My CX Content Roundup: 2020 Edition

2020 was the year that time forgot, mostly. Luckily for me, the amount of writing that I contributed to amazing sources this year will make it difficult to forget. I’m fortunate to work with some of the best names in the biz contributing my thought leadership on all things customer experience, customer success and support.

In total, I wrote close to one hundred pieces this year. Below are the ones that I wrote and published under my own name, and the companies that I published them with. Great thanks to Nicereply, Jitbit, Qwilr, Front App, Partner Hero, TextExpander and Digital Genius for allowing me to contribute to your online presence, and thanks so much to the many others that allowed me the opportunity to ghostwrite for them as well. Huge thanks, also to Sarah Chambers of Supported Content, with whom I’ve worked for many years and without whom none of this would be possible.

Nicereply

My favorite posts for Nicereply this year were, likely, my content on journey mapping, identifying personas and target markets for customer experience teams and, of course, my post about championing anti-racism work in CX.

• 25 Stats that Prove the Value of CX in 2021

• Rejecting Applicants: A Template for the Perfect Rejection Letter

• Horror Complaints by Customers: When Good Requests Go Bad

• Tackling Annual Planning for CX Teams

• Hiring People for Your CX Team: 7 Experts’ Advice to Choose the Right Folks

• How and Why To Define Your Target Market

• Using CSAT Scores for Better Cross-Functional CX Collaboration

• 5 Steps to Move from Reactive to Proactive Customer Support

• Why You Should Treat Your Support Job Like Your Yoga Practice

• Queue Fatigue and How to Stop It

• 4 Unique Career Paths in Customer Experience

• COVID & CSAT: Keeping customers happy during the pandemic

• Championing Anti-Racism Work Within Your CX Team

• 10 Tips to Improve Your Feature Request Responses

• 5 Ways to Use Customer Personas in Your CX Strategy

• 33 ESAT Questions to Ask Now That Everyone’s Working from Home

• 6 Ways to Communicate the Value of Your Support Team

• Keep Your Documentation Up-to-date with These 3 Tasks

• 9 Places to Look for Your New Dream Job

• The 5 Professional Love Languages ​​to Improve Your Team’s Connection

• 6 Ways to Be a Better Person & Manager

• 5 Reasons Why You Should Stick with Email Support

• Why You Should Hire Retail or Food Service Workers For CX Work

• 4 Ways To Be Humble in Your Day-to-Day

• How to Set Yourself up for Success on Your Parental Leave

• There’s No Such Thing as a Perfect Journey Map

TextExpander

I use TextExpander almost religiously, so I feel ultra-privileged to have been able to write for their blog. I loved the work that I did creating templates for CX teams to use for chat, email onboarding, complaint responses, and phrasing in general.

• How to Gather Customer Insights to Improve Experience

• How Understanding the Customer Journey Leads to Better Support

• 6 Tips for Writing Effective Onboarding Email Sequences

• Empathy is the Secret to Great Customer Support

• Creating Knowledge Base Content that is Indispensable

• How to Create a Customer-centric Culture

• The 30 Customer Service Scripts Your Team Needs for Chat

• Happy to Help! Plus 25 Other Customer Service Phrases That Work Like Magic

• Customer Service Chat: How Live Responses Meet Customer Expectations

• Save Time With These Must-Have Customer Service Email Templates

• 12 Great Examples of How To Respond to Customer Complaints

• 31 Customer Experience Tips to Delight and Drive Efficiency

• Deliver 5-Star Customer Experience with These 5 Tips

• 22 Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions to Assess Consistency

• 6 Observations about the Importance of Customer Service

• 4 Practical Ways to Use AI in Customer Experience Today

Qwilr

I loved putting on my sales hat and writing for Qwilr this year! I find many of the strategies in sales to be similar to those that we use in customer success—like different limbs on the same body. I started my career in tech working for Apple Retail, so this felt like a good call back to that as well.

• How to deal when your prospect wants a discount

• 8 creative ways to find B2B sales leads

• Three top tips for women in sales

• 3 interesting ways to use surveys for sales discovery

• 7 unique ways to find your decision maker

• 9 traits to look for in your next sales hire

• How to use buyer intent data to close more deals

• How to create a sales scorecard

• 10 common sales interview questions and answers to get you hired

• How to make the most out of your sales meetings

• 7 signs it’s time to move on from a prospect

• 5 ways to modernize your sales team

• 6 hidden issues that could sidetrack your deal, and how to overcome them

Front App

I so appreciated the opportunity to flex a little bit of my rhetoric background in these two posts on communication for Front!

• The 14 best tips for effective communication with customers

• The 4 communication styles and how they impact customer communication

Digital Genius

A great example of SEO content that is actionable and helpful. I loved working on this piece about the product principle of the Iron Triangle, and how that related to support.

• The Iron Triangle of Customer Service: Speed, Quality, and Cost

Partner Hero

The folks over at Partner Hero and I collaborated at the start of the pandemic to synthesize some of their learnings into digestible, useful anecdotes for other teams looking to weather the storm.

• CX Lessons Learned during the Pandemic

• Trends by Tech Sector During the Pandemic

Jitbit

I got back to my roots with these customer support and service blog posts for Jitbit!

• 5 Ways to Define Helpdesk Ticket Priority Levels

• 5 Excellent Strategies that use Helpdesk Automation

• Writing a Helpdesk Job Description

Let’s work together

While I do almost all of my writing through Supported Content (so reach out to Sarah if you have marketing or content needs!), I do work as a consultant, mentor, and coach in the CX space. My experience, when it comes to CX and leadership, is pretty boundless, and I can lend insights whether you’re looking to get started with employee number 1, or you’re trying to grow through an acquisition. I really love figuring out processes, data and reporting structures, mentoring leaders, and helping companies understand how to scale their teams.

