The authors

Two operators, one playbook

Carlos Quezada and Sheik Ayube have spent their careers inside the work this book describes. Between them: eleven customer success programs built from scratch, and years helping executive teams turn strategy into something a company can actually run.

Carlos Quezada

Operator, author, keynote speaker

Carlos has built customer success programs eleven times, across startups, mid-market companies and Fortune 100 enterprises. He brings an operator's perspective on customer value, transformation and scale: what it takes to stand a program up, what breaks when it grows, and how to fix it without simply adding people.

He is also the author of The Immigrant Survival Guide to Silicon Valley and a keynote speaker. Find his speaking work at latinoleadership.com.

Sheik Ayube

Vice President of Business Development, ESG

Sheik is Vice President of Business Development at ESG, where he works with executives and their teams to build and implement customer success strategies. He has seen what separates the programs that stick from the ones that stall.

He brings a broad perspective on turning strategy into repeatable execution: the operating rhythm, the handoffs, and the measures that let a company deliver customer value consistently rather than occasionally.

Why we wrote this

Because the headcount plan was never the strategy

We kept watching the same thing happen. A company would commit to customer success, hire a team of CSMs, and then ask that team to carry the whole relationship on its own. When growth outran the hiring plan, the program looked like it had failed. It had not. It had never been designed to scale.

We wrote this book to share what we learned building and rebuilding these programs: the hard-earned lessons, the methods tested in the field, and the conversations with executives that changed the outcome. Our goal is to help leaders move beyond managing a team to leading a transformation, one where sales, product, marketing, operations and finance all own a piece of customer value.

If you are building a new program or strengthening an existing one, we hope it saves you a few of the mistakes we made ourselves.

Read the book. Then put it to work.

Pre-order on Amazon Hardcover November 1, 2026