An increasingly popular practice that’s being adopted by DevOps groups are developers working regular shifts in front line support. The thinking behind this exercise is pretty sound. When exposed to the real world problems and frustrations customers face when using their software, a developer’s work becomes more about supporting that customer experience and increasing customer satisfaction and less about “Get the tests passing and ship it fast!” The practice also increases an individual developer’s understanding of the larger solution their company provides. If a particular developer is master over a small part of the total application, working support will give them valuable insight into the bigger picture of the problems they’re solving and how well their corner of the world is supporting the larger solution.
We practice this at my company, Datical, but on a wider scale. In addition to the app dev engineers every member of the product team, myself included, regularly works support cases in direct contact with the customer. It has been a pretty eye opening experience for all of us and we are most certainly realizing the promised benefits of this practice.
Our product team operates with a single guiding principle: Well defined, customer driven requirements yield excellent solutions. When you schedule calls or take customers to lunch, you get a lot of great feedback on where your product should go and net new features you should consider implementing to improve the overall solution. The conversations we’ve had with customers in this way are generally very positive and supportive with a focus on future direction and growth.
Working a support case is an entirely different and much more crucial customer conversation. The conversation that takes place during a support interaction is centered on a pressing need. The customer may need clarification on usage that isn’t as intuitive or well documented as it should be. They may be dealing with a gap in previous requirements or a coding defect that is keeping them from completing a goal. Whatever prompted the call, it’s occurring because the customer is not delighted and we are getting a firsthand, real time account of what is problematic and what we must do better. These needs translate directly into our product plans and requirements.
But there’s more to glean from these interactions than the matter at hand. When the customer is amenable we like to use GoToMeeting to remotely look over their shoulders as they demonstrate for us the issue they are having. During their demonstration, we get additional insight into the mechanics of our solutions. How do customers interface with our products? Are there minor inefficiencies our users have to contend with that they aren’t reporting? A few of the most well received features we have delivered since adopting this practice have been very small stories that were pretty easily addressed, which removed a minor annoyance that was encountered frequently in our workflows. We’ll release these fixes with a minimum of fanfare, but they are almost always noticed, commented upon and appreciated by the customer.
The last class of lessons learned from our foray into front line support pertains to my new favorite non-word, troubleshootability. When something goes wrong, how easy is it to diagnose the problem and how long does it take? How detailed and centralized is your logging? Are users being updated on the progress of long running operations? If an error is encountered due to customer misuse, is the customer appropriately guided to correct the error? Anything that we can do to shorten the cycle and cut through the murk when something does go wrong improves the overall experience with the product and increases customer trust.
Working support in product management and engineering has been a really great exercise. It’s given us a deeper understanding of our solutions, our users, our strengths and our weaknesses. This understanding has led to requirements that are tightly focused on our customers’ needs, holistic development practices concentrated around comprehensive customer workflows, and a solution that clearly communicates what’s going on as it happens for fast diagnosis and remediation of issues in the field. I highly recommend it.
About the Author/Peter Pickerill
Pete Pickerill is Vice President of Products and Co-founder of Datical. Pete is a software industry veteran who has built his career in Austin’s technology sector. Prior to co-founding Datical, he was employee number one at Phurnace Software and helped lead the company to a high profile acquisition by BMC Software, Inc. His ability to understand product demands from a customer’s perspective and translate those demands into actionable product and development plans has led to expanded duties at every company for which he’s worked. In his time at Symantec, Pete worked directly with large financial services companies and online retailers to implement and improve online fraud prevention solutions that were used daily by millions of people worldwide. In addition to managing a development team and product schedule at BMC, Pete worked directly with large financial services institutions to provide the features they needed to achieve greater efficiency and cost savings in their application deployment processes.
Connect with Peter on twitter: @PetePickerill
