EPISODE THIRTEEN

In this episode, we learn how to turn customer experience into a powerful growth lever by blending marketing, customer education, and go-to-market strategies. 

Meet our Guest

Samantha is a Go-to-Market & Customer Experience Strategist. She's the Co-Founder of PX as a Product and the Founder of AlignedCX. A former brand strategist turned SaaS enablement leader, Samantha brings a unique lens to program design, change management, and customer adoption at scale.

As organizations seek to scale customer-facing programs, they must balance speed with empathy, connect initiatives to measurable business outcomes, and build resources that actually remove friction for the end user. Samantha has done this across industries and offers a practical playbook.


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Samantha Murray
Chief Alignment Officer/Co-Founder
Connect with Samantha

In This Episode 

🏁  Start scrappy and iterate fast

🗣️ Speak the language of the C-suite

👀  View adoption as a two-way street

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From Jungle Gym to Growth Engine

Background context: Samantha’s career path has been anything but linear — she calls it a “jungle gym.” From brand strategy and account management to customer success and marketing, she’s experienced every angle of the go-to-market puzzle.

At Shopify, she joined post-IPO to help build the customer success function for Shopify Plus from scratch, spotting patterns in customer challenges that inspired the first version of Shopify Plus Academy. Her work since has focused on one guiding principle: get closer to the customer, remove friction, and the business results will follow.

Key Insight #1: Start Scrappy and Iterate Fast

Early on, Samantha’s team at Shopify lacked formal systems for gathering customer insights — but they had each other.

Small, repeatable resources solved immediate customer needs and laid the foundation for scalable programs.

Example: Weekly huddles revealed common setup issues, prompting a “Launch Checklist” that reduced onboarding time by 30%.

 🎤 “Even in the absence of sophisticated data, you can meet weekly as a team, share what you’re hearing, and turn those conversations into playbooks and templates. Then test, refine, repeat.” — Samantha Murray

 

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Key Insight #2: See Adoption as a Two-Way Street

Adoption isn’t just the customer’s journey — it’s also the organization learning how to serve the customer better.

By seeing users as employees with their own goals — not just “seats to activate” — Samantha ensures programs fit seamlessly into real workflows.

 

 🎤  “Our job is to remove as much friction as humanly possible so customers can do their job. When they win, adoption follows naturally.” - Samantha Murray

 


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Key Insight #3: Speak the Language of the C-Suite

Samantha’s bridge between empathy and scale? Outcomes.

Tying programs to North Star metrics that leadership already values unlocks buy-in and resources.

🎤  “Nobody cares about your onboarding program. They care about the business objectives it moves. Shift from talking about outputs to talking about measurable outcomes.”  — Samantha Murray

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Free Adoption Template: The Service Blueprint for Adoption

The Problem: Teams often struggle to align customer success, product, and enablement around a unified adoption strategy. Without a clear view of the end-to-end customer journey, gaps, overlaps, and friction points go unnoticed. 

The Solution: 

  1. Define the Customer Journey Stages - Map each phase from onboarding to renewal. 
  2. List the Touchpoints - Capture every interaction, whether digital or human. 
  3. Identify Supporting Processes - Document the systems, teams, and workflows, enabling each touchpoint. 
  4. Spot Friction and Gaps - Highlight delays, confusion, or redundancies. 
  5. Design Improvements - Align teams on actions that will remove friction and support adoption. 

Why this Works: A service blueprint visualizes the complete experience, connecting the “front stage” customer interactions to the “back stage” processes that make them possible. This alignment ensures every team understands their role in driving adoption.

🎤  “When everyone can see the whole picture, it’s easier to coordinate efforts and measure real impact.”— Samantha Murray

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Service Blueprint for Adoption

A fast evidence-based workshop that you can run in the next 30 days to surface adoption blockers and align cross functional owners.

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More Episodes

Get access to all the past episodes of Adoption Curve for free! Includes all downloadable workbooks and contact information for guest speakers.