June 2015 Summaries

At Intercom, the company has taken an unconventional approach by having a small central Ops team that focuses on maintaining the reliability and performance of their platform. This team is responsible for ensuring the continuous deployment infrastructure is in place, which enables the product engineering teams to ship code to production dozens of times a day. The Ops team also drives performance improvement initiatives across the product engineering teams and maintains the infrastructure security. The company has created core values that guide the behavior and decision-making of the Ops team, including prioritizing Security, Availability, Performance, Scalability, Cost, Efficiency; striving for Faster, Safer, Easier shipping; and promoting Zero Touch Ops and Run Less Software. Despite this approach being similar to DevOps, Intercom plans to maintain a central Ops team while hiring engineers to work on both the core Ops team and product teams to improve performance and scalability in different areas of their product.

We've shipped several exciting updates at Intercom, including a new package called Acquire that enables real-time messaging with visitors on your website. This allows you to convert them into users of your product by answering their questions and sending targeted messages. We also fully support mobile apps with our Android integration, making it easy to see and talk to your Android users from one place. Real-time messaging features have been released, including the ability to prioritize who to respond to first and see "is typing" indicators. Additionally, we've improved how you can target the right audience for a message using "or" filtering, and made several other messaging improvements such as auto-message creation flows, HTML importers, and bulk actions on messages. Other notable updates include file attachments in email and in-app messages, alignment features, emojis and stickers in conversations, and improvements to Saved Replies and Notes.

The concept of a product roadmap is crucial for building great products, as it involves making hard decisions and trade-offs. A well-planned roadmap balances new ideas with iterative improvements, addressing customer problems, improving quality, and features to help scale the business. The key to nailing a great roadmap is to have a balance between these types of ideas, ensuring that resources are allocated effectively. Great product teams use various inputs to inform their roadmap, including customer conversations, research analysis, and sales strategy. By balancing different priorities, teams can avoid making half-baked features or focusing solely on customer requests, while also keeping the product high-quality and bug-free. The roadmap serves as a guide for prioritization, allowing teams to make deliberate decisions about what to build next, and ensuring that their product remains relevant and competitive in the market.

The authors of the blog have learned several lessons while running their content marketing strategy over nearly four years. They found that creating a successful blog takes time, as it's not an instant return on investment and its value is often measured in months or years rather than days. The quality of the content is crucial, and "average" content won't work, instead, articles with fresh, authentic opinions tend to perform better. Writing regularly requires practice and making time for it, even if it means finding extra hours. Not every company should be a publisher, as it's essential to have an opinion about how the world works and create products that reflect that opinion. The key to scaling content production is to have a clear content strategy in place, defining subject areas, article quality, writer types, and more, and attaching an editor who can impact the quality of the content. By following these lessons, businesses can create effective content marketing strategies that attract and engage their target audience.