Making Developers on Support Work For Everyone by Camille E. Acey
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This talk was delivered at The Lead Developer NY 2017 in February 2017. I discussed approaches to All Hands Support in tech companies.
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Making Developers on Support Work For Everyone by Camille E. Acey
- 1. Making “Developers on Support” Work for Everyone Camille E. Acey / @kavbo
- 2. @kavbojka
- 3. @kavbojka
- 4. @kavbojka
- 5. @kavbojka
- 6. @kavbojka
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- 14. @kavbojka
- 16. Process - People - Period @kavbojka wocintechwocintech
- 20. Process - People - Period @kavbojka wocintechwocintech
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- 22. Feel free to ping me at: @kavbojka camille.acey@gmail.com http://camilleacey.com
Editor's Notes
- I’m Camille. (PAUSE) I run support at a small startup called Clubhouse. Need help. (PAUSE) I know what you’re thinking [NEXT]
- How with so much on plate? Here today to share new approaches to technical leadership End of talk will have plan
- Lot on plate too. Phone rings, ticket in queue, angry tweet in Twitter feed
- CEO’s Twitter feed. Ready to tackle. Fine for “lion’s share” but many require attention from you - the Engineering team Quick show of hands - escalations? regular meeting? answer users directly?
- Every time we have to be on, come back quick many require attention from YOU - the Engineering Team By A Show of Hands - deal with bugs/escalations? meet with? answer directly?
- We think about you constantly. Underdog protagonist. Attention - Time - Closer Relationship
- Anecdotes - > Stories from the trenches Lost full day of work frontend change Then we think
- We pull together metrics and visualizations But one thing works better than stories or data
- All Hands Support defined Many goals but three main ones I’ve identified
- More people available to attend to customers
- Your support team is on the front lines Enthusiastic and angry customers
- Getting into the user context and understanding painpoints in a way that can inform future development decisions.
- Noble endeavour Cool things can happen - third party integrations, internal tools, opportunities to deliver super fast solutions But if sounds bad, not alone
- Developer who decided to service outside forum instead of customers At ANOTHER company, BigCartel support is its own skill and developers are expensive At Clubhouse went alone but soon ran into issue, we couldn’t quickly hire out of. Developed another approach
- Some of the developers. Some of the time. Works well at small company like Clubhouse can work well if coordinate across three key areas
- What’s yours what’s theirs? Support needs to have written down and be ready to train. Engineering also needs to have their workflows written and ready to share. Rogue dev pushing code. Missing QA and documentation is not good. Get relationship off to good start by harmonizing process.
- Who does support need? Who can you afford? At another company Automattic they rotate whole product team for Support Week. Assign appropriate tickets. In addition to technical, also need good communication skills. Don’t put on the snarky dev who was just hired to crunch code. But might need to look at how hire if no one fits the bill.
- Daily commitment? Regular rotation? Support happy to take ALL TIME I know at ANOTHER STARTUP FullStory, they rotate people on and off support desk avoid EMPATHY FATIGUE. Also regular interval to review arrangement and report wins back to the organization.
- So harmonize process. Pick the right people. And set clear periods of time to rotate and review. There’s the plan. We’ve all got a lot on our plates to be sure BUT
- with some more hands on deck, I think we can tackle it all.