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Interesting read, but… Specifics? "Hope and teamwork" was all it took to get on top of a crushing backlog of support requests? Sounds like a fairytale…

• adrianhoward 11y ago
  Doesn't sound like a fairytale to me. It's been my general experience that startups, especially startups built by dev-focussed folk, tend to radically underestimate the impact of people issues (moral, amount of sleep, work/life balance, etc.) on their effectiveness of their business. In fact I saw almost exactly this story, but with dev rather than support. Going from _perception_ of their being an ever growing list of new features, massive overtime, general feeling of being overwhelmed. To showing that folk were actually getting on top of things with numbers. To some scope adjustment so we could make the hours sane. The team getting happier, and faster at every step.
  • nathanbarry 11y ago
    Thanks for sharing this. It's exactly as you said: we were getting bogged down because the work felt impossible. That was affecting the attitude and productivity of the entire team. It's amazing how much more you can do when it feels possible. The other thing is we had focused our entire 5 person dev team on helping support with bug fixes and help text / documentation for common problems. That took a while to kick in and lower the support load, but it's definitely helped!
• biot 11y ago
  It wasn't a crushing backlog in the sense that the number of outstanding tickets was increasing. Rather, the backlog was at a steady 250 even when they were adding new customers every month. All it takes for a team of people to get through 250 tickets (and completely eliminate the backlog) is to care enough to put in a concerted effort and clear them out. Makes complete sense to me that such an effort can happen in a single day.
• manigandham 11y ago
  It seems vague but the last sentence describes the reality: discipline. You can solve a lot of problems through better time management, more efficient processes and improved focus.