November 2017 Summaries

In today's era of product-first companies, a strong vision is crucial for success, as these businesses prioritize creating a product that meets the needs of their customers and is feasible, desirable, and viable. To achieve this, they must maintain focus on their goals, capture the value they aim to create, and measure their business effectively. Additionally, they need to be patient for growth, which can take time. By adopting these traits, companies can build a successful product-first approach that drives revenue through sales, marketing, and technology.

In a counterintuitive conclusion, product teams are found to work best without a single leader, leveraging the psychological principle of diffusion of responsibility, which explains that groups tend to do less when ambiguity of responsibility arises. In contrast, having a clear leader is effective in meetings and projects, as it promotes accountability and ownership. However, product teams, with their ambiguous leadership structure, can thrive without a single leader due to the partnership between engineering manager, product manager, and designer, which requires trust, humility, and daily effective communication.

As companies grow, they undergo significant changes that can impact engineers and their careers. Growth brings new challenges, such as scaling problems to solve, the need for dedicated security teams, and increased investment in equipment and tools. While it may seem like a bad thing at first, growth also presents opportunities for creative people to redesign processes, learn from experienced executives, and develop valuable skills that can lead to career advancement. Ultimately, growth is a journey out of one's comfort zone, but it can also be an opportunity for personal and professional development.

When designing for a specific audience, avoiding common design pitfalls such as relying on tired clichés is crucial. A unique visual identity was needed for the "Building Intercom" event, which required embracing risks and challenging conventional wisdom. The Hershey font, created by theoretical physicist A.V. Hershey in the 1960s, was chosen for its innovative approach to digital type design, but using it presented technical challenges due to limited availability as functional font files. To overcome these issues, a custom solution involving FontSelf and Glyphs was developed, allowing for the creation of weights and layouts using zero-width paths. The design process also involved taking risks with interactions and animations on the event page, which required testing and iteration to ensure success. Ultimately, the project reinforced the importance of risk-taking in design and encouraged embracing humanity in overcoming fear of consequences.

The future of Intercom's Operator bot is set in London, marking a significant expansion for the company. This move comes after Intercom's growth and a need to accommodate its rapid expansion. The team in London will focus on building product, including Educate, which was launched last August, and Operator, a newly launched bot that has huge potential in the company's future strategy. The operator exists at the centre of five trends in technology: messaging, new scale, personal communication, automation, and AI and Machine Learning. It aims to understand these megatrends, build something that works for both businesses and customers, and provide a best-of-both-worlds answer between technologies like bots and human communication. The company is now hiring across various levels for the London-based Operator team.

Building a platform is not as simple as having some integrations and public APIs. It requires a deliberate approach to create a governed ecosystem that serves multiple jobs, prioritizes customization, and focuses on distribution. Companies should avoid trying too hard, focusing on giving value to customers first, and instead build platforms for their customers to build on. They should also prioritize developer success by defining what it means to succeed, investing resources in engaging developers, and creating a clear purpose beyond "opening up". Building a platform takes time, with no immediate feedback loops, so companies should focus on long-term value creation rather than expecting overnight success.

The text discusses the importance of considering the timing and context in which a message is received by a customer or recipient, as this can significantly impact its effectiveness. The author uses the analogy of Calvin from the classic cartoon strip to highlight that just like how Calvin's question "Do you know where your son is?" is more likely to be answered at 3:00 AM when he's outside, the context in which someone receives a message has a huge bearing on how successful it will be. The author breaks down the day into different time slots - early morning, arriving at work, during the workday, relaxing in the evening, and socializing with friends - to illustrate how each stage offers unique opportunities for messages to be read and acted upon, or ignored. To increase the odds of sending a successful message, it's essential to consider the state of mind of the recipient, the capabilities of their devices, and schedule messages at optimal times. The author suggests using scheduling tools like Intercom to send messages during specific delivery windows and recommends checking out their book on customer engagement for more information.

Designing simple products is often prioritized in tech companies, but the team working on it can also be affected by complexity. Complexity prevents understanding and makes it harder for designers to keep the entire product in their head, engineers to think about side effects, customer support to understand how the product works, analysts to find which part impacts measures, and the QA team to go through edge cases. To minimize unnecessary complexity, companies should simplify for both the user and the team. This can be achieved by removing features, concepts, content, visual effects, animations, steps, rulesets, and untangling the UI by composing screens and pages with modular components. A clear conceptual model of the product can also help to simplify it. The goal is to avoid short-sighted thinking that would trap the team in a complexity hole and look one step ahead when making design decisions.