Reach out today if you’re looking for your next steps towards customer experience excellence. I’d love to help.

It's All Your Fault: Managing, Firing & How You Can Do Better

Hello, my name is Mercer and I am a manager. I always thought that I would be the type of manager that never fired anybody. I always thought that I would be able to coach even the baddest of bad apples back to righteousness. Unfortunately, that is not the case and I’ve had to fire several people over the past few years. If you are just a fresh-faced new manager, or you have yet to fire someone, I regret to inform you that it is coming. I also regret to inform you that it will always, at least partially, be your fault. Some good news, though: over my series of unfortunate firing events over the past few years, I’ve done a lot of soul-searching and digging to figure out how to try to avoid these things as best I can, and now I’ve compiled them here for you.

Performance-Related Firing

Imagine that you are watching one of your employees and consistently, day in and day out, they are not doing as much work as your other employees, or even meeting the standard of what you expect your employees to be doing. While there’s a lot that comes between that noticing, and the actual firing, that is a performance-related issue.

What is it?

This one is definitely one of the more tricky ways to run into firing someone because it isn’t always clear-cut as to whether there is an issue or not. Unless you have put defined metrics in place, you might not even have a way to tell that employee that they need to do better.

That being said, you can almost always get a sense of poor performance within the first few months of an employee’s tenure with a company but maybe you, like me (the first time), make the excuse that they’re still fresh and you should cut them a little bit of slack. This firing is your fault.

What can you do better?

There are so many things that you can put in place to ensure that your employees thrive and do well at your company. If you haven’t done so already, you can use your first firing as an example of all of the things that you need to improve. But, beyond that, here are a few things that I learned about and could have done better for my first performance-related firing.

• Interviewed better and checked references: while my first performance-based firing was not someone that I hired, I took the opportunity to learn a bit more about interviewing and checking references. When interviewing, ask questions about their performance in the past, and when they mention disagreements with leadership around performance or moving in the right direction with the team take heed. Similarly, instead of reaching out to the direct references provided by the employee, take a look on LinkedIn and see if the two of you have mutual connections. If you do, maybe reach out to them as well.

• Created 30/60/90 check-ins with my employees: Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but prior to this firing, my team did not have any regular check-ins about performance, even in the first 90 days. Tracking metrics and letting people know what’s important from the get-go is a great way to engrain your culture into your employees and let them know what to expect for performance and how you’re tracking it. If you don’t already have a training program like this, please make one.

• Be more diligent about hard performance conversations as they happen: For a long time, I thought it was better to be liked by my employees than respected. I wanted them to come to me and talk to me about anything they needed to. While there is certainly a place for that, as a manager it is important to be able to have hard conversations, specifically around performance and what can be done better. Practice having these conversations clearly and concisely and making sure they are documented. This is super important if you have to fire someone but also makes it much easier for the person being fired to understand what is going on.

• Performance Improvement Plans (PIP)(sometimes): personally, I feel that performance improvement plans are just documented ways for large companies to shift employees out the door. That being said, I have seen them done well and work. If you need to implement a performance improvement plan, do so with a defined date of the end of the plan and easily measurable metrics that you track each week up until the date. If you lack either of those things, it is immensely unfair to your employee.

• Moved more quickly: I knew that things weren't going well and that we were likely going to have to terminate the first person that I fired, but I didn’t want to do it and I was worried that I was making the wrong choice. I felt guilty for having to fire someone and felt like I had failed them as a person. That being said, the pain that I caused by drawing out the experience was probably immeasurably more than I would have caused if I had fired the employee the moment that I realized that it wasn’t working. While it can feel cruel to take action so quickly, ultimately it’s better for both the employee and the company: the employee is able to move on and find another job and so is the company.

How can you handle it?

If you notice that someone’s performance has taken a huge dip and you are thinking that you might have to fire them, there are a few different things that you can do. If your company already has a PIP process in place, and you think that it might help your employee because they are not far enough along their downward slope, try that. If you’re just starting fresh, 30/60/90 day reviews are excellent for beginning employees—set goals and conversation points for every month of the first three months of a person’s tenure with your company. This allows both you and them to know what’s coming, know what to expect, and have a straight-forward rubric that you can use with every incoming employee.

If a firing is a surprise, you’ve certainly done something wrong. So, the second thing is to make sure that both you and your employees get really clear on what metrics are important and how they are measured. If you do not yet have a standardized way of measuring your metrics, create one and document it so that your employees are also able to pull metrics on their own. Having this kind of transparency will greatly help you and everyone on your team know where they stand in terms of performance.

Culture-related Firing

Sometimes you hire people who you think will be a great fit for your team and company culture. They hit all the prerequisites, they look great on paper, and they charm your interviewing team. So, you decide to hire them. Once you do, whether they are remote or in person, there’s usually a few weeks of buffer period between when you hire them and when the problem behavior starts, but sometimes it can happen right away. Here are some examples of what “problem behavior” can mean:

• Making inappropriate comments towards other employees

• Taking things from other’s desks or from the office that don’t belong to them

• Not attending mandatory meetings or showing up on time

• Excessive disclosure of personal details to other employees

• Other culturally-set expectations or issues that are company specific.

