structure a QBR, design a churn-risk mitigation. When you reach the interview prep and the program schedule, you'll practice presenting these artifacts the way you would to a hiring manager — and answering the live scenarios ("a key customer is threatening to cancel," "usage just dropped on a top account") that your own deliverables have already prepared you for.

Tips

• Keep it real and specific. "Improve adoption" is weak; "get all 15 dispatchers running their morning routes through RouteIQ by day 30, measured against the empty-mile baseline" is a CSM thinking.
• Anchor everything to the outcome. Maya and the CFO bought a result (lower empty miles, dispatcher visibility), not a feature. Every artifact — onboarding milestone, QBR slide, save play, upsell — should ladder back to that outcome and, by the renewal, to Net Revenue Retention.
• Reuse your earlier work. The success criteria you set in the handoff should reappear in your onboarding plan, get reported against in the QBR, drive your health-score rationale, and justify the renewal — graders (and employers) love a coherent thread.
• Start from the provided template. Each deliverable's frontmatter links its template; they live in the role's shared customer-success-manager/templates/ folder (from a deliverable that's ../../templates/<name>.md — the capstone/templates/ folder is intentionally empty). Use it as scaffolding, then revise against the AI feedback rather than aiming for perfect on the first try — that revise-against-the-rubric loop is the exercise.