June 2017 Summaries

The text discusses how Intercom, a company that aims to move faster with smaller steps, has adopted a service-oriented architecture to achieve this goal. They have broken down their application into smaller services and composed them to create a bigger service, which allows for fast deployment and shipping of new features to customers up to 50 times a day. This approach enables the company to test relentlessly on themselves, use feature flagging, and roll back quickly if needed. The author believes that this philosophy has helped Intercom ship large complex solutions to problems by taking small steps in favor of shipping valuable code regularly. By doing so, they have shortened their feedback loop, minimized complexity and dependencies, and enabled continuous adaptation and learning as they push new code to production.

The SaaS law of averages suggests that around 40-60% of people who sign up for a free trial will use it once and never come back. To increase the chances of success, businesses can focus on improving communication with new signups by designing impactful messaging campaigns. A good nurture messaging campaign should be based on behavior, sending messages that show customers the value of the product, and include triggered, action-based messages. The key to success lies in understanding what actions lead to conversions and measuring the effectiveness of the campaign. By providing guidance on how to create a well-thought-out campaign, businesses can move beyond radio silence and encourage new signups to become paying customers.

Intercom is expanding its research and development operations to London, aiming to make internet business personal and disrupt the traditional ways businesses interact with customers. The company is hiring immediately for engineering managers, product engineers, and product designers to join an initial landing team that will bootstrap the new office. This move puts Intercom close to its largest concentration of European customers and provides access to a rich pool of talented people in London. The decision was influenced by factors such as proximity to customers, availability of skilled talent, and ease of collaboration with existing Dublin-based teams. The new London office will focus on one of Intercom's fastest-growing products, Articles, which is being developed using machine learning technology to provide automated customer support.

Attracting users to a product is challenging, and ignoring non-English speakers can lead to missed opportunities. Businesses with an existing marketing site in one language may still benefit from supporting additional languages to tap into new audiences and build a global footprint. Considering localization when there's demand, as indicated by high traffic volumes and paying customers from non-English speaking countries, is crucial. Testing for demand through paid experiments can help determine the effectiveness of localized content. The results showed that localized content outperformed English content in terms of impressions and visits, was cheaper to acquire leads, and converted at similar rates throughout the funnel where the funnel was localized. Expanding localization efforts across marketing sites and products can lead to increased traffic and better conversion rates. Ultimately, speaking a customer's language is essential for making an internet business personal, and businesses should consider localizing their content to tap into new audiences.

We've shipped over 20 new features this year, focusing on making support frictionless and personal for customers, helping teams manage their inbox at scale, improving integrations with other tools, and enhancing outbound messaging capabilities. Key highlights include office hours and away mode, articles autoresponder, animated GIF support in Messenger, and several inbox enhancements such as prioritizing waiting customers, grouping conversations, and snoozing conversations. Additionally, we've made it easier for developers to build on our platform with new integrations, APIs, and a developer dashboard.

When I worked for Google as a Site Reliability Engineer, I was lucky enough to travel around the world with a group called “Team Development”. Our mission was to design and deliver team-building courses to teams who wanted to work better together. The biggest finding was that the number-one indicator of a successful team wasn't tenure, team leaders, seniority or salary levels, but team psychological safety. To build psychological safety into your own team, balance respect for your culture with an openness to change it as needed. Make sure people can be themselves by ensuring you say something when you witness disrespect. Give 100% if you spend mental energy pretending to be someone else. Create an expectation that everyone on the team should think outside the box, and ensure that the whole team can go off-piste at the same time. Make it obvious when your team is doing well, celebrating glorious failure as much as success. Clearly communicate expectations and make sure your team feels safe by sharing results of a short survey and discussing what "Safety" means to them.

Our team's diverse mix of skills and technical abilities enhances performance by fostering empathy in customer interactions. Less tech-savvy teammates can offer unparalleled levels of understanding, allowing them to provide unrivaled empathy to users through relatable experiences. This approach transforms technical teammates into teachers, as they share their expertise and explain complex issues in accessible language. Furthermore, this diverse setup brings a clean slate, offering endless creative opportunities for innovation and improvement, ultimately leading to better products and more accessible customer support.

