Expansion Playbook

Trigger Conditions

Enter expansion only after the customer has completed a first successful task and shows stable usage. Do not treat “the customer just liked it” as automatic permission to upsell.

Read expansion signals across three paths:

Signal	Expansion type	What to check
Other teams ask to join	Seat	Whether the new team has a clear first task and permission boundary
The same users try adjacent work	Workflow	Whether the new workflow’s completion rate, cost, and risk are controlled
Capacity, concurrency, or service level approaches current boundary	Capacity	Whether margin remains healthy after upgrade
Task success rate is stable	Precondition	Expansion will not amplify quality issues
Human-review rate is controlled	Precondition	Risk checks are not consuming the efficiency gain

When multiple signals appear, CSM diagnoses the expansion path before sales engages.

Roles And Responsibilities

Role	Primary responsibility
CSM	Signal monitoring, expansion diagnosis, initial customer conversation
Sales	Commercial negotiation, contract changes, pricing
Product	Workflow enablement, example tasks, new capability training
Engineering	New tools, private deployment, SLA, data-region, or permission upgrades
Finance	Billing unit, plan migration, overage terms

Three Paths

Seat Expansion

Use when the customer wants to roll the agent out to more teams or departments.

1. CSM confirms target team, users, task types, and permission boundary.
2. Product or CSM prepares first-task examples for the target team.
3. Sales evaluates contract structure: add seats, add department package, or move to enterprise.
4. New team follows the Customer Onboarding Playbook, reusing lessons from the parent account.
5. Review first-success coverage and retention for the new team.

Workflow Expansion

Use when the same users or team want to delegate more task types.

1. CSM identifies adjacent workflow candidates from task logs.
2. Product checks candidate workflow completion rate, tool dependencies, HITL boundary, and cost.
3. Recommend only a small number of candidate scenarios, with example inputs and success criteria.
4. Run a small pilot before adding the workflow to the formal plan or contract scope.

Capacity Expansion

Use when task volume, concurrency, context length, model quality, or service-level needs increase.

1. CSM talks to the customer before they hit a hard capacity boundary.
2. Finance and product confirm post-upgrade task margin, limits, overage rules, and service commitments.
3. Sales proposes the next tier, usage overage, or enterprise contract.
4. After upgrade, keep monitoring unit economics so “more revenue” does not hide more loss-making tasks.

Common Mistakes

• Treating every expansion as seat expansion and ignoring workflow depth.
• Pushing upgrade before churn signals are resolved.
• Buying capacity expansion with deep discounts before checking marginal cost.
• Extrapolating a successful workflow pilot to all customers too quickly.

Metrics

Track quarterly:

• Expansion revenue split: contribution from seat, workflow, and capacity expansion.
• Time to expansion: time from first successful task to first expansion.
• Expansion success rate: percentage of triggered opportunities that become plan or contract upgrades.
• Post-expansion margin: whether task margin improves after expansion.
• Workflow reliability after expansion: whether new workflows remain stable.

Cross-Section Connections

• Product logic of the three paths: growth/expansion
• Signal definitions: metrics/overview
• Tier design for capacity upgrades: pricing/tier-design
• Early churn detection: churn-save