January 2018 Summaries

The author describes their weekly planning process as a leader and manager, highlighting the importance of strategy and planning in achieving goals. They outline their specific approach, which includes Monday morning planning, stand-up meetings with their team, 1-on-1s with their boss and team members, and a final team meeting on Friday to plan for the next week. The author emphasizes the value of accountability, recognition, and continuous improvement, using tools like project management software and dashboards to track progress and identify areas for growth. They also discuss the importance of self-reflection and preparation for each day's planning meetings, including reviewing goals, values, and metrics, and practicing what they want to say during the meeting. The author concludes by highlighting the benefits of their approach, which includes increased productivity, improved communication, and a culture of continuous improvement.

In customer engagement, the right context for a message is crucial, just like the right time and recipient. Intercom has released its second audiobook installment, Intercom on Customer Engagement, which provides actionable messaging strategies to grow businesses. The book features 8 chapters narrated by Intercom team members who engage customers regularly, covering topics such as writing laser-focused messages, using the right voice and tone, and ensuring timely delivery. To access the audiobook, listeners can download it from popular podcast platforms like iTunes and Overcast, or listen to it for free on the Inside Intercom podcast website. This release is part of Intercom's efforts to re-release its published books in shortened audio format for easy digestion.

A company uses Visitor Auto Messages (VAMs) to capture more leads by tailoring their messages to specific visitors based on criteria such as company size, website behaviors, and demographics. By personalizing these auto-messages, the company aims to increase engagement and conversion rates. One reply from a human increases the conversion rate of leads to users by 50%. The company has experimented with VAMs in lifecycle marketing, using them to promote gated content and capture email addresses. To target the right audience, the company uses behavioral and demographic filters, such as page visits, referral URLs, browser languages, and country and city data. The messages should be concise, reflecting a clear action or goal, and relevant to the visitor's interests. It is essential to monitor and iterate on these messages regularly to optimize their performance.

The concept of flow, as introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, refers to a state of complete absorption in an activity where the skill level and difficulty of the challenge are matched. This state is characterized by heightened focus and concentration, often described as being "in the zone". To feel challenged, individuals can pursue three types of challenges: increasing their skill level in an area of existing expertise, building new skills in unfamiliar areas, or finding opportunities that simulate a challenging workload. The key to experiencing flow is finding a balance between challenge and skill level, as exceeding this balance can lead to anxiety, while underestimating it can result in boredom.

I had imposter syndrome at Intercom, despite having a solid reputation from my previous 7 years at Google and Facebook. I doubted myself when I joined a tiny startup as their first 'public profile' hire, feeling uncertain about startups, SaaS, venture capital, and people management. Imposter syndrome is common in our industry and can happen before joining a company, with many top performers hesitant to apply due to fear of failure. However, it took vulnerability for me to join Intercom, and I'm grateful that others did too, as our success relies on their contributions.

At Intercom, a company with values that prioritize moving fast but optimizing for the long term, doing less but better, and taking ownership of their engineering projects, the Production Systems team identified an opportunity to reduce their Amazon Web Service (AWS) costs by up to 50% by maximizing the use of Spot Instances. To achieve this goal, they needed a safer and easier way to utilize Spot Instances in their infrastructure. After evaluating two options - forking an open-source project called Autospotting or building their own implementation - the team decided to build their own solution with just the bits they needed. This allowed them to own the design, set their own success criteria, and reduce communication friction while working in isolation from their team. The team's autonomy was essential in making this decision, as it enabled them to choose a project, make better decisions, and work independently without requiring sign-off. With the help of Agile principles, they were able to deliver a functional solution within two weeks, which significantly reduced their EC2 bill over time. Despite the initial success, further refinement is necessary to ensure seamless integration with other cost strategies and systems, such as Reserved Instances and custom Amazon Machine Images (AMI). The ASG-optimizer project serves as a testament to the power of autonomy in engineering, highlighting the importance of alignment with the team, adherence to principles, and continuous improvement.

We scaled our product demos at Intercom by moving from live, personal demos to hybrid demos that combine pre-recorded video with a live Q&A session. This approach reduced technical overhead and allowed us to deliver consistent quality to attendees every time. We also experimented with on-demand demo videos, which increased viewership significantly and showed improved engagement metrics. Our constant evolution of this content strategy continues as our software develops and our user base grows.

At Intercom, we've spent years learning the benefits and challenges of making it easy for website visitors to chat with us. We know that live chat can be a valuable tool for converting customers, but we also understand that it can be challenging to have meaningful conversations with potential buyers. To help you make the most of live chat, Intercom is launching the Live Chat for Sales Starter Kit, which provides best practice advice and sample messages to help you create a proactive messaging strategy. By using Visitor Auto Messages (VAMs), you can reach out to targeted segments of your website traffic with relevant messages, filtering out low-quality leads and increasing the chances of converting visitors into customers. With this kit, you'll be able to quickly implement a proactive messaging strategy that can take minutes to set up, regardless of which live chat product you use.

