1 min lesson
Who you work with: the account team
Say what this means in practice. "You own a slice of a unified account team, and the seams between those slices are where deals quietly die."
Step 1 of 3
You don't own the customer alone. You own a slice of a unified account team, and the seams between those slices are where deals quietly die.
Four functions surround you at Cursor: Sales, Field Engineering, Product and Support. The posting names the same four as the teams you work closely with. Each has a distinct relationship to the account, and your value is partly defined by how cleanly you hand off to and from them.
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Advanced table
Your lane is the realized value between the close and the renewal
- Partner
- Sales / AE
- What they own
- Commercial relationship and the close; the contract and the quota
- Your interface with them
- You inherit the relationship at signature and own the realized value; you feed them expansion signals
- Partner
- Field Engineering
- What they own
- Deep pre-sales technical muscle, POCs, hard architecture questions
- Your interface with them
- You partner on rollout architecture and escalate gnarly technical blockers back to them
- Partner
- Product
- What they own
- The roadmap and what ships next
- Your interface with them
- You represent the customer upstream, carrying synthesized friction and feature gaps instead of raw complaints
- Partner
- Support
- What they own
- Day-to-day case resolution for the customer's users
- Your interface with them
- You pull account-level patterns out of the ticket flow and escalate blockers a single case cannot fix
| Partner | What they own | Your interface with them |
|---|---|---|
| Sales / AE | Commercial relationship and the close; the contract and the quota | You inherit the relationship at signature and own the realized value; you feed them expansion signals |
| Field Engineering | Deep pre-sales technical muscle, POCs, hard architecture questions | You partner on rollout architecture and escalate gnarly technical blockers back to them |
| Product | The roadmap and what ships next | You represent the customer upstream, carrying synthesized friction and feature gaps instead of raw complaints |
| Support | Day-to-day case resolution for the customer's users | You pull account-level patterns out of the ticket flow and escalate blockers a single case cannot fix |
Your lane is the realized value between the close and the renewal. The partners flank it.
The handoff from Sales to post-sale is the single highest-risk moment in the account's life. If the AE's context doesn't transfer, you restart discovery from zero and the customer feels it. Most CSMs run this as a forwarded email thread. The strong version is the structured transfer below.
Interactive diagram. Step through it with the Next and Previous controls below, or Tab to a region to read its detail.
Run the AE's context through these stages before kickoff. The agreed first win is the gate that protects momentum.
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Optional practice
Test yourself on Who you work with: the account team
QWhich moment in the account's life carries the highest risk of stalling?