Inside the Product Specialist Role at Clarisights

At Clarisights, Product Specialists work closely with Customer Success Managers as part of their daily workflows. We sat down with Avisek Rath, our Customer Success Manager, to answer the most common questions we hear from candidates interested in our Product Specialist role. If you're considering applying or just curious about what makes this position unique, this conversation covers everything you need to know.

Key Takeaways

• The Role: Product Specialists handle technical implementation and customer onboarding while building toward strategic account management - it's 50% tactical execution, 50% strategic thinking
• Day-to-Day: Split between high-urgency pilot implementations (getting new customers live in one week) and optimising existing customer setups through data analysis and platform configuration
• Technical Requirements: Must be comfortable with large datasets, SQL/database work, and tools like DuckDB - but it's more about problem-solving ability than specific syntax knowledge
• Ideal Candidate: Someone who learns rapidly, asks great clarifying questions, gets excited by complex data challenges, thinks in scalable solutions, and thrives under pressure

Let's start with the bigger picture. Customer Success at Clarisights isn't like traditional Customer Success roles. What's unique about it?

Customer Success at Clarisights operates on three key axes that differentiate us from typical CS teams. (You can read this post to learn more)

First, we're building a product exclusively for business users - marketers who expect abstraction from technical complexity. Our platform handles massive amounts of data over long time frames, involving technical concepts our end users don't need to understand. But we do. We need to interpret, configure, and implement solutions that fit seamlessly into their existing workflows.

Second, the context we deal with has much less to do with our product features and much more to do with how our product interacts with the customer's specific data. Most questions from customers are about their data and how it behaves within our platform, not about our features themselves.

Third, there's a strategic component. We're not dealing with customers in isolation - we're seeing patterns across enterprise clients like Delivery Hero, Uber, and HelloFresh. What works for one food delivery company often applies to others, with minor variations. We leverage these cross-customer insights to proactively add value.

How did the Product Specialist role emerge from this model?

Until we had about 10-15 customers, Customer Success Managers did everything - technical setup, ongoing support, and strategic planning. That worked initially, but it couldn't scale. You can't expect one person to handle technical implementation, day-to-day support, AND strategic account management.

We realised we could split these responsibilities along a natural line. The technical aspects - product configuration, setup, and immediate problem-solving - can be learned relatively quickly and don't require deep historical context with each customer. The strategic work - understanding business evolution, relationship management, and long-term planning - requires time to develop that customer intimacy.

The first part is where Product Specialists come in. They focus on implementation and technical execution while building the customer context that eventually prepares them for strategic ownership. (I will get into the evolution of the role in a moment.)

What does a typical week look like for a Product Specialist?

It depends on whether you're working on a pilot implementation or supporting existing customers.

During pilot weeks, everything operates with higher urgency. The goal is to get a new customer from connected ad accounts to a fully functional workspace with familiar reports within one week. You're simultaneously configuring the platform and gathering real-time feedback from the customer about their specific business requirements.

For example, we recently started work with a massive telecommunications company that advertises phone plans, device contracts, and has B2B businesses. You can make certain assumptions about their data structure, but you need to ask specific questions about how they segment their business. That week involves creating the right dimensions and metrics, ensuring data sources integrate properly, and troubleshooting any volume or compatibility issues.

With existing customers, the focus shifts to optimisation and education. Users might ask how to achieve a specific result, and often the answer isn't building something new - it's showing them how to use existing features more effectively. You might write help articles, coordinate with our product team on feedback, or work through our shared Slack channels to guide customers coming from Excel or other platforms.

Can you give a specific example of a complex problem a Product Specialist recently solved?

Here's a common but complex scenario: a customer wants to combine their internal revenue data with advertising cost and traffic data from external platforms. For native integrations like Adjust, we handle this automatically. For custom data sources, it requires systematic thinking.

The Product Specialist first needs to understand what data actually exists in the source, often millions of rows. They have to identify joining keys (campaign, ad group, ad level), determine relevant metrics (revenue, conversions, AOV), and figure out what calculations are needed. If you only have average order value but need total order value, you're multiplying by conversion count.

This usually involves working with SQL interfaces - we commonly use DuckDB locally for large datasets. The Product Specialist analyses patterns, determines field requirements, and then configures our platform accordingly. They handle joining logic, transformations, and often coordinate with DevOps for enterprise permission structures.

The end result: the customer can see revenue-per-campaign from Facebook alongside their ad spend in Clarisights reports. But importantly, this solution becomes reusable for the entire organisation and for other similar customers.

The Product Specialist has just transformed a single customer request into a platform-wide feature that any of our customers can use.

What makes a good Product Specialist?

When hiring, I focus on traits more than specific industry background or vertical experience, because this role combines elements that don't typically exist together elsewhere. The Product Specialist operates in the space between state-of-the-art performance marketing reporting on the one hand, and hyper-scale data engineering on the other.

Two critical traits are first-principles thinking and rapid learning ability. You'll face scenarios you've never encountered before - even performance marketing veterans will hit data challenges they haven't seen, while data experts will encounter marketing contexts they don't understand.

The ability to learn quickly manifests in how you handle large datasets and ask clarifying questions. When customers give you vague problems, which they always will, because they're business users dealing with technical challenges, can you systematically clarify until you understand the real requirement?

Working with data at scale is essential. Whether through SQL, advanced Excel with Power Query, or other tools, you need to be comfortable analysing patterns in large datasets. The SQL requirement isn't about syntax memorisation - it's about proving you can handle complexity and figure things out.

If someone's reading your job posting and considering applying, what five questions should they ask themselves?

