Think Big, Go Far with the MongoDB Customer Success Team

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) play an integral role at MongoDB by providing our customers with the tools and guidance they need to make an impact on the world with their applications. Our Customer Success team is made up of employees from all around the world and collectively speaks 10 languages. Stay tuned to learn more about how the team has grown over the years and get insights into what a day in the life of a CSM at MongoDB is really like.

Customer Success at MongoDB

For CSMs at MongoDB, every day is different. With a wealth of growth opportunities, a diverse set of customers, and the chance to play a role in the full lifecycle of a customer’s journey, CSMs have the opportunity to constantly innovate and develop creative solutions.

Here, Demarcus Lloyd and Paige Jornlin from the U.S.-based team share what it’s like to be a CSM at MongoDB.

Demarcus Lloyd, Senior Customer Success Manager, Austin

Photo of Demarcus Lloyd

Candidates often think you need to have a strong background in tech to be a CSM at MongoDB, but that’s not necessarily the case. I, for example, completed a college degree in chemistry and international studies, and in 2015, I was working full time in a molecular biology and pathology division of a lab. Initially, I was worried that without a computer science or engineering degree, the move to a technology company would be too difficult of an adjustment, but the opposite proved to be the case. I transitioned my career and joined a health IT company, where I was promoted to a Customer Success role within a year. That role opened doors for other opportunities and eventually led me to join the database space with MongoDB. My portfolio includes computer software and hardware companies, as well as retail, media, oil and gas, and even healthcare companies. This type of diversity in industries creates exposure to some really niche and interesting use cases for MongoDB.

One of my favorite success stories is about one of my customers that had major concerns around migrating from on-prem deployment to our cloud offering, Atlas, and sharding several terabytes of data for a customer-facing application. This hesitancy was delaying the company’s overall goal to offload from its data centers by 2022, which could implicate millions of dollars in cost savings. Knowing the team needed to see another successful customer example to move forward, I leveraged a key stakeholder relationship I built with another customer that had a very similar migration and sharding experience. The Lead Engineer agreed to provide me with their tech specs, success metrics, and migration experience to be shared back with the customer. By sharing this proof point, I was able to restore my customer’s confidence, and the company was able to migrate its preproduction workloads a month ahead of schedule and begin migrating production workloads in Q3, ultimately accelerating and de-risking an expansion.

When it comes to our team culture, the Customer Success organization is a collective of some of the most talented and selfless individuals I have had the opportunity to work with. For most of us that don’t come from a database background, we recognize that MongoDB can be challenging for beginners to learn. However, the individuals on the team all have strengths and weaknesses, and this is where the collaborative spirit pulls through. A lot of the playbooks, team enablement, and initiatives that are in place for the team are spearheaded by the CSMs themselves, with a focus on the betterment of the global team.

We also have a lot of team events. I manage our global happy hour sessions for all new hires every quarter to welcome them to the team. Recently, we had a trivia night as a team-building exercise. The questions ranged from films to history, music, and even Greek mythology. With the various age groups that make up the CSM team, it was interesting to see firsthand the generational familiarity across the topics. At times, it was really competitive, but it was a lot of fun.

Paige Jornlin, Customer Success Team Lead, New York City

Photo of Paige Jornlin

When I first joined MongoDB in May 2018, I was blown away by the onboarding process. Right from day one, they guide you through your ramp-up and make sure you have everything you need to feel comfortable talking to these really technical customers. I also was paired up with a “buddy” at MongoDB to help me with all of my questions during my first few weeks, and I attended our incredible sales boot camp. Since 2018, we’ve only made improvements to these programs. At the beginning of COVID-19, we built out a Customer Success boot camp to take these concepts they’re learning about throughout their ramp-up plan and let them hear directly from the experts. I was certainly impressed two-and-a-half years ago when I joined, but it’s changed drastically, and we have a huge focus on making sure that any new hire has all the tools and support available to really get comfortable with it.

