July 2019 Summaries

The concept of confidence is often misunderstood as being solely about self-perception, but it's more complex than that. Confidence in the workplace is crucial for overcoming uncertainty and dealing with new challenges, but traditional definitions of confidence can be limiting, especially when faced with unfamiliar areas or tasks. A healthy dose of self-esteem is essential for success, but it's not just about being certain of one's abilities; it's also about taking action despite fear of failure. Building confidence requires a mindset shift, where individuals focus on their ability to try without worrying about outcome, and recognize that success or failure is just a temporary state. This personal definition of confidence emphasizes the importance of persistence, self-worth, and the mentality of taking things in one's own hands.

Sales forecasting is a crucial tool for businesses to predict future revenue and make informed decisions about their sales strategy. It allows companies to identify potential blockers, course-correct when necessary, and proactively influence deals to achieve desired outcomes. A well-implemented sales forecast requires cooperation from the entire sales team, visibility into the sales pipeline, and clear line of sight into deal stages and likelihoods of closure. By using a combination of data-driven approaches such as category forecasting, historical forecasting, opportunity stage forecasting, and pipeline forecasting, businesses can create accurate forecasts that drive growth through identifying deals that need immediate action, spotting effective and ineffective sales tactics, establishing the impact of new processes and tools, and continuously qualifying sales opportunities. Additionally, integrating all sales tools and creating deep integrations between them is essential for ensuring data accuracy and seamless flow across different platforms. By implementing rigorous sales forecasting, businesses can project future revenue, drive growth through swift action on deals, invest in effective sales tactics, and capitalize on new opportunities for expansion.

When gearing up for a big product launch, creating help content is often overlooked. New products raise new questions, and having supported countless product launches, it's clear that customer support teams dread the increased volume of mostly repetitive queries. Help content empowers customers to get started with new features and see the value in them, reducing the volume of questions that support teams receive. By assembling a collection of articles based on existing product documentation, such as summaries of features, design specs, product demos, and beta feedback, help content can be shared with customer support teams before launch day, enabling them to focus on more complex problems and providing customers with faster answers to simple queries. This leads to less work for support teams, a smoother experience for customers, and a better chance that new features are adopted.

Intercom, a software company, realized the need to improve their incident response process after a complicated and long-running incident. They defined different stages of an incident, including identification, triage, communication, and resolution, with clear guidelines for escalating incidents from P1 to P0 based on severity. They also established formalized roles such as Incident Commander and Business Lead to ensure clear communication and accountability. Key principles were defined to guide decision-making during incidents, including doing one thing at a time, trying the easy stuff first, and wrapping things up quickly. The company created training videos and documentation for incident management to ensure a smooth process, tested their processes with scenarios and real-life events, and invested in continuous improvement to handle larger and more serious incidents.

Today Intercom is launching three new features to help businesses scale their support: Articles Pro, a multilingual knowledge base; Custom Bots, which can automatically triage customer issues for faster resolutions; and powerful Inbox workflows with SLAs and workload management to deliver consistent support at scale. These updates aim to address the challenges of supporting growing businesses on a global scale, providing fast, personal support in multiple languages and across time zones.

The AIDA model, created by E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898, describes the four cognitive phases that buyers follow when accepting a new idea or purchasing a product: attention to a problem, interest in benefits, decision to buy, and action to complete the purchase. However, this model was originally designed for pre-digital products, whereas today, digital products often require little or no purchase commitment from the buyer, offering free trials, minimal month-to-month commitments, or being completely free. As a result, the first use experience has evolved into A-I-A-D, where users take action to sign up for a product before making a decision to buy it. To convince early-in-the-process buyers to stay beyond their first use, the first use flow should help them experience the value of the product while asking very little in return. This requires focusing on the job customers want to do, showing rather than telling, and removing all non-essential steps. The goal is to provide maximum value with minimal effort, creating a compelling tour of a new and better world that helps users quickly understand, visualize, and experience the benefits of the product.

The Intercom Messenger is a modern react.js app with many components, third-party libraries, and stylesheets. To optimize its bundle size, Intercom embarked on an effort to reduce the size of the bundle by 65%. The steps taken included splitting out vendor packages into a separate bundle, which reduced the size from around 600kb to approximately 240kb. This change was made possible by using webpack bundler features and optimizing code duplication and rarely executed code. Additionally, refactoring the stylesheet by introducing a CSS-in-JS approach with Emotion library reduced the size of the bundle. The changes resulted in a faster Messenger experience for customers, shaving off up to five seconds of loading time on mobile devices. According to Google Lighthouse, the site now has a score of 100, up from the previous score of 59.

The world of product design is shifting with the emergence of "best of breed" apps, which are mixing decades-old ideas with modern UI patterns to create innovative solutions for specific market segments. These products are pushing out new ideas with speed and confidence, often targeting a niche audience that values exceptional user experience and efficiency. By focusing on a specific use case and leveraging existing design patterns, these best of breed products can carve off a significant slice of the large existing market. The Canon Cat computer is cited as an early example of this concept, which was initially met with limited commercial success but has since become a model for innovative product design. With the economics of modern software development more efficient than ever, it's an exciting time for product design innovation, and companies like Intercom are hiring to continue pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Automating repetitive, non-value-added tasks in the sales process can help sales teams free up more time for high-touch, revenue-generating activities. By identifying opportunities for automation through tools like Intercom's Custom Bots, Salesforce, Clearbit, LeanData, SalesLoft and Tray.io, companies can streamline their sales workflows, reduce manual data entry and improve the overall efficiency of their sales operations. This enables sales reps to focus on personalized outreach, demos, negotiations, and building meaningful relationships with prospects, ultimately leading to faster sales cycles and increased revenue.