While I call it cultural-based firing, it could also be considered sexual harassment, or disrespecting the boundaries of people that work with the offender, depending on who you work with and the extremity of the situation. Sometimes this involves people within the company, sometimes it involves people without, but the one thing that remains the same through all of it is that it affects the culture of the office and the people within, both remote or otherwise.

How could you have done better?

As a manager, it is your job to sniff out any potential issues that might come up with people you bring on to your team. You are there to protect and gatekeep your team from potential issues, and also take action should anything start to arise. While it can be very difficult to uncover things like propensity towards sexual harassment in an interview, you as the manager can catch things before or as they are happening between your employees and put a stop to them. If you don’t then any potential issues that stem from them are your fault or are at least something that you could have helped to avoid.

How do you handle it?

If you have had a few issues with employees not respecting boundaries or other employees, or even having to get HR involved for boundary issues, you likely need to start putting things in place to ensure that you can stop these behaviors in the future. The first time to do that is during the interview process. Create some interview questions with your team that you think will help nail down some of the deeper cultural issues that you are sensing. Inc has a great list of twenty that might help you get your creative juices flowing if you’re struggling to get started on your own. Beyond sniffing out issues in the interview process, you can also become extra vigilant once you hire people.

If you are hiring individuals remotely, have them come into the office during their first month so that they can see how in-office culture works. If you are not hiring individuals remotely, watch how they perform within the first few weeks of their tenure with the company and if their personality shifts from who they were like when you hired them. These are both great ways to save yourself and your employees the potential headaches of either dealing with a culturally inappropriate issue or being affected by a culturally inappropriate issue.

Conclusion

While it may seem harsh to say that it is almost always the manager’s fault when an employee gets fired, it’s true. There is almost always something that could have been done better or more carefully or a process that could have been put in place to save the employee from either being hired in the first place or being fired. It is the manager’s job to notice these things and make shifts moving forward to avoid the same mistakes twice. Take the examples and tips above and implement them within your own company for a better, safer experience for your team and any new employees you bring onboard.

Your Happiness is in Another Castle: 5 Ways to Find your Way when Everything Seems Blocked

I’m just going to preface this by saying that I honestly don’t think anyone is an expert at this stuff. You know why Tony Robbins is a GOOD life coach? It's not because of his millions of dollars, and it's certainly not because he has his shit together - I assure you that none of us do. It's because he's able to talk about his own experiences in a really compelling way. That’s all that we, as humans, really have: our shared experiences and how we talk about them. That’s my first piece of wisdom: how you talk about yourself and what you do is incredibly important. So, start thinking about that. 

Anyway, I’m hopeful that I can share my experience of entirely flipping my life around, and intersperse a few bits of eloquent wisdom enough to make you feel like maybe you’re not so alone in the journey. I hope that I can help you fear less by teaching yourself about the things that are inside of you through the mirror of my own experience.

I’ve done a whole heck of a lot in the years leading up, but in the past three years I have: switched career paths again (partially, I started teaching yoga and flipped my entire life perspective upside down), had a baby, moved across the country to a place where I have no family for a job, left that job for another one (back where I moved from, ironically), and started the process for separating from my husband. Most of those actually occurred within the past year. I guess I am the type of person that thrives in chaos.

There were many times during all of those decisions where I was worried that I’d gone the wrong way. That things would never get better. That I would never feel as good as I had felt before when I was comfortable and safe. I spent hours berating myself for always picking the hard path and always thinking that the grass was greener on the other side. Like in the Mario games, my princess, or in this case my happiness was always in another castle. Or, at least it felt that way. And it felt stuck. Well, here are some tried and true ways that I’ve found to get around that stuck feeling and basically slingshot myself towards a more joyful, more grounded existence.

Do what makes you say fuck yeah!

I credit Mark Manson with this phrase, but it’s one that I use in my everyday life now. If you haven’t read his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, you probably should. Originally it was made for dating, but I’ve applied the philosophy to every part of my life to great effect.

Anyway, if you’re feeling stuck and like you need a change or you aren’t sure where to go, orient yourself towards the things that make you say fuck yeah.

For me, this looked like yoga teacher training. I started practicing yoga in high school as a way to get out of having to do “actual” work for PE, and had always had a pretty basic practice at best. When I started working remotely for the first time ever for an Australian company in the dead of winter in Boston, I had a depression cocktail of epic proportions: seasonal depression due to the perpetually grey skies, the transition of switching from going into a social office to staying alone at home, and a majority of my coworkers working in the opposite time-zone from me, so I didn’t even get to talk to them that much. I felt miserable and isolated, I had no direction and no hope. I felt stuck in just doing what I’d always done: slogging through it, waiting for something to happen to me, rather than making something happen.

But, I had to make something happen, so I followed my fuck yea: I threw myself into my yoga practice, and subsequently teacher training. I’d never thought I’d be a yoga teacher. On the first night of class, I looked around me and felt other. I didn’t look like them, I didn’t have as extensive a practice, I was wearing Harry Potter leggings, for crying out loud. The rest of them looked like something straight out of a Lululemon ad.

But what I did know is that teaching and taking yoga made me say fuck yeah. It gave me something that I was missing in my normal life, though at that point I didn’t quite know what. But, following my gut and following something that lit me up inside ended up changing my life for the infinite better, and getting me to a place where I can talk to you from today.