When Intercom's latest book, "Intercom on Starting Up", was being designed, the team wanted to create a truly editorial experience. They worked with the Intercom Brand Studio to bring the book to life, and lead designer Kelly Carpenter took the reader behind the scenes of the process. The transition from digital to print required asking different questions, such as what colors would pop and whether to include special techniques like debossing or spot varnish. The team aimed to create a unique character through color and illustration, while also bringing in some of Intercom's personality. Kelly had worked on smaller print jobs before but nothing close to the scale of this book, which was a huge step up for her as a designer. She found that working in print brought its own set of challenges, such as lack of control over the design and the need to work within limitations. The team faced many challenges during production, including tight deadlines, proofreading errors, and packaging files correctly. To elevate the reader's experience, they added fun illustrations throughout the book, while also choosing a typography that was both sophisticated and friendly. Working in print has taught Kelly that limitations and constraints are vital for success, and she found that working within these boundaries has helped her to create more focused designs.

The text discusses the importance of having a flexible process in software development, particularly for startups. It argues that traditional waterfall processes can be detrimental to progress and innovation, as they require certainty from start to finish and can lead to building something wrong due to lack of feedback. The author suggests that Agile processes are not inherently better than waterfall, but rather, both have their limitations. Instead, the goal should be to create a process that expects uncertainty and allows for experimentation, iteration, and customer feedback to guide decision-making. This approach recognizes that the most valuable learning happens through research, shipping, and feedback, and that everyone in the organization should understand this primary goal. The text also critiques the tendency of Agile teams to adopt waterfall-like processes when "handoffs" occur, such as product hands off to design, design to engineering, and engineering to QA.

Hiring the right people is crucial for a startup's success, as it can give them a new superpower. To ensure this, it's essential to focus on intellectual curiosity and communication skills in candidates, as they are better equipped to grow with the company. It's also vital not to oversell the position or the company, as this can lead to disappointment if the candidate doesn't align with the organization's values. When selling the vision, it's crucial to keep the pitch high-level and focus on what the company believes in and values. Additionally, don't let hiring managers get desperate, and instead, scale back projects or delay deadlines if necessary. Keeping the bar high is also essential, as great people want to work with other great people. This can be achieved by creating standardized baseline exercises to evaluate candidates. Finally, making the investment up front, with discipline and care, pays off in the long run, avoiding financial costs, time costs, and opportunity costs associated with hiring the wrong person.

Creating a customer retention strategy is crucial for software companies, as the cost of keeping customers often exceeds the cost of acquiring them. To tackle this challenge, companies can take basic measures such as lifecycle messaging, which involves contacting users with messages that provide value based on their experience of using the software. This approach can be broken down into three stages: early retention, where new users need to be onboarded into important actions; mid-term retention, where existing users need to be engaged to build habits that stick; and long-term retention, where seasoned users become loyal customers through constant realization of value. Effective messaging in each stage is critical, with triggers such as notifications, reminders, and emails working well to encourage habits and create a sense of belonging among users. By focusing on user intentions and goals, companies can create retention messaging that resonates with their audience and drives long-term loyalty.

When a startup needs program management, they need help managing the complexity that comes with scaling. This involves introducing structure to avoid chaos while retaining their culture and fluid ways of working. Clear responsibilities are crucial, including defining decision-making roles, such as Drivers, Approvers, Contributors, and Informed individuals. Milestones provide a lightweight way of planning without detailed spreadsheets or Gantt charts, enabling progress, ensuring the right decisions are made by the right people with the right input, and keeping relevant teams informed. Keeping everyone updated with the right amount of information in the proper forum is key to successful program management. Proactively identifying and managing risks is essential, building relationships and trust with team members to understand potential risks. Program management becomes necessary when a startup is trying to deliver a complex product with multiple project tracks, teams are not working in sync, or there's an urgent need to meet a marketing-driven deadline, investor demand, or market opportunity.

The author of this article emphasizes the importance of asking "why" when it comes to understanding customer needs and designing products. They argue that rushing through the conversation can lead to missing important details, while slowing down and exploring each layer of the "why" conversation can yield more valuable insights. The author identifies three productive layers of conversation: usefulness (what do you actually do with the thing?), usability (what result comes from using it?), and desirability (what's different now that I've accomplished my goal?). They also discuss how to make a product more appealing by understanding its use in the user's life. The article concludes that taking the time to explore each layer thoroughly is worth it, as it can lead to a deeper understanding of customer needs and more valuable insights for product design.