Episode #28: Farheen Noorie on Growth, Monetization, and Offboarding

Farheen Noorie spent close to six years as a software engineer at PayPal, working on pricing systems that calculated transaction fees. Product management was not an obvious entry-level path at the time, especially on a backend team with few customer-facing surfaces. When she began exploring a change, she gave herself one year to try product, knowing she could return to engineering if it was not a fit.

That experiment led to Zendesk, where her early work included launching the company's first package of products. In this episode, Farheen and Dwayne Samuels examine growth and monetization across a B2B customer journey, including trial conversion, purchasing, expansion, retention, renewal, and offboarding.

What you'll learn

• How engineering work can develop roadmap and strategy skills before a formal move into product

• Why growth and monetization teams should examine the entire customer journey, not one conversion screen

• What makes B2B offboarding clear, flexible, and respectful

• How quantitative funnel metrics and qualitative research answer different questions

• Why communication is a core part of representing a product, team, and stakeholder group

Follow the whole customer journey

Farheen's team in Zendesk's growth and monetization organization looks for customer pain points and opportunities to streamline or expand the funnel. Her area centers on buying experience. It begins when a potential customer starts a trial and considers how that trial becomes a paid relationship. The work continues after purchase through expansion suggestions, renewal and retention experiences, and eventually the process for customers who decide to leave.

This scope matters because each stage behaves differently. Improving trial conversion requires different measures and interventions from supporting an existing customer. A growth team cannot assume that one metric or experiment design applies everywhere.

Zendesk also has a substantial self-service motion. A new customer can visit the website, start and evaluate a trial, then convert without speaking to sales. Sales assistance remains available for customers who want it. That combination makes buying experience a product problem as well as a sales problem.

Treat offboarding as part of the relationship

Farheen argues that offboarding deserves deliberate design, particularly in B2B software. A buyer is acting on behalf of a company, but that person may later move to another employer. Zendesk has seen champions take the product from one company to the next. A poor exit can therefore damage more than one account, while a clear experience can leave the door open for a future return.

Once someone has decided to leave, the product should not increase their frustration. The process should be simple, clear, and transparent. Customers need to understand when cancellation takes effect, how long data is retained, and what will happen to the support teams that use the product. Because a B2B product may serve many people inside an account, offboarding cannot be designed as if only the purchaser is affected.

Flexibility also matters. A company may want to return after three or six months, or the original champion may bring Zendesk into a new workplace. The exit experience should preserve that possibility. Farheen is candid that this was an area receiving new investment and was still a work in progress, which is itself useful product practice: define the intended standard without claiming the current experience has already reached it.

Combine metrics with customer understanding

The evidence used by a growth team depends on the stage of the funnel. For trials, Farheen's team examines trial conversion and win rate relative to trial volume, along with how easy it is for customers to evaluate the product. These measures show what is happening, but they do not always explain why.

For complex questions, the team adds user research and design studies. One example came from customers who found it difficult to choose a product or plan. The team tested an approach that asked about business needs and used those answers to recommend an option. At the time of the conversation, the work was still being evaluated rather than presented as a proven success.

Managing this work is challenging because the projects and metrics vary across the funnel, while the stakeholder group effectively spans the entire company. Keeping people informed about experiments and goals is therefore part of the product itself.

Farheen also discusses the personal side of that responsibility. She did not see herself as naturally extroverted, and product management forced her to speak even on days when it did not come easily. Preparation helped her represent the product, the team, and stakeholders. The lesson is not that every PM must change personality, but that communication can be practiced because the role requires it.

Listen to Episode #28 for Farheen's full discussion of B2B growth, buying experience, and customer exits.