The Customer Success team takes a really powerful, impactful product and jumps in to expedite and ensure a customer’s success. We offer a really deep level of guidance and partner closely with our clients as they work toward all of their upcoming objectives. We like to think of ourselves as an extension of their team. We also focus on making sure customers can take advantage of the whole ecosystem of tools they have available to them and on ensuring that their experience is seamless.

Every day in my role is different. One day, I might be meeting with our Sales leaders from the various regions I support to strategize on how to best support accounts and de-risk them, while on another day, I might be working with my team to drive toward their metrics and career goals. I’m also really passionate about bringing the team together for enablement and mindshare of what’s going well and what the team might be struggling with.

Our team culture is one of the things that excites me the most. Having a team of people I want to be around who are extremely intelligent, challenge me, and make me feel super comfortable is of the utmost importance to me. Because of COVID-19 and our office closure, I ate lunch by myself for the first time after two years in my role here, and it felt so weird because this is such a tightly knit team. We’re always doing things together — constantly looking to collaborate on projects or even just hang out. The team culture has been one of my favorite parts of working at MongoDB. Our team is also really diverse, and people’s differences are embraced. Without having that diversity of background, thought, race, sex, and so forth that exists on our team, we wouldn’t be able to innovate, challenge the norm, or think about different ways of doing things as much as we do.

Interested in pursuing a career at MongoDB? We have several open roles on our teams across the globe, and would love for you to build your career with us!

