Mini-CEO. Strategic Account Architect. Advocate for Customers, and for Clarity.

Singular Goal Leads to a Hyper-Growth Career

“I knew I always wanted to live in New York,” Jourdan Elam says. Her path into Customer Success wasn’t linear, it was intentional in a different way. She targeted New York based companies and ultimately took an onboarding role at a restaurant tech company to get to the city, and the rest followed. “I didn’t care what it was. It just got me to New York.”

That decision turned into a decade-long journey, climbing from onboarding to full-cycle account management, to eventually leading teams. After her first role she spent time at an industry-leading travel tech company, but when it was acquired and red tape took over, she realized what really matters to her: “I like a smaller, more startup-y culture where you can have more impact.”

At Shippo, she found the autonomy and scope she wanted. Today, she leads the strategic accounts team and manages key partnerships, balancing day-to-day execution with high-stakes strategic direction. In every sense, Jourdan operates like a mini-CEO, deeply accountable for customer outcomes, not just relationships.

Leading Like a Mini-CEO Starts with Knowing the Business

At Shippo, terminology matters. “CSM meant different things to different people,” she says. “We constantly had to explain we weren’t support agents.” That led to a title change: Director of Strategic Account Management.

The rebrand wasn’t cosmetic. It helped draw a clearer line between ticket-based support and high-value, long-term relationship management. “Support solves tickets. We’re managing relationships. Success is making sure both sides are winning.”

That framing requires a CEO mindset: knowing what’s strategic, when to push, and how to align incentives. Jourdan learned to drive internal alignment across the organization which is critical to making customers successful. Success has to influence cross-functionally and get to know the business at depth to drive these outcomes. The product team and her (and her team’s) relationship with them is a great example.

“You can’t burn your credit with the product team by asking for every single thing,” Jourdan says. “You have to know what to ask for, and when.”

Her team’s work with the product team is collaborative but constrained. “There’s never been a company I’ve worked for that had excess roadmap capacity.” Add to that Shippo’s unique environment, reactive to carrier regulations, tariffs, and trade policy, and priorities get even harder to manage.

That makes influencing the product group and engineering a high-stakes effort. Jourdan trains her team to treat product requests like strategic capital: limited, but powerful when deployed well. Very CEO like.

Real AI, Real Impact

Shippo isn’t dabbling in AI, they’re building it into the company’s DNA. “Our founders are super, super AI friendly. They love it. They want more of it.”

They even launched “AI Week,” pausing all internal meetings so teams could experiment. One result: a chatbot that reduced support tickets by 30% in a single week.

Jourdan and the success team are also leading the way as they explore how AI can help in less obvious ways, like surfacing backend signals that humans can’t see. “Does Shopify power their (the customers) store? Are they using address validation? If we know that, we can drive product adoption, not just upsell.”. Real-world application of AI to drive meaningful results.

She’s also bullish on how Noded helps her team prep smarter: “Meeting prep, connecting themes across transcripts, surfacing real-time context, it’s a game changer.”. Success is leading the way with AI exploration in ways that meaningfully impact their days. Now.

Acme Corp: A Masterclass in Leading Like a Mini-CEO

Jourdan tells this story to every new hire.

Acme (real Shippo customer and name hidden to protect this awesome hyper-growth pet company) had been with Shippo for years. They were a great customer experiencing hyper-growth. Shippo had been on this ride with them, meeting and exceeding their needs along the way and developing a deep trusted partnership. As Acme grew so did their needs and asks. With this radical growth came the requirement for a totally different contract structure including pricing. The kind of restructure that often gets super senior execs involved. Shippo leaned on Jourdan and the success team to drive the negotiation and restructure of the contract. Shippo needed to ensure their contract reflected the cost / growth of Acme’s business.

“They’d become accustomed to a certain level of service, direct access to engineers, immediate support, and we had to say, ‘We want to keep you, but it has to make sense for both of us.’”

This is a CEO level discussion many times and the success team drove this seamlessly. The result? An expansion and an incredibly successful Super Bowl campaign, driven and supported by Shippo and the success team.

“It was really validating. It proved that what we do, real, human success management, is worth it.”

What Jourdan Wants to Hear from Her Peers

Jourdan wants to know how other CS leaders handle things when customers make decisions upstream that cut them out, through no fault of their own.

“How do you retain customers when there are other factors at play? How do you stay sticky when you risk becoming collateral damage?” she asks. “We want to be seen as a partner, not just a vendor.”

She’s especially interested in how to navigate these moments proactively, by asking the right questions and earning a seat at the strategic table before decisions are made.

CSMs As Mini-CEOs: Why CSMs Are More Than Relationship Managers

Jourdan’s story is proof that great CSMs are really strategic operators, account managers with a CEO mindset.

They don’t just answer questions. They anticipate needs, read market shifts, advocate for their customers internally, and keep the business honest about value delivered. They know the entire customer journey and all of the parts (product, engineering, support, etc) required to make a customer successful. Sounds a bit like a CEO.

“Shipping is crazy,” she says. “But we’re here to make it feel sane, for the people who count on us.”

That’s what makes her a true Success in the Wild, and a blueprint for what the next generation of CS leadership looks like.