Support Knows the Product Best (and How to Make Engineers Know It Too)
A good SaaS Support team will actually know the details and quirks of the product better than the engineers who actually built it, in many cases.
One reason is that engineers typically build something and move on, but Support teams deal with it ongoing.
I think this is to be expected and is the sign of a good Support team. Our Eng team sometimes asks Support questions about how some detail of our product actually works, despite being able to read the code directly.
(Alternatively, we’ve all also interacted with clueless Support teams where you wish you had direct Eng access instead. Don’t let that be your company!)
But we do some things to try to avoid engineers just shipping code and moving on:
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“Warranty period.” For a couple months after shipping, the engineer who built a thing still deals with any problem that comes up, bypassing the typical bug triage.
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Dogfooding. Engineers “dogfood” our product as much as possible to encounter problems that can only be discovered through real-world usage. (In our case, looking up customers in CRM when dealing with customer issues, and also using our product as a recruiting ATS.)
Despite all best efforts, our team shipping countless bug fixes, etc... I still almost never can use our product in a "real" setting for even a couple minutes without finding previously unknown/unreported bugs. #dogfooding is like a 🧲 magnet for finding bugs.
The problem with dogfooding your own web app for real tasks is that you can't get simple things done without running into bugs that need to be logged/fixed. I mean, I know the point of dogfooding is to discover problems like this. But still always 😩
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Support rotations. Finally, we’ve done rotations where engineers occasionally handle Support cases directly, or will join a Customer Success call to learn more about specific problems customers are running into.
This was originally posted as a Twitter thread in April 2020.