Newsletter - Why engineers should do support

[ivanagas]

Summary

Write a short paragraph on what this article is about. If applicable, what's the opinion or point we want to make in this article?

Our engineers do support, it provides us benefits, other teams could get these same benefits if they did the same. Write a newsletter about why engineers should do support and how we do it.

Where will it be published?

select any that apply

• Blog
• Founders Hub
• Newsletter
• Product engineers Hub
• Tutorials
• Other (please specify)

Why type of article is this?

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• High intent (i.e. comparisons and similar)
• Brand / opinionated (how we work and why, etc.)
• High-level guide (concepts, frameworks, ideas, etc.)
• Low-level guide (step-by-step guide / tutorial)
• Other (please specify)

Who is the primary audience?

select any that apply

• Founders
• Engineers
• Growth
• Marketing
• HackerNews
• Existing PostHog users
• Potential PostHog users

Headline options

suggest a few angles

Why engineers should do support

Why our engineers do support (and you should too)

Will it need custom art?

• Yes
• No

Outline (optional)

draft headings / questions you want to answer

• Engineers don’t always do support but they should
  • They have from the very beginning of PostHog, even though this is a lot of work throughout
• Why engineers should do support
  • User empathy. Feel the pain of issues. Keep user focused. Encourages ownership.
  • Polishing the product.
  • Faster fixes. Sparks joy. Instead of waiting for the full product development cycle to happen, they can just fix the issue. PR > issues.
  • Engineers have more context about what could have caused the issue. Can ask the right questions to figure this out.
  • Good support is good for business. Helps close deals and increase word of mouth.
  • This is what startups do. Works with our small team structure.
• How engineers do support at PostHog
  • Support hero, rotation. This ensures they aren’t interrupted, focused time.
  • Solve tickets to the best of their ability, work on bugs, feature requests, customer issues. Respond to incidents.
  • Having product engineers is really helpful because anyone can ship anywhere on the stack.
  • PR > issues
• How to set engineers up for success
  • Prioritize, we prioritize based on revenue (mostly)
  • Provide guidelines on communication. Our engineers do talk to users, we look for their ability to do this.
  • Optimize your process. We’ve done Zendesk, pager duty improvements. We have a lot of process improvements documented.
  • Single source of truth. Emails, in-app reports, Slack threads all come into Zendesk.
  • Runbooks, monitoring, admin tools.
  • Debugging tools, we have a lot in Django admin dashboard, impersonating users.
  • Gatekeep. We have support engineers and sales team to help teams prioritize.