The Adoption Curve

Jungle Gym to Growth Engine

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.

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Featuring

Samantha Murray

Chief Alignment Officer & Co-Founder

What you'll learn

Start scrappy and iterate fast
Speak the language of the C-suite
View adoption as a two-way street

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.

Featuring

Samantha Murray

Chief Alignment Officer & Co-Founder

Connect

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.

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

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

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