First: "Can I learn things quickly and ask good questions when I don't understand something?" This requires both self-awareness and initiative.

Second: "Do high-pressure scenarios energise me or scare me?" You're working with business users who have short attention spans and competing priorities. There's always urgency.

Third: "When I see large amounts of data, do I get excited about possibilities or overwhelmed?" Some people cap themselves at the first 10 rows and give up. That won't work here.

Fourth: "Do I think in terms of scalable solutions rather than one-off fixes?" You're not only doing consulting work - you're building repeatable solutions across customers. You need to identify patterns and think about platform implications.

Fifth: "When I encounter an interesting problem, is your first reaction 'I think I can solve this' or 'this looks scary'?" Curiosity about complex challenges is essential. If problems scare you, startups in general aren't the right fit.

What happens to Product Specialists in the medium to long term?

The typical progression is Product Specialist to Customer Success Manager within 6-12 months. During that time, you're building customer context and relationships while mastering the technical aspects. We think of the Product Specialist role as a boot camp for future CSMs. The moment someone joins Clarisights as a Product Specialist, we are all thinking: How can we get her/him to become a CSM as soon as humanly possible?

As a CSM, you take on strategic account ownership - understanding customer business evolution, identifying expansion opportunities, and having longer-term planning conversations. You're not just responding to requests; you're proactively identifying how customers can get more value from our platform.

The longer-term paths for CSMs are still evolving as we grow. What I usually tell candidates is: your intermediate goal is to become a CSM.

Your long-term trajectory depends on how the company and your interests develop. We're a startup, so opportunities emerge based on growth and individual strengths. In general, we have seen CSMs at Clarisights grow into roles across the company: from growth and business development to product development and product management. The CSM role is the most versatile role at Clarisights. In fact, it might be one of the most versatile roles you can get in any startup anywhere. The functional exposure you get at Clarisights prepares you for all kinds of things.

CSMs at Clarisights have gone on to become product managers, investors at VC funds, and even entrepreneurs with their own companies.

What should candidates expect in terms of challenges and support?

The biggest initial challenge is the learning curve. You're simultaneously mastering our platform, understanding diverse customer contexts, and often working with data at scales you haven't seen before. Each customer brings unique requirements and business models.

We provide structured onboarding and ongoing support through our team. You'll work closely with experienced CSMs who can provide customer context and strategic guidance. Our engineering team is accessible for complex technical challenges, and we have established processes for escalation and collaboration.

The most rewarding aspect is seeing immediate impact. When you successfully implement a solution that transforms how a customer analyses their marketing performance, the feedback is immediate and gratifying. You're not just supporting software - you're enabling business decisions at companies operating at massive scale. And these are million-dollar decisions.

It's surprisingly, and satisfyingly, common to see customers come back and say that a CSM unlocked an insight that they had missed for months, if not years. And these are some of the world's most sophisticated reporting teams. The combination of demanding customers, the Clarisights platform, and an expert Product Specialist can do magical things.

One question that comes up frequently in interviews: What's the difference between a Product Specialist and a Product Manager at Clarisights?

This is an excellent question, and I want to be very clear: this is not a product management role. This is very much a customer success role focused purely on Enterprise B2B engagements. We work with some of the most competent marketing teams at large public companies like Uber, DeliveryHero, On-Running, etc. with a high-touch engagement model. Think shared slack channels and workspaces, the customer's OKRs are often our priorities.
Having said that, we are a startup and there will be opportunities to potentially take on product management functions later down the line as we grow.

Here's how these roles differ in practice. The Product Specialist's job is to take our product and make it successful for individual customers. If you have seven customers, you're the expert on their respective implementation, what you need to do to support and extend the platform's functionality for those seven customers. You play a pivotal role in improving adoption of the various features in the Clarisights platform for each customer you work with. And when a customer says "here's what we're trying to build..." or "something doesn't look right...," you handle both the proactive and reactive work to solve their specific problems. As you gain more context and find patterns in the different requests or common use cases you contribute to documentation or improve discovery of support content. The end goal is to every user successful at what they sought out to do with Clarisights.

Our Product Manager team - which is quite small, just a PM and an APM - thinks about medium to long-term product development for all our customers. While a Product Specialist might collaborate with Engineering team or on-calls to solve an immediate customer need or implement a solution, the Product Manager is thinking about newer integrations that need to be scoped or built out in the next weeks and delivers on the product roadmap.

To use a medical analogy: Product Specialists are the emergency and diagnostic specialists who handle immediate issues or configurations, while Product Managers are the preventive medicine experts planning for long-term health (eg: better UX)

The timelines are different too. Product Specialists work on daily and weekly cycles, and maintain high-touch engagement with the customer to accelerate time to value. Product Managers think in terms of months & quarters.

However, these roles do collaborate closely. Product Specialists' feedback & insights often become Product Manager priorities. If a PS identifies that something isn't just a customer-specific need but actually a product feature that should go on the roadmap, that feeds directly into the PM's work.

As you progress from Product Specialist to Customer Success Manager, you'll work even more closely with our PM team, since CSMs help shape our product roadmap based on strategic customer insights.

Any final advice for potential applicants?

During the interview process, ask us about specific customer scenarios and how we approach complex implementations. Ask about the types of data challenges you'd encounter and the tools you'd use. Most importantly, ask about the team dynamics and how Product Specialists collaborate with CSMs and engineering.

The role requires someone who thrives in ambiguous situations, enjoys learning rapidly, and gets energised by complex data challenges. If that describes you, you'll find this work both challenging and deeply rewarding. And we want to hire you!