November 2015 Summaries

Intercom uses Elasticsearch as its primary data storage and retrieval system, initially using MongoDB before switching due to scalability issues. The transition brought several challenges, including handling free-form custom data, ingesting data into Elasticsearch, and addressing mapping growth and consistency concerns. To mitigate these issues, Intercom implemented a solution involving a worker that checks data counts, reingests data from MongoDB to Elasticsearch, and uses a table in MySQL to map custom data to existing fields in Elasticsearch. The company has since addressed additional challenges related to cluster stability and scalability, including hotspotting, shard size, and dual writing for customer apps. Looking ahead, Intercom plans to further improve and scale Elasticsearch by sharding customers across different clusters, removing routing, and adopting a service-oriented architecture.

Meetings can be either highly productive or a waste of time, with the outcome often depending on how they are run. Meetings can be expensive due to the opportunity cost of people's time being spent in them instead of other important tasks. To improve meeting quality, meetings should have a clear owner who is responsible for keeping attendees on topic and ensuring the meeting stays on track. The meeting owner should clearly define the topic boundaries and start by sharing the required output. Meetings should end with clear action items, each with an owner and due date, to ensure accountability. Additionally, best practices such as ending meetings early if they conclude before time, allowing attendees to leave if they feel unnecessary, and declining meetings without knowing their purpose can help improve meeting quality. Ultimately, good meetings are essential for productivity and efficiency, and everyone involved should strive to run high-quality meetings that meet the standards of a productive conversation between two or more people.

Design is increasingly becoming a conversation between designers, users, and computers. The rise of conversational UIs has created opportunities for designers to build products that facilitate conversations between humans and services, rather than just two people. This shift is driven by human nature, with language being an innate part of our makeup for hundreds of thousands of years. Conversational interfaces are now being used in various applications, including messaging apps, where they can perform tasks and provide answers to users' queries. The emergence of conversational UIs has created a new platform for building user experiences, similar to how APIs transformed the internet during the Web 2.0 era. Designers must consider how to design conversations that are meaningful and engaging, drawing inspiration from past examples such as linguistics and interactive fiction. Ultimately, conversational interfaces are just beginning to unfold, offering exciting possibilities for designers to explore.

Joining a new company can be daunting, especially when you're expected to ship production code on your first day. However, Intercom's strong engineering values and culture centered around ownership and potential for growth make it easier to adapt. The company provides a welcome pack with a hand-signed card from teammates, setting up machines, configuring tools, and giving new engineers the opportunity to immediately contribute to the product through completion of an introductory task called an "Intermission". This small scope allows them to jump right in and feel like a productive member of the team. With continuous deployment process and feature flags, new engineers can commit and deploy their first lines of code within hours, receiving feedback loops and having actual impact on the product. The company values both craving and giving feedback, with dedicated meetings with engineering leads, goals for the next few months, and early recognition at demos, making it a refreshing and motivating environment for growth as an engineer.

Design patterns are reusable solutions to common problems that greatly speed up the design process. However, designers may default to using popular patterns without understanding if they're the right fit for their product. The article discusses how Intercom, a company that sends messages to users at key points during their lifetime with your product, had to choose between two commonly used patterns - folders and tags. By assessing the dominant patterns, understanding the design goal and constraint, and future-proofing their designs, Intercom was able to design a solution that best solved the customer's problem, fit the product goals and constraints, and set them up for the future product roadmap. The article emphasizes the importance of designers starting with first principles and carrying them through their work, rather than mindlessly deferring to popular patterns or trends.

Today we released our third book, Intercom on Customer Support, which explains how we think about customer support and the principles applied as we scaled a team to support over 8,000 customers in 85 countries. Quality customer support is a competitive advantage, not a cost, and this book aims to help businesses deliver it. We live in the age of customer support, where all businesses are becoming internet businesses and recurring revenue is key, making customer support teams crucial for measuring lifetime value. The lines between sales and support have blurred, requiring careful consideration on how to handle user queries, scale a team, and ensure costs don't impact margins.