Support driven development
How we use client feedback to shape and extend our service offering.
I wear many hats at fortrabbit. I do most 1st level customer support and I am also product owner. These two roles go together well, since I have a direct channel to what developers are expecting from us.
Exchanging with our clients not only helps to uncover bugs and UI quirks. We also learn how they see our platform. And that is often a brutral truth. Some of our features build with best intentions are not well received. The customer is always right with some string attached. 'Customer support driven development' is not a new concept of course, this is how we practice it.
Support meetings
We have rotating support shifts. Everyone in the team needs to do at least a bit of support. Once a week, we do a support meeting to reflect on recent cases. Personal bias: I will likely cherry pick customer cases that are supporting my vision. Support meetings help to exchange on how we perceive the feedback. Feature requests may be added to already existing tickets in the backlog, or we create new tickets. We let update clients on their requests even after longer periods of silence.
Noise to signal
Customer input helps us to validate our work on the new platform in the making. Picking the right signal and turning it into functionality is not an easy task. Most ideas will be dismissed, we need to say 'no'.
Generalization VS specialization: Customers present us with their problems and requirements. Our job is to figure if implementing a specific idea will support more might be of general interest.
It's easy to take customer feedback too literal. Often customers request faster horses. But our job is to build a car. We need to think ahead, outside of specific constrains.
A common request is yearly upfront payments. We however have pro-rated billing after usage (not upfront), which supports making experimenting with different hosting setups and scaling easily. So we need to keep educating customers about the benefits of such a system.
Supportive clients
We are grateful to have such awesome clients who are really invested in our platform and are helping us to uncover potential.