The essential role of Datadog TAMs in maximizing your observability investment

Have you ever wondered what a Technical Account Manager (TAM) does? The role and responsibilities of a TAM, as well as the pricing model, can differ quite a lot from company to company.

In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at what our TAMs do and how they help our customers achieve success. So, if you want to learn about our approach, keep reading! Note that those notes are based on my own experience as a TAM in Datadog.

From the basics

Before going into depth on what is different, let’s review what a TAM is.

T is for technical

According to the market, a key responsibility of a TAM is to be a technical point of contact and support in troubleshooting customer issues. This can include identifying and addressing software bugs, organizing technical resources, and offering guidance on best practices. However, the degree of support and troubleshooting a TAM provides can vary based on their specific role and company.

At Datadog, our monitoring and security platform integrates with various technologies and custom codes to provide valuable insights to our customers. To ensure effective troubleshooting, first the TAM reviews the situation with the customer to understand the scope, challenges and constraints. Then the TAM works closely with our support team to address issues as they arise and connect the right person and knowledge for each case. While TAMs may not handle every case alone, they play a critical role in ensuring each case progresses and is resolved to the customer’s satisfaction. This approach is more scalable and effective, particularly for companies with over 1,000 weekly platform users.

TAMs are often invited into customer messaging tools or office hours, where they provide answers to day-to-day questions. They will start the investigation, guide users on complex cases, suggest best practices and help them navigate the support system.

In my personal view, the best TAMs shine by articulating customer needs and architecture to speed up the resolution rather than with pure knowledge.

AM is for account management

In addition to providing technical support and troubleshooting, a TAM is part of a large account team to support deeper investigation and technical topics in addition to managing customer accounts and focusing on customer needs. This involves coordinating with internal teams, handling escalations, and providing regular status updates.

This Account Management aspect of the TAM role is where most models differ between service providers, leading to different pricing structures. In addition, customers will have different needs depending on their organizational structure, technical knowledge and objectives.

In the following sections of this post, we’ll delve deeper into the different activities a Datadog TAM can perform to help our customers achieve their goals. By the end, you will better understand the value of our TAMs and why they’re essential to customer success.

To the 3 pillars of TAM

The role of TAMs at Datadog goes beyond just troubleshooting and supporting the platform. As part of their role, they focus on three key pillars: implementation, advocacy, and strategy. Let’s walk you through each of these pillars and how they contribute to the success of observability and security at customer’s organization.

Implementation

Drive adoption

TAMs play a crucial role in providing guidance on best practices, offering training sessions, and importing resources to customers. As customer needs become more specific to their global environment or team situation, TAMs invest time discussing with individual teams to understand their requirements and create customized training material. This personalized approach ensures that customers receive maximum value from Datadog’s platform and engagement stays high thanks to customization.

To illustrate, TAMs commonly organize enablement sessions around specific best practices for targeted teams to address opportunities such as optimization of the platform usage or configuration improvements. Customers are also increasingly requesting health checks with enablement sessions adapted to their current setup. TAMs will then build relevant training material to meet those needs.

The effort invested by TAMs in training and education also benefits the customer’s central SRE team by providing insights into their users’ observability and security maturity. This information helps the team to adapt their roadmap and prioritize activities in the following quarters.

Execution

While TAMs in Datadog may not directly deploy an agent or edit a configuration file, they are vital in supporting the project manager and coordinating resources. From experience, finding the right model of interaction with the customer takes a few weeks since each customer has a unique organization structure and unique strengths to rely on. This is an area where less experienced TAMs are coached on to ensure long term success.

TAMs will proactively identify potential roadblocks and deliver relevant resources and solutions to overcome them. This ensures the implementation process stays on track (e.g. migration or consolidating systems on time) and is managed as efficiently and effectively as possible to realize value sooner.

Advocacy

Influence

As TAMs spend more time with customers, they gain a better understanding of the unique architecture of systems, responsibilities, and concerns. TAMs partners closely with the product team to escalate customer needs, and advocate for customers interests. Additionally, TAMs collaborate with each other to share customer interests and requests, thus creating RFC documents that influence the product roadmap.

While these may be long-term initiatives, TAMs aim to reduce common pain points and focus on enhancing what matters for business through better observability or security coverage. Their underlying goal is to ensure that the platform evolves to be even more intuitive for everyone and at any scale.

Strategy

Network

At Datadog, TAMs strive to be proactive and self-sufficient in their role. While they typically work closely with the customer central team to plan and coordinate activities, TAMs aim to support individual users independently. This then helps them create a network of observability and security advocates inside the customer account.

This parallel network enables the TAMs to share new ideas and initiatives with their individual contacts in the customer organization, who can then help spread the word and drive adoption and change across the organization. This way, the customer central team can leverage additional relays to promote change and drive success.

Furthermore, working closely with individual teams can also reveal patterns and trends. TAM shares them with the central team to identify the next items to be added to the roadmap, such as new automation requirements or new learning content.

Organization

It’s important to note that success in observability and security isn’t solely dependent on best practices-sharing and recommending action plans. The speed and effectiveness of implementation are also influenced by management support, and organizational processes. A TAM will often take ownership of a few project management tasks to ensure progress. Note that TAMs at Datadog also gain valuable experience by shadowing other TAMs, sharing knowledge, and working directly with customers. Exposure to various scenarios and their resolutions helps them develop their skills and expertise.

In order to make implementations more successful and realize value sooner, TAMs strive to improve their customers’ ability to execute and ultimately drive success. To accomplish this, it is common to organize Quarterly Business Reviews to involve higher management and make recommendations to maximize their investment in the platform, such as splitting the responsibilities of technical expertise and project management/coordination among different stakeholders.

Roadmap

Within large customer SRE organizations, goals and challenges may vary from team to team. TAM is here to help align goals and priorities, suggest highest value activities and coordinate the roadmap accordingly. TAMs continually suggest ideas to guide customers on the next best step. Even if the initial Datadog implementation is relatively straightforward, needs will change as observability maturity grows. TAMs will support customers by identifying both low hanging fruits and long term initiatives to maximize investment. .

TAMs will leverage their experiences with other customers and deeper knowledge of organizations to tailor their recommendations and implementation plans based on teams ability to execute.

TLDR; a TAM is a proactive resource that aims to improve your business metrics.

The Ultimate Measure of Success for Datadog TAMs

So, what does success look like for a TAM in Datadog? While the activities and responsibilities mentioned above provide insight into what a TAM can do, it’s important to note that each TAM is assigned to a maximum of four customers, typically three, to ensure flexibility and customization based on each organization’s unique needs. Additionally, success is measured differently for each company, based on its organizational structure, maturity, and goals.

Ultimately, customer satisfaction is the most significant measure of success, with customer renewals being a key quantitative indicator.

Conclusion

Observability can be a game-changer for companies that invest in it, leading to growth and improvement. The Technical Account Manager (TAM) role in Datadog is an extension of that investment, a premium service aiming to provide long-term benefits beyond just supporting the product. Ultimately, a TAM’s value can be summarized in a few key points, including accelerating time to value, maximizing investment returns through implementation, advocacy, and strategy thus improving business KPIs.