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Devs too good to shadow the support personnel, which are the frontline of the product they build, aren’t welcome on my team. We build high quality products, an

by rblatz 6y ago

Devs too good to shadow the support personnel, which are the frontline of the product they build, aren’t welcome on my team. We build high quality products, and we do that by caring about the customer experience. Both support and consumers are our customer.

necovek 6y ago
It's not about ego: I love learning about customer problems, and hearing their stories about how they use "my" product. I love it more when I am building that product. With such a competitive market (software developers), don't be surprised if my motivation is a bit lacking when I've got to respond to a bunch of people asking questions unrelated to the product.
- bArray 6y ago
  > With such a competitive market (software developers), > don't be surprised if my motivation is a bit lacking when > I've got to respond to a bunch of people asking questions > unrelated to the product. I did suggest some kind of filtering where more technical questions could be passed on to developers. You would also expect the completely unrelated questions to be filtered. But don't underestimate the power of the experience, if you've got 100 support tickets asking where the 'login' button is, maybe you'll be motivated to label it clearly with the word 'login' and not some icon that requires interpretation. If you think about it, the power of agile development has really come from being more customer requirements focused, with quick rounds of feedback and review on deliverables and milestones. If you abstract the developers away from the feedback, how on earth can you expect them to make a decent end result?
unionpivo 6y ago
That's good, and I always prefer buy such product, but it's getting harder and harder to find them. I think you are giving tp-link too much credit, that they want to build good devices. Most products (including pretty much everything tp-link has) are mass market garbage, where the goal is to throw as many of them over the wall and hope some stick (and then milk the ones that stick). By the time you buy device, developers are already working on next one. They only address issues that blow out. Customer service in such cases is just minimum necessary that they can get away with. They are there more as damage control rather than actually helping users. If they can have a choice of cheaper customers support (and development time), or better one, they will pick cheaper one 100% of time.

by rblatz 6y ago

necovek 6y ago

It's not about ego: I love learning about customer problems, and hearing their stories about how they use "my" product. I love it more when I am building that product. With such a competitive market (software developers), don't be surprised if my motivation is a bit lacking when I've got to respond to a bunch of people asking questions unrelated to the product.

bArray 6y ago
> With such a competitive market (software developers), > don't be surprised if my motivation is a bit lacking when > I've got to respond to a bunch of people asking questions > unrelated to the product. I did suggest some kind of filtering where more technical questions could be passed on to developers. You would also expect the completely unrelated questions to be filtered. But don't underestimate the power of the experience, if you've got 100 support tickets asking where the 'login' button is, maybe you'll be motivated to label it clearly with the word 'login' and not some icon that requires interpretation. If you think about it, the power of agile development has really come from being more customer requirements focused, with quick rounds of feedback and review on deliverables and milestones. If you abstract the developers away from the feedback, how on earth can you expect them to make a decent end result?

unionpivo 6y ago

That's good, and I always prefer buy such product, but it's getting harder and harder to find them. I think you are giving tp-link too much credit, that they want to build good devices. Most products (including pretty much everything tp-link has) are mass market garbage, where the goal is to throw as many of them over the wall and hope some stick (and then milk the ones that stick). By the time you buy device, developers are already working on next one. They only address issues that blow out. Customer service in such cases is just minimum necessary that they can get away with. They are there more as damage control rather than actually helping users. If they can have a choice of cheaper customers support (and development time), or better one, they will pick cheaper one 100% of time.