February 2022 Summaries

A customer acquisition strategy is crucial for businesses to survive and thrive. It involves creating a set plan to generate demand, spend resources on efforts, and convert visitors into paying customers. Customer acquisition is the process of bringing in new customers through various activities such as paid and organic marketing strategies. Paid strategies include methods like PPC ads, display ads, affiliate marketing, referrals, promoted social media, and others, which involve investing money to attract potential customers. Organic strategies, on the other hand, cost nothing but require time and effort, including content marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, social media marketing, and events. To determine the effectiveness of a customer acquisition strategy, businesses need to calculate their customer acquisition cost (CAC) and optimize investments accordingly. With the right strategy in place, businesses can acquire more customers with cost-effective marketing strategies, ultimately driving long-term business growth.

At Intercom, security is a top priority, with the InfoSec team protecting customer data and trust. The team has invested heavily in security assurance to foster and safeguard customers' trust, achieving SOC2 Type II and HIPAA attestation reports, and ISO27001 certification. To meet the needs of growing mid-market and enterprise customers, Intercom's InfoSec team focuses on investing in your trust through compliance with industry security standards, shipping quickly and securely, continuous risk management, and hiring talented individuals to join the Information Security team. The team is embedded within the R&D org, allowing for close proximity to risk while retaining company-wide visibility and impact. Intercom's approach to security is fundamentally risk-based and relies heavily on a continuous internal security risk management process to evolve. The team also prioritizes education, enabling, and empowering people across the company to protect Intercom's ability to move fast and securely. With a focus on cultivating Intercom talent to overcome the InfoSec skills shortage, the team takes an alternative approach of investing in internal transfers and early growth mindsets to navigate the InfoSec learning curve. As Intercom grows and evolves, the InfoSec team will continue to foster and safeguard customers' trust by addressing emerging security challenges and building robust security controls within the product.

We learned that starting fast, despite the scale of the project, was crucial for figuring out unknowns and finding solutions. Employing speed and hustle helped us to move forward, even if it meant allowing ourselves to fail in order to gain valuable learnings. Our engineering principles, such as "Be technically conservative" and "Keep it simple", also played a significant role in keeping the project moving fast. We bent the rules when necessary to allow flexibility around planning processes and team structures, kept work as local as possible to minimize disruptions, and kept timelines flexible to accommodate changes and unexpected challenges. These lessons learned will help us keep moving faster as we continue to expand Intercom globally.

Intercom's product principles are a set of fundamental truths that serve as the foundation for behaviors that give Intercom its desired results. These principles guide teams in making good work together, and are not just for onboarding new hires but also help repeat successes and avoid mistakes. The company values principles over process, believing that understanding the intent behind the process allows for more freedom in execution. Great principles are not truisms, but rather guiding ideas that hold up when flipped around. Intercom's R&D principles focus on starting with problems, thinking big, and delivering outcomes, while product design principles emphasize connected systems and opinionated design, and engineering principles prioritize shaping solutions and keeping it simple. By sharing these principles, Intercom hopes to demonstrate their value and help others shape their own.

Transforming how you share your work is crucial for avoiding bottlenecks and silos in projects. By adopting the film industry's publicity playbook, which includes stages such as concept gathering, project outlining, casting, filming, editing, advertising, screening, movie premier, film reviews, and building a franchise, you can increase business impact and reduce duplication of effort. This process involves sharing your work with relevant stakeholders at each stage to gather feedback, build excitement, and create a sense of community around the project. By applying this model, teams can maximize staying power, maintain momentum, and ultimately drive success in their projects.