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Built With MongoDB: Stoovo

When Hantz Févry and Pierre Mombeleur first met, they wouldn’t have guessed they’d one day become co-founders. As students at the same high school in Haiti, they weren’t particularly close. There was no noticeable chemistry when they faced off in a music competition either, and they maintained only a passing acquaintance on Twitch. But both attended college in New York. At the time, Hantz’s checking account was constantly overdrawn, and it was harder than he thought to pick up short-term work. He and Pierre started talking about ways to help gig workers maximize their income by providing intelligence about how and when to use platforms such as Uber and DoorDash. They kept working on that idea even as both got jobs at Google. In 2015, the pair met Semih Korkmaz, who became their CTO, and in 2018 they launched Stoovo , an app to help gig workers maximize their income. Stoovo now covers 6,000 platforms used by gig workers to find jobs, and has 17 employees. Just last week, the company announced that it had raised a $2.4 million seed round from 500 Startups, Alpana Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and Watertower Ventures. In this edition of #BuiltWithMongoDB, we talk to the Stoovo team about building for the gig economy, immigrant entrepreneurship, and their experience growing with MongoDB for Startups . How did you keep Stoovo going while you were at Google? Hantz: There is a big misconception among venture capitalists that you need to be working full-time on your startup. That is not true in the case of immigrants. I’m an immigrant, and don’t have my aunt’s couch to sleep on. I don’t have this famous garage in Silicon Valley. So I basically had to work two full-time jobs. After working until 5 pm for Google, I started working with Semih, often until three or four in the morning. What is your vision for Stoovo for the next few years? Hantz: You have three main players in the gig economy: the platforms, the requester, and the supplier. The problem is that the worker, or the supplier, is left completely alone, because the platform is optimizing to meet the demand of the requester. We want to shift that optimization to help workers maximize their income for each hour worked. We want to give them financial stability through income boosting and income smoothing. Without Stoovo, workers are on their own trying to figure out if their time is better spent on DoorDash or Uber Eats or Postmates. They realize that if they blindly follow the direction of those platforms, they may not make enough money. The average gig worker uses three platforms, and shuffles arbitrarily between them, or relies on word of mouth, which is not really optimal. We tell gig workers which platform is best for them at any given time, and when to take a break. We go even further to help with financial management. We envision another type of banking for gig workers, where we not only store the money, but we’re better adapted to their realities. How does the typical gig worker use Stoovo? Hantz: We have one user, Lionel, who is an actor and does gig work to help ends meet. Without Stoovo, he was trying to use Uber sometimes, sometimes Postmates. Sometimes he made money, sometimes he didn’t. With Stoovo, he knows exactly how to shift between his acting career, and exactly what to do and how many hours he needs to work. Another user might rely more on the finance side. We have one user, Megan, who relies on the card for a cash advance. At first we were thinking that gig workers would use the cash advance to pay for gas. But when we looked at the transactions, a lot of them were fast food. Megan explained that gig workers often don’t even have a sufficient cash flow to buy food. This is why we built the two products together. We help you plan your day to maximize your income and we provide you with cash flow if needed. How have you built your tech stack to enable this? Semih: Stoovo is a very distributed system and works with many different partners, especially geospatial data providers, so our stack is a little bit heterogenous. On the application side we use Node.js, and MongoDB is our database platform. On top of that, of course, we have lots of Python scripts running. How did you select MongoDB as your database solution? Semih: We did a few prototypes with relational databases, but there were so many changes – not only on our side, but at our data partners – that we weren’t able to stick with a schema. And changing the schemas in our applications was almost completely eliminating our chances to work in an agile manner. We were really impressed with some of the capabilities of the graph databases, but you can always represent a graph in a document format. That’s when we realized we would go with NoSQL. After that, it was easy to choose MongoDB. What has it been like scaling with MongoDB? Semih: MongoDB Atlas made our life much, much easier. If you’re a startup, when you first start with a database, you want to start small. You have to keep your costs under control and your maintenance low. Then you need to scale up, and you see many startups fail to do this. Thanks to Atlas’ sharding system and its scaling system, which is automatically handling each replica’s scaling, we were having no problems at all with this, and we were easily able to scale. What are some of the features of MongoDB you find most valuable? Semih: We are rapidly developing many machine learning models, and they can be changing all the time. Those can create a new collection or change an existing collection, and change the access patterns. When this happens, indexing becomes really important. MongoDB Atlas helps us in two ways. One is that it gives us real-time alerts when our interaction pattern has changed. And, it suggests what the index should be. Then we can say, “Yes, please go ahead,” and apply this index on a rolling basis, and that makes life really easy for us. There is so much happening in the gig economy. What are your thoughts on how Stoovo fits into the future of the sector? Pierre: There’s an increasing amount of pressure for platforms to make sure workers’ rights are respected. We want companies to really give workers context into their work and be able to use data to their advantage, rather than holding onto the data and only using it themselves. Hantz: If you talk to someone from Gen Z, they don’t see themselves working for a big corporation from nine to five. There will also be a lot of automation and a lot of displacement of jobs. So a lot of people will jump into the gig economy, and they’ll need two things: They’ll need to make sure they earn enough, and they will need a financial system built for gig workers. This is exactly where we’re trying to position Stoovo. Looking to build something cool? Get started with the MongoDB for Startups program.

March 16, 2021
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MongoDB’s 2024 Year in Review