Once you’ve found something that makes you say “Fuck yeah,” I want you to go all in on it. Don’t listen to the people that are saying “but just three months ago the only exercise you got was eating tacos and watching Doctor Who.” Screw them. Also, sobbing to Doctor Who is FOR SURE cardio, and depending on how much Cholula you put on your tacos, you might be sweating. Soooo…

Throw yourself into learning

The next time I started to feel stuck and scared was when I was pregnant, or was talking about getting pregnant with my then-husband. I remember this conversation vividly. We’d been trying for a few months and arguing the whole time. I looked at him and said “I don’t think we should do this. I don’t think we’re ready. I don’t know that we can take care of a whole other little life if we can’t even communicate with each other about how to take care of us.” A week later, I found out I was pregnant.

Of course, I was excited and overjoyed, but there was still a little bit of me that felt like I was stuck in this new life that I wasn’t sure I was ready for. So, I leaned into it. Instead of sci-fi, I started reading parenting books. Instead of going to DnD meet-ups, I joined mom groups. I started Slack channels to talk with other parents and read about their experiences. I figured the more I knew about something the less scared I would be, and the better equipped I would be to make the right choice when it came to it.

I didn’t know if my partner and I would be good parents. But I also knew that I couldn’t control the actions of anyone else but myself. It wasn’t my job to make my partner be a good parent, just to make myself a good parent. And so, I threw myself into learning as much about that, and striving as much towards that as I possibly could. Spoiler alert: two years later and my little dude is doing a pretty great job, and my ex is an amazing, loving father.

When something scares you, or when you aren’t sure of what direction to go in, try to find as much information as you can about whatever you’re struggling with and move forward with that information. If you aren’t sure of what you’re scared of or what you’re stuck on, throw yourself into seeking something out. This can go hand-in-hand with the “fuck yea” point from above. It’s awful to not have direction, to be walking up against a wall and not sure how to climb it or get around it, but if you figure out what the wall is made of, how tall it is, and find out where the hand-holds are, you’ll be able to get up and around it in no time.

 Take the Leap

Sometimes opportunities will come up into your life that you will have some control over, but not much. This was the case with my opportunity to move to Texas. Jerry, my then-husband, and I had been thinking for a long time about moving to Austin. We’d been struggling with our relationship, and I hoped that being closer to his family and friends in Texas would help him to be a happier person with himself, and hence in our partnership. So, when Atlassian said they wanted to move me, with a 9 month old baby and my partner in tow from Boston to Austin, I said yes. I had a month to prepare and say goodbye. 

For a long time, I’d called Boston home, but said that I never actually felt attached to the city. As I got prepared to leave, I started to wonder (once again) if it was the right choice to leave—I realized that I loved the assholeishness of the city, I loved having the same restaurants near my house, I loved all of my students in my yoga classes and the friends that I’d finally made. But, I’d already committed to taking the jump, so the time was to plug my nose and shut my eyes and go for it.

Austin was sad at first. I was lonely without friends, it was hard being in an office after working remotely for four years. But, I started to love it. I have yoga students in Austin too. I have breakfast tacos in Austin. I had no winter in Austin, which was probably the best part of the whole thing, honestly. I wore Birkenstocks the whole first year I was there. But, despite loving where I lived, I had stopped loving the job that brought me there. I was sniffing around for something else to do when a full-time job with a company I’d been consulting for fell into my lap. Only problem: they wanted me to move back to Boston.

This is my dream, right? I thought? I’ve missed my friends and family. I’m homesick. Don’t I want to move back? But the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea. But I couldn’t just tell them “No,” right?

Actually, I could. And you can too. You are never obligated to tell anyone anything that you don’t really feel. While it can be scary to be totally honest, it can also be one of the most fulfilling things to do. So, with an anxious heart, I wrote up an email to the company declining their offer to move to Boston and telling them that, if they ever decided to open remote positions, I would be ready and able to accept. They came back saying that now wasn’t the right time…but then two months later they decided to extend me an offer as their first remote employee. Now, I get to have all of the benefits of living in Texas, while still seeing my friends family and loved ones in Boston once a quarter. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t been bold enough to take the first jump to moving to Texas and into the unknown as the first remote employee at a small start up.

Chances are, if you’re feeling stuck, there’s a jump—either big or small—to take into your life. Remember that by taking that courageous first leap, you’ve already won the battle towards control over your own life and happiness.

Talk to your friends

You never realize who your true friends are until you are going through a rough time. Trouble and sadness easily weed out the good from the bad. So, if ever you are having a hard time and find yourself frustrated with the lack of support that you have, recognize that maybe you’re not noticing some of the other places that it might be showing up.

When I first started thinking about divorcing my husband, it was four years ago. Every year since then, the thoughts have occurred, and I’ve just pushed down the feeling that something wasn’t right in favor of keeping with the status quo. I made excuses about my son needing to have both parents in the house to be happy. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to find another partner as a thirty year old single mom. And, so, I started talking to my friends about it—something that I’d never done before.

While of course they were there to tell me that being afraid of being single isn’t a good reason to do anything, they also were chock full of perception and support and shoulders for crying on. In fact, this incredibly trying time in my life opened my eyes to all of the amazing human beings that I did have in my life, that did support me and love me. I never would have realized or recognized how many people cared about me and loved me without it. I have been filled with gratitude every day, even though sometimes it seems like everything is falling apart.

Your friends are there for a reason. They will be willing to listen to you and talk to you about what’s going on in your head. Sometimes, you just have to talk to the duck in order to sort all of the stuff out—it’s not even a matter of them being smarter or better at life than you are. Lean on them to give you guidance and make sure that you’re sailing in the right direction. Also lean on them if you just wanna watch shitty tv and eat ice cream. The one thing I will say is: make sure that you let your friend know what you need. Sometimes you just need to vent, and that’s okay. Just let them know that you don’t expect them to fix anything and you don’t need anything other than an ear to talk to. Because they are your friends, their default mode might be to try to help you fix things, and it will be frustrating for both of you if that’s not what you were looking for. Try saying “I appreciate you trying to help, but I just need to vent right now. When I need help, I will tell you.” But if you do communicate your needs it helps to strengthen both of your bonds, and maybe even let them know that you’ll be there in the future if they need you. 

