Engineering All Hands Support

olark.com

9 points·bcx··4 comments

We do all hands support at Buffer as well. At first it started out as to help maintain the inbox, especially during launch days, which was always fun. We quickly realized how important this is. So much of our product decisions, bug fixes and security patches have come from talking first hand to our customers.

I really love this because it's been an opportunity for me to help others and also learn about different areas of our product that I may not deal with on a daily basis. We've started having a support focus be part of the engineering on-boarding process.

We've recently gone to an all hands day rotating system which has been working well. I'm curious what others do. Do you do more a free-for-all, or do you have a more structured system?

We are up to 27 people now, so for us it's super important to have everything scheduled and organized. We have shifts and a shift switch board, that let's us switch shifts when people are going on vacation, or have other items in their schedule.

I know Wufoo started off pretty informal, and their formalized support rotation was largely in reaction to not everyone pulling their weight. In my experience it's really important to formalize things so that everyone is pitching in, and it's not just up to a few people to volunteer.

We do all hands support at Aarki for our rich media product. We have the support tab located inside the dashboard of our product.

It's really helped out product team discover pain points of customers and find usability issues.

With only one person on support, that person tends to filter information to the team. This is a great working strategy.

There's a bigger writeup from Olark that was recently posted on HN, with some good comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599765

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