The key to a successful product launch is co-ordination and communication among cross-functional teams, including marketing, sales, support, and product. A well-planned process ensures consistent messaging across all touchpoints, reducing the risk of silos and confusing experiences for customers. The author shares their experience with a "build-a-box" process, which involves positioning exercises to create a unified messaging framework, as well as internal guides that capture key information about target audience, search terms, and competitive intelligence. Regular stakeholder syncs help teams stay aligned on messaging and timing, while enablement training prepares staff for sales and support roles with clear product information and positioning guidance. A plan of attack outlines the steps needed to roll out the launch smoothly, ensuring everyone is aware of their responsibilities and timelines. By implementing these processes, companies can achieve a cohesive and successful product launch.

As an engineer, it's easy to disconnect from customers in larger companies where dedicated customer support teams are formed. This can lead to a sense of detachment and lack of personal responsibility towards customers. However, some companies like Intercom prioritize getting engineers close to their customers by encouraging them to spend time directly talking to customers, providing "customer days" for employees to engage with customers, and using Github integration to quickly dig into real customer conversations. By doing so, they foster a sense of having "skin in the game," where engineers feel personally invested in the outcome of their work and can respond to customer feedback in a more meaningful way. This close connection allows engineers to understand the impact of their actions on customers and maintain a personal touch that is hard to replicate in other areas of life.

It's essential to recognize that not all feature requests are created equal, and they can be categorized into three main types: unresolved problems with an existing feature, feature improvements, and brand new feature requests. When dealing with feature requests, it's crucial to understand what the customer is trying to achieve and provide a balanced response that keeps them happy while collecting valuable information for product improvement. The key is to mine these requests for deeper information, acknowledge that some features may not be supported, and offer workarounds or suggest alternative solutions. By prioritizing feature requests based on factors such as customer lifecycle, high-value users, difficulty of implementation, volume of feedback, and other relevant considerations, teams can ensure they're addressing the most critical issues while staying aligned with their company's mission and long-term strategy. Ultimately, responding to feature requests in a thoughtful and proactive manner is essential for building customer trust, loyalty, and driving product success.

At Intercom, they aim to enable businesses to communicate with their customers in a personal and meaningful way. They explore how people like to communicate and try to understand the elements that make it personal. Non-verbal cues such as tone of voice and physical gestures play a crucial part in face-to-face communication, and understanding these cues is important for effective customer communication. Textual paralinguistic cues, such as non-standard punctuation and text formatting, can help convey different types of nonverbal information. Emojis can act as substitutes for body language and facial expressions, conveying emotion and clarifying a message's meaning. The use of emojis and other visual elements like GIFs can add emotional expression to online communication, helping to build trust and form meaningful relationships with customers. By embracing new conventions and adopting these elements, businesses can make their connections with customers more personal and effective.

Using case studies to tell your story for you is crucial in de-risking the effort to change an existing operation and potentially their teammates' too, particularly for the vast majority of potential customers who are not technology enthusiasts and are more averse to change. A good case study shares the elements of a good story, including a relatable protagonist, tension, resolution, and should be structured as a portrait of their workflow and challenges before using your product, how they solved it by replacing their workflow with your product, and what makes your product the right fit for them. The process exposes you to your most passionate customers and instills empathy and appreciation for them, which can carry you throughout your career and plays a pivotal role in helping tip potential users over the fence.

We structure our teams at Intercom as cross-functional teams where designers are embedded together with engineers and a product manager. This allows us to build and iterate fast, as everyone is working closely together and builds up deep domain knowledge over time. However, we've encountered challenges such as designers lacking feedback from each other, work getting siloed, designs becoming inconsistent, designers having different values, difficulty learning from each other, and lacking a social sense of the design team. To overcome these challenges, we encourage designers to get feedback from each other through regular design crits and sharing their designs on Wake. We also establish transparency by keeping roadmaps and project information accessible to everyone, share weekly goals, introduce a design system, establish shared design principles, provide opportunities for new hires to learn from the team, and organize social events for the design team.