Break it down into small chunks

While I was going through the process of my separation, I kept feeling like I was gaslighting myself. I’d feel happy and wonder if it was really happy or just my bipolar mania acting up. If I felt sad, I would wonder if I was really sad, or if I just had a bad hangover, or slept poorly the night before. I was tired of feeling like I wasn’t in control over my feelings or myself, and I was tired of feeling guilty every morning for drinking the night before. I recognized that I was leaning on alcohol as a crutch to feel fewer of my feelings, and that I had been for a while.

Long story short, I went to a few AA meetings, and now I have three months sober. Which is pretty bonkers and amazing, and something that I didn’t really expect.

But, sobriety is not for everyone, and it isn’t what I am telling you that you need to do to get past the blocks in your life. The good thing that AA does for alcoholics is that it teaches you the principal of one day at a time. For example: I’m not trying to stop drinking forever, I’m just trying to stop drinking today. The idea of breaking things up into smaller more digestible pieces is so important when you feel like you’re staring down the barrel of a gun not knowing which way to go.

Whatever it is that you are perceiving as being in your way: identify it. Then, identify all of the things that you would need to do to overcome or accomplish it. Once you have those, pick one of them, and make that your goal for the next week, month, whatever. Break down that small tasks into even smaller tasks and set them with due dates. Of course, when you look at an incredibly beautiful layer cake you think to yourself “Wow, that’s beautiful. But I could never make something like that!” But you actually can if you just bake it piece by piece and follow the instructions. Make your own instructions and bake your own cake.

Get quiet

There will always be the stage right after you’ve accomplished The Thing until you move on to the next The Thing that feels a little weird. Maybe it feels like the calm before the storm, or the calm after the storm. Maybe you feel like you don’t know what to do with all of your energy now, because you were so used to using it all on that one thing that you no longer have to do any more. The best recommendation that I have for that it to just sit with yourself for a little while. Maybe, if you’re a journaller, take some time to write in a journal how it feels now that you are done. Take some time to integrate the feelings and the learnings about yourself and feel the feelings. Sometimes, in the quiet eye of the storm, surrounded but not touched by all of our brain chatter, we can find the most clarity.

Either way, take time to enjoy the fact that you have moved onwards from The Thing. Maybe mourn some aspects of The Thing that you are going to miss, or evaluate some things you were afraid of that maybe did happen, You are right and entitled to feel feelings of all kinds, and just because you will be happy in the long run doesn’t mean that you aren’t allowed to feel feelings now. Revel in your humanity everyday, and serve up gratitude for your mind, your space and your beautiful self every chance you get. You’re amazing.

That's So Sick: Bipolar Disorder & Radical Candor in Tech

When I was 16, I downed a bottle of 100 tylenol PM and was hospitalized for a month after. I was in mandatory therapy up until I graduated high school. After that, I had a number of other hospitalizations and “set backs” as my family likes to call them. To be clear, I’m “good” now, or as good as I can be with bipolar disorder. But, the point isn’t that I’m good: it’s that looking at me, a person up on here on the stage, seemingly with my “shit together”, you probably would never expect me to 1. Have had those issues or 2. Admit it to 500 of my closest stranger-friends.

When I was younger, my mother called me Eeyore (my sisters were Rabbit and Piglet). My grandmother told me that I looked sad, even before resting bitch face was a thing. So I guess what I’m saying is I’ve pretty much always been this way. But I haven’t always been open about it. I grew up in a staunch British/Northeastern family where everyone thought that it was better to keep a stiff upper lip than admit weakness. So, as a youth I ended up listening to a lot of angry sad music (Rites of Spring, Minor Threat, Bright Eyes, Brand New) in private, and acting like a true asshole in public. 

I didn’t realize that it could be different until one day when I was working at Wistia. The day felt wrong, it felt like Fall, and everything was making me sad. I could feel like I was about to go into a depressive episode. My husband was traveling and had been for a month. I felt lonely. I was sitting in the basement of our office in a room alone, feeling numb and trying to hide the fact that I wasn’t answering any tickets and hadn’t done anything but cry all day.

One of my people in the office noticed and brought me a ball of burrata from a local cheese shop. I know. I know. She sat with me, and we talked about everything. I talked about how it was the Fall when I had first been hospitalized, and how it had been a good chunk of years but it still felt so fresh. And we talked about bipolar disorder and how hard it is to admit, especially in the professional world, that there is something wrong with you. She talked about her brother who had bipolar disorder, and how it was hard for her, sometimes, to understand where he was coming from. But that talking to me had made it much clearer.

It’s easier to understand and empathize over something when it’s not so close.

I realized then that the more we all talk about it, the easier it gets and the more everyone benefits. I’ve tried to do it a lot since then. Not just in telling people that I’m bipolar or the really dark, craggy parts of my history, but also just in admitting to my team members when I’m feeling cranky, or if I feel burnt out. I ask about emotional health in every one-on-one: 
How are you feeling? 
What’s working what’s not working? 
How is being remote going for you this week?

At first, people felt weird about opening up. But I continued to ask, even if they just shrugged awkwardly when I did. And with every time that I admitted that, maybe, over the weekend I’d just laid in bed all day watching Star Wars, they started to feel more comfortable admitting that they, too, had had some trouble getting out of bed on Saturday. Everyone feels feelings. 

