June 2019 Summaries

So, you want to give a Ted talk? There's a lot of content and advice about giving presentations out there, but most of it is really useful only some of the time. Intercom has been holding events for years, with their founders delivering acclaimed talks on building software and scaling customer support teams. The author has been helping colleagues hone their material and practice their delivery behind the scenes. This summary aims to distill everything they've learned down to a few key areas in an organized and useful way, providing tips on public speaking that you won't see elsewhere and inspirational resources along the way. Talks serve many practical purposes, including promoting ideas, making pitches for capital, communicating who you are and what you're about, and connecting with the community. A good talk involves three stages: before writing, while writing, and after writing, each with its own important steps. The key areas to focus on include getting started, finding inspiration, and ideation. When starting out, it's essential to begin with your audience and tailor your content to whom you're speaking. You can start by writing for a small audience and expecting them to be small. It's also crucial to draw inspiration from various sources, including comedy, politics, Ted talks, podcasts, TV shows, and movies. The best talks are a mixture of educational and inspirational, with big picture concepts and micro examples that all weave together to form the narrative tapestry. When writing your talk, remember that it's not about you, but about your audience. Focus on how they want to feel and what they want to get out of your talk. The most common mistake is to focus too much on text and not enough on visuals. Good talks are not about that time you built a cool new tool in your job, but about what your audience can learn from it. When practicing, recreate the environment you'll be in as much as possible, and don't be afraid to make mistakes. You should seek feedback from people who know how to give good talks, and use their insights to refine your content. The key is to never give a talk just once and to always adapt to new situations. Talks are really just conversations, and the best ones generate conversation and participate in an existing conversation that's already happening. To get the most out of your talk, prepare ahead of time for luck to turn against you and adapt on the day.

The Intercom team aimed to improve the accessibility of their Messenger's quick reply buttons, a seemingly small detail that could significantly impact users with disabilities. They wanted to achieve four goals: improve readability, ensure accessibility, personalize quick replies regardless of the chosen action color, and maintain hover state consistency. The new design addresses these requirements by introducing a light background instead of white, automatically adjusting text and background colors based on the selected action color's lightness, and ensuring that the hover state matches the active state. This resulted in significant improvements in accessibility, readability, and personalization, with only 2.1% of customers' messengers not meeting the desired accessibility ratio compared to 9.9% with the old design.

The article challenges the conventional view that product managers should build and prioritize roadmaps. Instead, it suggests that building a roadmap should be a team effort, with the entire product team involved in gathering inputs, discussing priorities, and creating the roadmap. This bottom-up approach can help align strategy and execution, reduce friction between teammates, increase motivation, and improve overall product direction. By involving the team in the input-gathering process and having open discussions during roadmap creation, teams can build a more cohesive and empowered group that is better equipped to drive business goals forward.

A well-designed welcome page is crucial for new users, as it's during this critical time that they'll decide if an application or SaaS product meets their expectations. A successful welcome page should reflect the brand, lay the foundation for customer success, and reassure users about their product decision. It can be personalized using data collected at signup, made interactive to encourage user engagement, offer sample content for a quick start, and provide easy access to support. By taking a fresh look at your welcome page, you can improve engagement from new users and show them how the app delivers on its promises.

Upgrading Elasticsearch without downtime was a challenging task at Intercom, but the company's focus on shipping great product at high velocity and empowering product teams to utilize their infrastructure services drove the decision to centralize this effort. With 54 releases between versions 2.3.3 and 6.3.0, the upgrade required careful planning and execution. The team used a two-step process, first upgrading from 2.3.3 to 5.6.9 and then from 5.6.9 to 6.3.0, which involved setting up dual writing and reading, taking snapshots, and restoring them into new temporary indexes. After verifying the stability of the new cluster, the team switched over for real and turned off dual writing, deleting all documents with the "Deleted" field set to true. The upgrade resulted in significant performance improvements, including a 50% reduction in average indexing and search latency, a 40% reduction in average CPU usage, faster restarts and recoveries with sequence IDs, and massive reductions in disk usage and costs. Today, Intercom has 10 Elasticsearch clusters running the latest version of Elasticsearch, still owned by individual teams but with a single team for cross-cutting concerns like major version upgrades.

The development team at Intercom rebuilt the company's homepage with a new content management system (CMS). The new design reflects the company's brand direction and features a new architecture that enables the marketing team to create pages from scratch. This change has had a significant impact on the engineering effort, allowing authors to make changes with confidence and edit the site without worrying about breaking it for customers. The project highlights the importance of considering the business implications of a marketing website and the need for careful planning and execution.

Product managers need to be attentive listeners, filtering signals amidst noise, to build strategic direction and make calculated tradeoffs for the product roadmap. Sales and marketing teams are valuable sources of inputs into the roadmap, providing raw insight into customers, market trends, and products. By aligning with their sales and marketing teams, product managers can leverage each other's strengths and tap into their insights to inform the roadmap. This includes analyzing conversations in tools like Intercom, evaluating closed won and lost deals in Salesforce, and studying email threads in Salesloft. A strong partnership between product managers and sales and marketing teams is key to success, requiring empathy, collaboration, and a clear process for sharing insights. By doing so, product managers can create an accurately prioritized roadmap and achieve product success.

The text discusses the challenges of career development for product managers (PMs) due to the subjective nature of their work, which makes it difficult to evaluate performance and provide clear guidance on career progression. Career ladders are proposed as a solution to address this issue by providing a framework for defining expected skills and attributes for each level of PM, making it easier to do fair and consistent performance reviews. The authors share their own approach to creating a career ladder, which includes five skill areas (insights-driven, strategy, execution, driving outcomes, and leadership behaviors), and provide highlights of their thinking for each area. They also mention the importance of ensuring that the ladder is informed by real-world experience rather than theory. Ultimately, the goal is to help PMs navigate their career path in a clear and structured way, providing inspiration for other organizations to create their own career ladders.