Customer Success turned Product Ops: How Estelle Reconnected GTM and Product at Gorgias & Contentsquare

Estelle currently leads Product Operations at Gorgias, after spending seven years at Contentsquare. She’s based in Paris and started her career in Customer Success at Sprinklr, before moving into onboarding and later Product Ops at Contentsquare. Her transition into the Ops world came from a desire to fix the systemic gaps she once experienced firsthand during her roles in customer success.

I started in a support function or customer success function. And I was submitting feedback to the product team, but I was never hearing back from them. So I was always chasing them to get status updates or hear back from the feedback that I was submitting.

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This blend of CS and product context is what now anchors her ability to connect go-to-market and product teams.

How Gorgias and Contentsquare Avoid the "Feature Factory" Trap

Estelle shared two effective ways her teams stayed close to customer needs and avoided building in a vacuum.

Gorgias: Direct Customer Ownership

Every product and engineering team member at Gorgias is assigned to a few customer accounts. Acting as part-time CSMs, they build direct relationships and hear pain points first-hand. This keeps the team grounded in real user needs.

Contentsquare: "Talk to Product" meetings

At Contentsquare, PMs didn’t manage accounts directly, so Estelle set up bridges with customer-facing teams. One key ritual was the monthly "Talk to Product" meeting. These sessions walked through real feedback examples – how they were collected, prioritized, and led to roadmap decisions – bringing visibility to the process.

Shared Principle

Both systems kept product connected to reality. Whether through hands-on discovery or internal rituals, the focus was clear: product teams should feel the customer signal – not just hear about it second-hand.

Continuous product discovery, from Customer Success to Product

Estelle frames feedback operations around four pillars: people, tooling, process, and culture.

• People and ownership – Clarify who owns which part of the feedback lifecycle – from collection, to review, to decision-making. Product Ops should orchestrate the system but involve PMs and GTM leads at every step.
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• Tooling – Implement tools to capture, categorize, and track feedback at scale. Estelle emphasizes the importance of making this tooling lightweight, integrated, and easy for GTM teams to contribute to.
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• Process – Track how much feedback comes in, how much is reviewed, and how much moves to prioritisation. These metrics make the system visible and accountable.
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• Culture – At Contentsquare, Estelle ran monthly "Talk to Product" sessions where teams reviewed examples of feedback moving through the product lifecycle. These rituals helped build transparency and reinforce a culture of shared responsibility around feedback.

Change management through influence, not authority

Estelle describes the role of Product Ops as one of influence, not authority. She reports directly to the VP of Product but doesn’t manage PMs or designers.

• Multi-directional influence – Secure sponsorship from leadership and simultaneously solve real pain for individual contributors. Both paths build momentum.
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• Evidence-based persuasion – Estelle backs her proposals with concrete numbers and relevant case studies. She often draws on real-world examples from her past experience or from other SaaS companies in the Paris Product Ops community. These examples help her make change feel less risky and more actionable – “if it worked there, it can work here.”
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• Start small, then expand – Piloting with one motivated squad proves value before broader rollout.

Driving change is slow and requires trust across all levels, but it’s also deeply rewarding.

How Estelle avoids getting pulled into scattered “side quests”, to stay focus on strategic ones

Estelle has seen both sides. At Contentsquare, she had the space to stay focused because Engineering Ops and Program Managers handled tooling and delivery. This allowed her to concentrate on product discovery, feedback systems, and go-to-market alignment.

At Gorgias, she was the first Product Ops hire and had a broader scope by default. She found herself managing rituals, tools, and even cross-team initiatives. She quickly realized the importance of asking for help early. One of her first moves was hiring an Engineering Ops counterpart to help her narrow her scope.

• Rituals – Before introducing new meetings, Estelle audits what already exists. She only adds a new ritual if it has a clear purpose, strong ownership, leadership support, and consistent follow-through.
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• Tooling – Estelle draws a clear line: Product Ops should focus on tools that help the product team build better, not on maintaining general company software like Notion, Slack, or Loom. Those belong to central ops or IT.

The core of her advice: set boundaries early, ask for the right support, and don’t be afraid to say no when something isn't mission-critical.

The invisible initiative that changes everything

Estelle created the Field Advisory Board at Contentsquare to bridge the gap between product and GTM teams. Unlike "Talk to Product" meetings, which explained the product lifecycle, this was about embedding GTM voices directly into product squads.

She mapped vocal, expert GTM volunteers – sales, CS, implementation, etc. – to specific squads. These groups:

• Shared feedback
• Joined alpha and beta phases
• Prepped for GA
• Reviewed enablement content

It worked.

Product got real customer insight. GTM felt heard. Launches improved. Friction dropped.

Over time, some GTM reps even formed their own teams to influence roadmaps and feedback systems.

Scoring Product Ops Wins in Your First 90 Days

Estelle treats her Product Ops role like a Product Manager would treat their product – except her 'product' is the product organization itself. At Gorgias, she spent her first 90 days doing structured discovery with product, design, engineering, and GTM teams.

She found a major gap: the feedback loop was broken. GTM teams felt their input disappeared, while product teams weren’t leveraging all available insights.

The result: frustration and lost opportunities.

Estelle didn’t jump to plug in a new tool. Adding a new business intelligence layer was not going to solve the problem. She pushed for a feedback loop system that would give teams visibility on what's getting shipped.

Her conviction came from experience:

I was in customer success and I submitted a lot of feedback to product. I never heard back. I was always chasing them.

This personal context shaped her focus: build alignment, close the loop, and bring visibility to the full feedback lifecycle.

How Estelle uses AI in her day-to-day

Estelle uses ChatGPT extensively:

• Communication Drafting: Writing Slack posts, emails, documents, and speaker notes.
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• Documentation & Writing: She feeds ChatGPT structure, intent, and notes, and it helps draft faster, especially for async work and Notion docs.
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• Ideation & Brainstorming: For example, she used it to design interactive sessions for a product/design leadership off-site, saying it gave her new ideas
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• Content Structuring: She prompts for TLDRs, vision statements, and objectives tailored to execs.
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• Language & Phrasing: As a non-native English speaker, she relies on it for more effective, "corporate" phrasing.

On AI’s impact on Product Ops

Estelle’s answer is a firm "no" to AI replacing Product Ops. The role is a bridge between teams and systems – something deeply human.

It demands relationship-building, informal communication, live collaboration, and empathy. She believes AI can help her move faster, but not replace the judgment, listening, and change management work that defines her role.

AI should handle things I can easily replicate or where I’m missing something. The rest is complex, human, and about people, process, and change.

Final thoughts

Estelle’s journey from Customer Success to Product Operations shows how deeply customer-centric thinking can influence product strategy and culture. Her work at Gorgias and Contentsquare proves that Product Ops is not about process for the sake of process – it’s about enabling better decisions, faster feedback cycles, and stronger collaboration.

Whether it's structuring a feedback system, embedding GTM voices into product squads, or using AI to scale her work, Estelle stays focused on what drives real impact: transparency, alignment, and human connection.

For Product Ops leaders, her message is clear: build systems that make feedback visible, build trust with teams across the org, and don’t be afraid to start small. The quiet, invisible work often leads to the biggest change.