Gradually, my team knew that it was safe to talk to me when things weren’t going great (or were going great!) for them. They could talk to me when they were fighting with their spouse, or when they needed to take a day for emotional health. But we wouldn’t ever have gotten there if someone hadn’t taken the first step, and admitted that they were flawed.

Not only does talking about your own mental health encourage others to feel comfortable doing so, it also (much like in my story above) allows them some perspective into something that they might not have seen before. Radical candor changes the way that people see things. It allows the people around you to see their partner/sibling/parent in the same way that they see you. It can be a total shift to see someone that you respect, love, and enjoy the company of and also recognize that they are mentally ill. It destigmatizes it and takes it out of the very painful context that they might have experienced with someone closer to them. With a mother, sibling, husband it is so much closer, and thus so much harder to see as a part of a whole.

It’s amazing what the constructs that someone’s built around you can do, and how quickly they can be crumbled through sharing. Humans are social creatures, and so much of our experiences are impacted by the stories that we share, and what we tell others. Without emotional candor, all that we show to people are our tough exteriors. They never get to see the things that make up who you actually are. They also never get to analyze how who you really are lines up with how they’ve built you up in their own mind. Allow yourself and them, especially if they do not struggle with mental wellness themselves, the opportunity to experience a bit more on the human spectrum, and recognize that mental disorders are not always specifically tied with negative personality traits.

Succumbing to the pressure that we feel to perform wellness is one of the most problematic things that we do to ourselves and those around us.

In support, especially, a job where we are expected to take on customer’s emotional burdens all day every day, it is important to give yourself a vent to let off some of that steam. If you ever feel like you aren’t able to do your best work, or you’ve had a particularly tough conversation say to your team “Hey, I’ve got to go for a little while. That last interaction left me feeling kind of bummed out, and I’d like to go and refresh.”

Woah. 

Hey.

What was that? Your team will think. And then the next time they are bummed out, they’ll remember it. They will feel more comfortable taking care of themselves and subsequently doing better for the team.

Are you worried that someone’s going to judge you? Would you judge them if they did the same? Would you say “No, you. Go back and sit at your keyboard and just work through the sadness.” No, you probably wouldn’t say it to them, and you shouldn’t say it to yourself either. And with each time you do it, it will get easier.

Furthermore, there are plenty of people who have never suffered from mental health issues. By saying “Hey, I’m having a hard time, here’s the action that I am going to take to try to deal with it, and I just need you to understand why/what I am doing.” you put the other person in a position of not needing to generate an answer to your needs. Instead, they are equipped with the tools that they need to have to assist you, and have a more solid understanding of where you are at and why. This is especially important when talking to people who, otherwise, would have no context into a given situation. You wouldn’t expect someone who had never been bungie jumping to immediately upon request be able to provide you with all of the things you would need to go and bungie jump, so why expect them to understand your immediate needs any other time?

The same goes for customers. How many times have you said (or thought) “This guy is being crazy.” But...what if they actually are crazy (not just over-the-top, but genuinely mentally disordered)? What if they are having a day, and they need someone to help? What if they’re crying alone in a room trying to use your product, and there’s no one there to bring them a cheese ball? These are real things to consider.

Just like you never would have known what was laying in my past and sometimes is simmering right below the surface unless I’d told you, you’ll never know about your customers. It’s not like you have a section in your contact form that says “Hey, do you have depression or another mental disorder? Check the box.” The good news is that by cultivating a space of safety and honesty on your team and in your life through radical candor, you have also increased the empathy that everyone is able to feel.

You educate people every time you talk about how you are feeling. You also better equip yourself with coping tools and advocates for any future problems that you may experience. You open up your circle just a little bit wider. When you take the time to explain what it is like when you have a depressive episode, or why certain things give you anxiety, it allows someone who has never had that experience a framework to try to understand other people that may feel the same way.

Admitting when you are depressed or when you need help, or when your thinking is disordered is difficult. It’s scary to open up the softest parts of you and ask people to acknowledge them. But every time you do, it gets a little easier for the people around you to do the same. It gets a little easier for people without the experiences that you have to understand others going through the same thing. It gets simpler to talk about, less tangled and scary. It gets better.
 

First Week at Appcues!

Today is the last day of my first week at Appcues. Although I’ve been working with Jonathan, Jackson and Nak for a while now thinking about how to approach support here, that doesn’t take away the shininess of these past few days.

I’ve had a lot of first weeks in my life, doing everything from cheffing up sushi to teaching yoga, but I don’t think any of them have been as fulfilling as this one. Perhaps it is that I have already been thinking these issues through tangentially for a while now, but I feel a great sense of satisfaction at being able to devote my attention wholly to them. Maybe it's because I learned how to curl. Who knows?

With that in mind, I wanted to share a few of my thoughts from this week.

Open Company.

A lot of companies preach transparency as a value. I’ve seen the variation of “no bullshit” too many times to count. It feels like many companies take the same values and just regurgitate them in a way that fits their tone and brand.

I do not think that is the case with Appcues. I, admittedly, was not familiar with the brand’s explicitly stated values until a few days into working here officially. But, to say that I wasn’t familiar with them explicitly does not mean I didn’t know them. The values are lived and breathed here, and permeate every interaction that I’ve had. To the point, even, that when Jonathan said what they were, I nodded. I didn’t need a presentation on it, I’d already felt it and knew them to be true.

God, what a refreshing feeling! Not only to not need to be reminded of them every day (because they are just innately there), but also to feel so completely aligned with them.