It’s hard to believe that another year is almost over! 2024 was a transformative year for MongoDB, and it was marked by both innovation and releases that further our commitment to empowering customers, developers, and partners worldwide. So without further ado, let’s dive into MongoDB’s 2024 highlights. We’ll also share our executive team’s predictions of what 2025 might have in store. A look back at 2024 MongoDB 8.0: The most performant version of MongoDB ever In October we released MongoDB 8.0 , the fastest, most resilient, secure, and reliable version of MongoDB yet. Architectural optimizations in MongoDB 8.0 have significantly improved the database’s performance, with 36% faster reads and 59% higher throughput for updates. Our new architecture also makes horizontal scaling cheaper and faster. Finally, working with encrypted data is easier than ever, thanks to the addition of range queries in Queryable Encryption (which allows customers to encrypt, store, and perform queries directly on data). Whether you’re a startup building your first app, or you’re a global enterprise managing mission-critical workloads, MongoDB 8.0 offers unmatched power and flexibility, solidifying MongoDB’s place as the world’s most popular document database. Learn more about what makes 8.0 the best version of MongoDB ever on the MongoDB 8.0 page . Delivering customer value with the MongoDB AI Applications Program AI applications have become a cornerstone of modern software, and MongoDB is committed to equipping customers with the technology, tools, and support they need to succeed on their AI journey. That’s why we launched the MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP) in 2024, a comprehensive program designed to accelerate the development of AI applications. By offering customers resources like access to AI specialists, an ecosystem of leading AI and tech companies, and AI architectural best practices supported by integrated services, MAAP helps solve customers’ most pressing business challenges, unlocks competitive advantages, and accelerates time to value for AI investments. Overall, MAAP’s aim is to set customers on the path to AI success. Visit the MongoDB AI Applications Program page or watch our session from AWS re:Invent to learn more! Advancing AI with MongoDB Atlas Vector Search In 2024, MongoDB further cemented its role in the AI space with enhancements to MongoDB Atlas Vector Search . Recognized in 2024 (for the second consecutive year!) as one of the most loved vector databases , MongoDB continues to provide a scalable, unified, and secure platform for building cutting-edge AI use cases. Recent advancements like vector quantization in Atlas Vector Search help deliver even more value to our customers, enabling them to scale applications to billions of vectors at a lower cost. Head over to our Atlas Vector Search quick start guide to get started with Atlas Vector Search today, or visit our AI resources hub to learn more about how MongoDB can power AI applications. Search Nodes: Performance at scale Search functionality is indispensable in modern applications, and with Atlas Search Nodes, organizations can now optimize their search workloads like never before. By providing dedicated infrastructure for Atlas Search and Vector Search workloads, Search Nodes ensure high performance (e.g., a 40–60% decrease in query times), scalability, and reliability, even for the most demanding use cases. As of this year , Search Nodes are generally available across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. This milestone underscores MongoDB’s commitment to delivering powerful solutions that scale alongside our customers’ needs. To learn more about Search Nodes, check out our documentation or watch our tutorial . Looking ahead: MongoDB’s 2025 predictions After the excitement of the past few years, 2025 will be defined by ensuring that technology investments deliver tangible value. Organizations remain excited about the potential AI and emerging technologies hold to solve real business challenges, but are increasingly focused on maintaining a return on investment. “Enterprises need to innovate faster than ever, but speed is no longer the only measure of success. Increasingly, organizations are laser-focused on ensuring that their technology investments directly address critical business challenges and provide clear ROI and competitive advantage—whether it’s optimizing supply chains, delivering hyper-personalized customer experiences, or scaling operations efficiently,” said Sahir Azam, Chief Product Officer at MongoDB. “In 2025, I expect to see organizations make significant strides in driving this innovation and efficiency by applying AI to more production use cases and by maturing the way they leverage their data to build compelling and differentiated customer experiences.” Indeed, we expect to see organizations make more strategic investments in emerging technologies like gen AI—innovating with a sharp focus on solving business challenges. “In 2025, we can expect the focus to shift from ‘what AI can do’ to ‘what AI should do,’ moving beyond the hype to a clearer understanding of where AI can provide real value and where human judgment is still irreplaceable,” said Tara Hernandez, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB. “As we advance, I think we’ll see organizations begin to adopt more selective, careful applications of AI, particularly in areas where stakes are high, such as healthcare, finance, and public safety. A refined approach to AI development will be essential—not only for producing quality results but also to build trust, ensuring these tools genuinely support human goals rather than undermining them.” With more capable, accessible application development tools and customer-focused programs like MAAP at developers’ fingertips, 2025 is an opportunity to make a data-driven impact faster than ever before. "Right now, organizations have an opportunity to leverage their data to reimagine how they do business, to more effectively adapt to a changing world, and to revolutionize our quality of life,” said Andrew Davidson, SVP of Products at MongoDB. “By harnessing our latest technologies, developers can build a foundation for a transformative future." Head over to our updates page to learn more about the new releases and updates from MongoDB in 2024. Keep an eye on our events page to learn what's to come from MongoDB in 2025!

December 19, 2024