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Management Story

Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

More Management based story (kinda weaksauce):​

Situation:​

  • A new deploy system was being created. Diverse perspectives were sought out to make the product better.
  • The old deploy system was showing signs of age - it was built before K8s was widely adopted, and hadn't been updated in a long time. It was built on top of various products like Jenkins which had other issues. It was also bulit for smaller scale and simpler times. There have been many requests for new features, and it was time to completely overhaul the FE experience.

Task:​

  • Gather perspectives on what users want in the new deploy system.

Action:​

  • Started by started making a document for interview questions.
  • Collaborate with others on this document to decide on which questions to ask. The interviews will also be recorded for others to analyze.
  • Work with UI specialists on both the interview process and interviews themselves. These people were experienced in conducting useability interviews so they had valuable insights. They knew how to lead people without giving them all the answers, and how to phrase questions around what is important and defineable rather than more ambiguous ones.
  • The actual interviewees were reached out to in various ways, through slack, email, and w-o-m. Some didn't respond, and some took following up, but in the end an effective cross-section of the user population was gathered. In addition to "user-population-APIs", usage logs of other tools were utilized to see who would be good to reach out to (audit logs, specific actions, etc.)

Result:​

  • Note engineers, and especially infrastructure engineers, are very different customers from product engineers, or consumers.
  • When the product was done, users found it to be a great experience, with over 90 NPS score.
  • Note that other projects also were also improved with this process - everytime there are useability studies everyone wins.

Reflection:​

  • Relationships are important - the stronger the network, the better the feedback sessions will be, because people will prioritize your product's research over potential other tasks, and also will have higher trust which will lead to more comfortable feedback.
  • In the future, there could be better bifurcation between roles and interests to make sure we are getting the full picture of users. Sometimes its hard to divide - is this engineer a service engineer? ops? reliability? automation? test? product? What does product even mean in this context?
  • It would be interesting to look at other useability interviews throughout the history of the company and other products.

5 Whys:​

  • uwu

Q&A:​

  • uwu