Kind, empathetic people.

It’s no surprise that people that I know from all walks of life are here. There are at least four people, including one of the founders Jonathan, that I have known for at least 5 years and was overjoyed to be working with again. The people that work here are some of the most categorically kind and empathetic ones that I’ve met. Everyone cares so much. Which is nice, coming from the part of a company that usually cares the most (support). For example, I ran into some troubles with the product while trying to work on a mandatory first-week project, and instead of rolling their eyes and brushing it off as unimportant, a group of the engineers sat and tried to work with me through it. I felt heard and supported and valued.

Not only that, but they are trying so hard to make things work for me. I will be their first remote employee, and they are going gung ho despite never doing it before. They’ve investigated the best video chat technologies and are so receptive to my feedback on how to do things better despite me being just one employee out of the many that currently work here. I am grateful for them and feel valued, appreciated and a part of something really awesome.

Tricky problems.

I am coming in at the relative beginning of things. We have two support employees and haven’t gotten deep into figuring out any processes. The struggles and problems we are running into are fresh and hard. It has been a while since I’ve been in a company solving these kinds of problems in such a scrappy way and I feel invigorated. I think it took me working in a larger, later stage start-up after already putting the processes in place to realize that I want to have a home in these beginning stages. Everyday I have something new and big to put my energy and brain towards. As someone who runs high on anxiety and energy, it feels good to leave work tuckered out and fulfilled.

I am overjoyed to be here. The onboarding experience was surprisingly good for such a small team—I feel like I am leaving my first week with a more solid understanding of the product, infrastructure and background than I’ve had at other companies. I feel prepared to start sinking my teeth into the queue next week with the other new employees for our company-mandated support week (everyone does one or two).

I am excited and amped up by my team and the other teams we work with. This has been in the works for a really long time, and I am just so happy that it’s finally come through and I can call Appcues home.

Leaving Trello

Friday is my last day working at Trello. I started as a Support Engineer (a role that they didn't have at the time and probably didn't really need), then took on the interim role of Dev Advocate. Then, I added the hat of Team Lead and eventually Manager when Ben left. I've done basically every role on the support team, and loved all of them.

I honestly didn’t ever think that I would leave this company: the people are amazing, the product is easy-to-use, adoptable and clean, the customers are genuine and appreciative. But, I guess all things eventually must come to an end. I am excited to be taking another step in my career and moving to the role of Head of Support at Appcues.

I’ve known Appcues, much like I knew Trello before it, for a long time. The people there are also amazing, welcoming, intelligent and kind. I am lucky to be always afforded opportunities with the best of humans. I am excited to work with a small team, implement processes and put frameworks in-place. While working and growing with a larger, more-established company has earned me a lot of great learning opportunities, I find that I am most invigorated when I am on the ground floor. Appcues also offers a great service that takes some things I'm very passionate about (user onboarding, foremost) and makes them accessible to all companies, whether they have a dev team or not.

That being said, I am immensely proud of the team that I have built and fostered. I am extremely grateful to have Mike Labrecque-Jessen willing to step up to bat to lead the team, as it’s been a true pleasure to watch his journey towards leadership and help him along the way. I have no doubt that Trello will continue to do amazing, amazing things, and I’m excited to get to watch it from a different viewpoint than I’ve had for the past several years.

Here are some of the things that I am most grateful for and proud of from my time at Trello

Being the “Teamiest Team”

At our off-site, Trello Together, when the acquisition was announced, my team was dubbed “The Teamiest Team.” I wasn't there, but I'm still pretty proud.They have always been so good at having each other’s back and supporting one another when the going gets tough. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such a kind and loving group. I have many, many fond memories with the team and could easily list a whole slew of inside jokes, but I shan’t. Torben, Denise, Mike, Crystal, Crystal, Teddy and Marta: you are all amazing. Emily, Michelle, Ben, and Caity, our alums, you are also amazing.

Promoting a Culture of Feedback

It can be really scary to offer constructive feedback to someone, and I am grateful that my team was so willing and receptive always. Not only that, but they were supremely keen-eyed and good at offering feedback up. If I had a dollar for every time that Caity brought to my attention that I was working too much, and that I should do the things that I advocated team members to do, I would be one rich lady. It bears noting that, sometimes, feedback can come from a place of maliciousness, but I truly feel that the Trello support team offers their insights from a place of desire for everyone to grow and learn.

Implementing and championing the OKR and OOTQ processes

While Ben and I figured out what our first year of OKRs should look like together, I was responsible for building the process and holding it all together. It was exciting because, at the time, no one else in Trello was working with the OKR system, so we were really pioneering that (and the idea of a support team getting 20% of their time out of the queue!).

We are a year and a half away from the first round of OKRs, and they’ve been going amazingly. This was one of the largest growth opportunities for me, and I am grateful that my team were so flexible and willing to try new things as we iterated on the original process. They also totally slayed at the OKRs and brought so much enthusiasm that it was totally infectious.

Making it through a year with 0 regrettable losses

The first year after an acquisition can be a hard one, but we made it through the first year with no regrettable losses. Our team remained committed to our goals that we had always had: providing excellent support to all of our customers, and we leaned on each other to get through some of the tougher times. I’m grateful that we stuck together, overcame and bonded over an experience that could have potentially broken us up. I’m also proud that I was able to, as a manager, make everyone seen and heard and properly convey our views and needs to Atlassian.

It’s bittersweet, right? Any of you that have left a company you love would know that. But I am grateful for Trello and all of its employees giving me a place to experiment (sometimes successfully, sometimes failing), grow my own chops when it came to development and management, and make some deeply lasting friendships along the way. I have changed immensely for the better since starting my work here.

