February 2018 Summaries

Intercom, a business messaging platform, is doubling its product teams in San Francisco, Dublin, and London to drive breakthrough innovations that help customers grow their businesses efficiently. The expansion aims to increase conversion rates and sales by more than 80% for customers using Intercom's products. With a focus on engineering, design, product management, research, and analytics, the new hires will be distributed across these offices, with San Francisco's corporate headquarters playing a key role in driving growth and innovation. The Dublin office is already attracting top talent from great companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and HubSpot, while the London office has outpaced expectations since its opening in October. Intercom values diversity and inclusivity, with 50% of leadership hires being women in the past year.

The sales handover process in SaaS environments is a critical moment that requires careful consideration and good processes to ensure a smooth transition. It's not just about making the sale, but about maintaining the relationship for the long term. The goal is to transfer sales activity from one party to another, with different members of the Sales team dealing with the customer at various phases of the relationship. Understanding the customer's behavioral style and their Job-to-be-Done is crucial in effectively building trust and rapport. Utilizing frameworks like DISC and Jobs-to-be-Done can help identify personality traits and pain points, enabling Account Executives to build a strong foundation for handovers. Internal notes are vital for Relationship Managers to understand customers and their goals, ensuring that the baton gets passed from hand to hand without disrupting the relationship. The key is to foster and nurture more relationships than competitors, making it essential to develop adept skills in passing those proverbial batons in a smooth, swift action.

The Run Less Software philosophy is a set of guidelines for software companies to win battles in the market and stay competitive. It's based on three pillars: choosing standard technology, outsourcing undifferentiated heavy lifting, and creating enduring competitive advantage. By adopting these principles, companies can reduce their operational costs, increase their speed and agility, and deliver value to customers more effectively. The philosophy is not about avoiding innovation or technology, but about being strategic in how they choose to invest time and resources. It encourages companies to focus on the things that truly matter to customers, while leveraging standard technologies and outsourcing non-core tasks to third-party providers. By following these principles, companies can create a sustainable competitive advantage and stay ahead of the competition.

The text discusses the importance of building strong customer relationships in today's digital age. It argues that businesses have come full circle, from being constrained by physical location to now having the ability to reach a global audience through the internet. However, this has also led to a focus on transactions rather than personal connections. The author suggests that businesses should refocus on creating and maintaining personal relationships with their customers, similar to how people build relationships in the past. This involves helping customers succeed, investing in the relationship, being available wherever customers are, increasing brand reputation, and focusing on people rather than just maximizing short-term gain.

Live chat can be a crucial component in converting high-intent website visitors into paying customers, particularly during product launch days when traffic is at its peak. To prepare sales teams for success, companies should focus on capturing intent quickly, proactively chatting with users to guide them through the conversion process, and dedicating an inbox to referral traffic. By implementing these strategies, businesses can transform ephemeral momentum into meaningful customer acquisition.

C.A.R.E. is a simple customer onboarding framework that consists of three core components: UI Design patterns, Contextual educational content, and Contextual communication. These components are essential for creating an effective onboarding experience, but they should be part of a wider onboarding strategy that focuses on the entire user lifecycle. A well-considered and well-maintained onboarding funnel is crucial for growing a business, while a leaky one could kill it. Onboarding should be treated as an ongoing concern, a mission, a mindset, and a strategy that needs to adapt over time as the product and business evolve. Successful onboarding experiences are those that activate customers in their first visit, provide contextual educational content, and use contextual communication to encourage onboarding actions. The C.A.R.E. model of onboarding provides a framework for creating an end-to-end onboarding UX that aligns around the entire user lifecycle, rather than disparate efforts owned by different teams.

Move fast and optimize for the long term` is a value-driven approach to product engineering, prioritizing speed and customer satisfaction over perfection. To achieve this, engineers should focus on picking problems with high payoff and low failure cost, becoming experts in not being an expert, ensuring success or failure is measurable, predicting broadly but positioning themselves to react, and gathering data without attachment to it. By adopting these principles, engineers can deliver value quickly while maintaining a long-term perspective, ultimately driving customer trust and personal fulfillment.

Intercom is a unique company that offers a special opportunity for product people. The company has a strong culture of understanding and supporting its product team members, who are empowered to make decisions and work independently. Intercom's mission is clear and stable, and the company values its employees' growth and development, offering opportunities for learning and professional growth. The company also prioritizes collaboration and communication among its teams, including product, design, support, sales, and marketing. This collaborative environment allows employees to learn from each other and grow in their careers. Additionally, Intercom provides a supportive culture that encourages transparency, humility, and self-awareness, making it an attractive workplace for those seeking a meaningful and fulfilling career.

The text discusses the importance of a strong sales and product feedback loop in avoiding common pitfalls, such as stalled deals due to missing features or untested product ideas. It highlights the benefits of regular meetings between sales and product teams, including improved alignment, better decision-making, and increased empathy between the two groups. The author describes their own experience with fortnightly sync meetings at Intercom, which resulted in the launch of a new feature that automatically routes conversations to the right team in their live chat solution. The text also provides practical advice on assembling the right group, preparing for the meeting, running the meeting, and sharing information between sales and product teams to foster alignment and better product development.

There's one thing all wilderness survivors have in common: they didn’t get eaten by a bear. The only way to make sure your customers see your message is to understand their behaviors and mindset. There’s a strong parallel between surviving in the wild and starting a business, where you’ll either find customers and get them to pay you or your business will fail and your idea will die. Demand generation is creating systems that build awareness of and a market for your products with target customers, involving elements like products, customers, systems, awareness, and demand. A key aspect of demand generation is starting with a point of view, determining your positioning, understanding your customer's behaviors and mindset, generating ways to reach your audience, winning on paper by evaluating the numbers, and finding one thing that works. By focusing on just one system at first, you can prioritize and maximize its impact, protecting yourself from failure long enough to think about the next big idea.

Onboarding new employees is a challenging process that requires focus on company culture to avoid misalignment. A generic and shallow onboarding approach, which typically involves meeting key people, setting up computers, and discussing the company's vision and mission, leaves huge gaps in understanding the company culture. Instead, personalized onboarding focused on details and tailored to each new employee's position is crucial for their success. This includes guiding them through a structured process over several weeks, providing a clear path to completion, and allowing them to build relationships with colleagues across the company. Investing time and effort into proper onboarding yields long-term dividends, as it helps maintain cultural alignment during periods of growth and ensures new employees feel confident and productive in their roles.

There is no better way to attract great designers than by starting a blog. A few years ago, the author joined Intercom after reading an article on product strategy and realized that they wanted to work with people who think like that. The company's blog has become an effective way to attract top talent, as it provides an inside look into how the company works, its mission, values, and process. By writing about design and sharing knowledge, companies can establish themselves as leaders in the field and attract designers who share their values. The key is to write from personal experience, include stories that are unique to you, and not be afraid of publishing something that may not have been written before. Writing regularly helps develop a valuable skill - formulating thoughts into clear opinions - which also benefits day-to-day work. By doing so, companies can find talented designers who share their values and join their teams.

Would you hire yourself? This question is actually a powerful tool to help you make better hiring decisions. As a company grows, each additional hire has a disproportionate impact, and a bad hire can set the company back significantly. Asking if you would hire yourself is a technique used by hiring managers like myself, inspired by Andy Grove's approach. It helps focus your mind on three critical factors: empathy for the candidate, hiring for potential, and setting a realistic bar. By asking this question, you can reset your brain, consider the people who gave you breaks in your career, and think about the trajectory of your ideal candidate rather than their current state. This simple question can help you make better hires and avoid making decisions based on unrealistic expectations.