November 2022 Summaries

Knock is a platform designed to enhance notification experiences by providing tools for engineering and product teams, with a particular focus on crafting an effective onboarding process that quickly immerses new users. The company emphasizes a self-service approach, allowing users such as developers and product managers to independently explore Knock's offerings, which requires a robust onboarding flow capable of addressing user questions preemptively. The onboarding strategy is centered on guiding users to a "magic moment"—sending their first notification—through a streamlined, context-driven process that integrates both in-app and out-of-app resources. The onboarding flow is designed with focus and discipline, featuring a clear progression and easy navigation back to onboarding materials, inspired by practices from companies like Stripe and Shopify. Knock's strategy also incorporates external elements such as sign-up flows, invitation emails, passwordless authentication, and welcome notifications to ensure users find value and remain engaged. This comprehensive approach not only accelerates user engagement but also provides crucial feedback for product improvement.

Knock enhances team communication by efficiently managing notifications, with a key feature being the ability to batch multiple notifications into a single, timely message. This batching process involves creating variables that summarize the batch, such as item count and unique user count, and providing an array of the first ten items for detailed information. A customer request led to a challenge of providing the last ten activities instead, which was tackled using advanced SQL window functions in Postgres. The solution involved using CASE statements within ORDER BY clauses to selectively sort data either in ascending or descending order based on user settings, thus allowing different ordering for different batches within a single query. This approach, though slightly more complex and costly in terms of query performance, ultimately resulted in more maintainable and understandable code, showcasing how SQL's flexibility can be harnessed to meet specific business needs.