This document discusses how to build internal products that customers love. It recommends knowing customers, listening to their needs, solving what matters most, treating support and documentation as products, communicating well, and measuring outcomes to reinforce success. Central themes are focusing on customer experience, continuous improvement based on feedback, and using metrics to guide priorities.

1. Building
Internal Products
Customer Love
2019-11-14
MOSTAFA NAGEEB
@MostafaNageeb

2. 2
ZALANDO AT A GLANCE
~ 5.4billion EUR
revenue 2018
> 250
million
visits
per
month
> 15.000
employees in
Europe
> 79%
of visits via
mobile devices
> 26
million
active customers
> 300.000
product choices
~ 2.000
brands
17
countries

3. 3
Building Internal Products
Customers Love

4. 4
2015

5. 5
RADICAL AGILITY
AWS
STUPS
DOCKER
DEPLOY
SSH
ACCESS
AUDIT
REPORTS
FULL AWS
ACCESS
Teams have
admin access
& full
responsibility

6. 6
2017

7. 7
Problem?
1- Heterogeneity increased complexity
2- Cloud Cost
3- Compliance

8. 8
Central Infrastructure Team

9. 9
32%

10. 10
Know Your
CUSTOMERS

11. 11

12. 12

13. 13

14. 14
LISTEN

15. 15
User Research

16. 16
ENGAGE YOUR TEAM

17. 17
SOLVE WHAT
MATTERS

18. 18
COMMON PROBLEMS
"Documentation is hard to find"
"Documentation is not comprehensive enough"
"Remove unnecessary complexity and obstacles."
"Get the documentation up to date and prepare
use cases"
"More and more clear documentation"
"More detailed docs, example repos with more
complicated deployments."

19. 19
TRANSPARENTLY COMMUNICATE
WHAT YOU ARE SOLVING

20. 20
LET THEM INFLUENCE YOUR PLANS

21. 21
LET THEM INFLUENCE YOUR PLANS

22. 22
Support & Documentation
are also features

23. 23
SUPPORT IS A FEATURE

24. 24
DOCUMENTATION
• Restructure following
www.divio.com/en/blog/documentation/
• Concepts
• How Tos
• Tutorials
• Reference
• Global Search
• Weekly Health Check: Support → Documentation

26. 26
COMMUNICATION

27. 27
COMMUNICATION
Guideline
• Target announcements
• Use the right tags
• [Announcement]
• [Newsletter]
• [Action Required]
• Timing

28. 28
NEWSLETTER
"You can now.."
• You can now upload your Scala code coverage
report to SonarQube
"This enables you to.."
• This enables you to browse your code quality
results and track it over time

29. 29
“Useful information, good level of details and pleasant to
read. It's one of the few newsletters that I took time to
read entirely :)”
- a reader, July 2018

30. 30
WITH GREAT POWER COMES
GREATER RESPONSIBILITY

31. 31
Measure, Measure, Measure

32. 32
51%

33. 33
DELIVERY PERFORMANCE METRICS
• Lead Time
• Release Frequency
• Time to Restore Service
• Change Fail Rate
srcco.de/posts/accelerate-software-delivery-performance.html

34. 34
DELIVERY PERFORMANCE METRICS
• Lead Time
• Release Frequency
• Time to Restore Service
• Change Fail Rate
• Commit to Prod
• Deploys/week/dev
• MTRS from incidents
• N/A

36. 36
DEVELOPER SATISFACTION

37. 37
TESTIMONIALS
“So, thank you, Team Automata, for listening to our
community, taking our upvotes in consideration when
developing new solutions and building every day
'the first CI that doesn't suck'.”
- a user, October 2018

38. 38
TESTIMONIALS
“Thank you very much for improving the color scheme of
the UI. It really helps me with my color blindness. It
used to be hard to distinguish between statuses
previously.”
- a user, February 2019

39. 39
BUILDING INTERNAL PRODUCTS
CUSTOMERS LOVE
• Know your customers.
• Listen.
• Solve what matters.
• Support and Documentation are
products.
• Communicate well.
• Measure and reinforce.

40. 40

41. QUESTIONS?
MOSTAFA NAGEEB
@MostafaNageeb