At Intercom, reflection is a key ingredient for great product teams. Individuals and teams regularly reflect on their performance, discussing successes, challenges, and areas for improvement to grow and transform their work. This includes weekly 1:1s with managers, bi-annual performance reviews, team reflections before planning sessions, project retrospectives, and company-wide surveys to understand employee engagement and areas for improvement. By reflecting on how they work, teams can increase productivity, avoid chaos, and improve collaboration, ultimately leading to better outcomes.

Choosing the right internship can significantly impact one's career trajectory, but many people focus on finding a job rather than researching and selecting an internship that aligns with their goals. To make the most of an internship, it's essential to figure out if the company is a good fit by researching its values, culture, and work environment. This involves checking the company's blog, watching leadership talks, reading about their industry experience on Glassdoor or careers pages, and asking questions during interviews. A product-driven company with a strong focus on innovation and collaboration can provide valuable learning experiences and opportunities for growth. Working closely with experienced engineers and mentors who provide guidance and support can also be instrumental in turbocharging skills and education. Ultimately, the right internship can help individuals discover their ambitions and make a meaningful impact in their desired field.

We built a comprehensive pattern library to harmonize our company's design elements and improve consistency across our Intercom product. The library was created as a single source of truth for designers and engineers, but its development revealed unexpected complexities and challenges. We learned that predicting exactly how colleagues work and their needs is difficult, and the library's usefulness varied among team members. Despite these challenges, the library became an invaluable resource for new colleagues during onboarding and has helped shape our team's mindset towards design system thinking. To build a successful design system, it's essential to formulate a clear strategy, allow for customization and local changes, think outside the box, and maintain the library as a living document that reflects the latest state of your product.

Intercom on Marketing`, the latest book from Intercom, aims to provide a comprehensive guide for startups on effective marketing strategies. The book addresses common challenges faced by founders who lack a background in marketing and provides actionable advice on topics such as product-launching, messaging, and go-to-market strategy. With over 14 chapters covering various aspects of marketing, the book is designed to help startups develop their brand strength and create a successful marketing plan. Featuring original illustrations and personal stories from Intercom's early days, the book is available in multiple formats, including PDF, Kindle, and epub, making it accessible to readers worldwide.

The company Intercom had a business-critical system, Nexus, that was built in-house and worked fine but demanded more resources to keep it running efficiently. The team tried to optimize and simplify the system, but finding time for such projects among other commitments was challenging. To address this, Intercom introduced a "wiggle week" - a dedicated space on the calendar where individual contributors could decide what they wanted to work on for that week with minimal planning. This allowed developers and designers to be creative and come up with their own ideas to improve the system. One engineer, William Tabi, used his wiggle week to rewrite Nexus in Go, which resulted in significant advantages such as faster deployment, improved performance, and major cost-savings. The project demonstrated the benefits of encouraging experimentation and innovation, and building the concept of innovation time into the culture allowed for unexpected rewards.

RICE is an acronym for a simple prioritization framework used by product managers to evaluate project ideas. It stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. The framework helps product managers consider each factor about a project idea with clear-eyed discipline and combine those factors in a rigorous, consistent way. The four factors are estimated using multiple-choice scales and then combined into a single score that measures "total impact per time worked". This allows for easy comparison of projects and helps make better-informed decisions about what to work on first. While RICE scores shouldn't be used as a hard and fast rule, they can help product managers think about why a project idea will have impact and be honest about the effort needed to achieve it.

In sales, focusing on closing smaller deals quickly can help free up time to prioritize larger, more complex opportunities. This approach optimizes for speed and thoroughness in the lower market, where a rapid response is crucial, and in-depth discovery is less necessary. By doing so, sales teams can maximize conversion rates and overall revenue by allocating their resources more efficiently. It's essential to balance the need for speed with the requirement for thoroughness when working with both small and large prospects, ultimately leading to a successful sales process that yields the desired results.

The text discusses the importance of finding balance between process and delivering great results in a startup. The author emphasizes that while processes are necessary, they should not overshadow the primary goal of achieving great things. Instead, leaders should focus on creating an environment where their team members can work with pride, urgency, and passion, guided by "just enough" process. The text also highlights the importance of spending time wisely, being proud of one's accomplishments, and taking personal responsibility for behaviors and actions. Additionally, it shares simple ways to change one's mindset, such as caring about doing a great job, setting meaningful goals and metrics, and holding retro and planning meetings that evoke pride and inspire recognition, reward, shame, and growth.