So long, Trello, and thanks for all the fish.

Becoming a Leader: From Title to Trust

It used to be that whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to do in my career, I said that I wanted to run a support team. I wanted to manage. But over the course of the past few years, that has shifted. Now I want to lead. Let me tell you: it’s easy to say “I want to lead. I want to be a leader.” Almost as easy as it is to say “I want to manage.”

But what do those things mean? How do we get from managing to leading? Well, let me start from the beginning.

I’ve been working in support on and off for the past 15 years. Those of you that know me or have heard me talk know that I took a break for a few years there to work in coffee and just generally enjoy some prolonged adolescence. This time, I’ve been working in support for 7 years. I was a Customer Champion at Wistia, then started conducting 1:1s in a leadership capacity sans title; then I moved to Campaign Monitor where I was an integrations manager for a team of 1. Next, I moved to Trello as a Support Engineer, became a team lead, and eventually, head of support.

A lot of these roles were things I was doing before I had a title—I was leading prior to managing. But I built additional trust with my fellow team members and got their buy-in with each new step I took. And that’s what I’m going to teach you how to do today. Keep in mind, some of the things in this talk might not resonate with you, or maybe you’ve never wanted to be in management. That’s okay! There are other opportunities besides management, but most of the lessons here are going to be most applicable to that job path.

First off: management is different from leadership. When you lead, you inspire the people around you and lift them up to do greater things and take steps towards a larger team vision on their own. When you manage, you make sure that they are doing all the shit that they need to do to get to that same vision, but do not give them the freedom to chart their own path. Notice the language that you use to describe what you do: do you say “I run the team” or “I’m the support team manager” or “I lead the support team”? How you talk about things says a lot about how you perceive them, so try to notice how you talk about what your role in the team is and how you might shift it.

I read a book a little while ago called The 5 Levels of Leadership, and it changed the way that I perceive management and leadership by proxy.

There are a five levels of leadership, and they build on top of one another:

• Level 1: You’re a leader because you’ve been given the title

• Level 2: You’re a leader because people CHOOSE to follow you

• Level 3: You’re a leader because you get shit done and motivate those around you.

• Level 4: You’re a leader because you are developing other people to be leaders

• Level 5: You’re a leader because the leaders you developed are going through the same steps (it’s a little bit like an MLM).

As a seasoned gamer, when I learned that there were levels the first thing that I wanted to do was know how to beat them, right? We all want to get to the final boss. But, with leadership, as with all challenges, you need to start from the beginning.

Level 1

When I was at Wistia, I only had any management privileges because my manager gave them to me. I hadn’t earned them through any particular leadership except via individual contribution to the queue. You do not need any trust cultivated to become a level 1 leader, as it is wholly title-related. This is often times how managers get started: they’re on a team, and they get selected out of the group to manage when someone steps down or a role opens up. It was no different for me. I hadn’t done much except for a bit of strategizing and totally slaying the queue.

Did that mean that I didn’t deserve the title? No. But what it does mean is that I wasn’t a leader by any means I had visibly earned. The team was only following me because the title deemed it, and our leadership said they had to. This is a great example of a Level 1 leader. I never got out of Level 1 at Wistia, and at Campaign Monitor I never had people to lead, so I never got out of it there either.

To be clear, being a level 1 manager isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My team was doing just fine, I was doing just fine; we were meeting all of our metrics and people were generally happy. But, if I stayed as a level 1 manager, I never would have been able to advance in my career, or start working strategically on advancing a team forward. It was time to do more.

Level 2

When I went to Trello, I was given the role of Support Engineer. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted: as I said earlier, I wanted to be running a team. But Ben, the then-manager, told me that there was opportunity for growth, and so I came aboard. After a few months, Ben shifted my role to team lead. I was nervous, there were other people on the team who had more historical context at Trello than I did, and I wondered how they would take it.

The work that I did while I was a Support Engineer helped. Unlike at Wistia, I had served as a support to the people of the team in a leadership capacity already without the title. I had helped to bolster and get to know their needs, and then support them through it. When I was given the title, it was just a secondary affirmation of the role that I’d already been performing.

In order to build that trust, I had to get to know them. I could never have moved from Level 1 to Level 2 without the team putting their trust in me. I couldn’t just passively wait for them to get to know me. I had to learn. What was their dog’s name? What did they do for their girlfriend’s birthday? Know whether they like Star Trek or Star Wars better. What were their professional goals, and how could I help to get them there. Without that focus and mutual understanding, the team never would have supported me in the shift, especially because I was so fresh to the team.

This is a common issue for people that are new to a team, especially managers just coming in to a company without any previous experience. To shift from Level 1, where people just follow you because they know they have to, to Level 2, where people follow you because they choose to, you need to get to know them, and let them get to know you. Be vulnerable. Welcome feedback. Let them know that you are like them and you are on their level.

Other than just conversing about personal stuff with them, one of the best ways that I know to do this is to be in the shit. When the queue gets bad, they’ll notice whether you are there with them or not. Don’t break that trust that you are beside them.

Level 3

When you manage, it can be easy to let go of the day to day drive to accomplish things. Instead of your own merit being what deems you a “good worker” it is the merit of those you lead. With that, it can be easy to fall into a trap of “just” people managing, without continuing to develop yourself or develop the team.

After a few months of being the team lead, Ben left Trello and I became the temporary manager of the team. Temporary. It frustrated me that I wasn’t just being given the title, and instead had to conduct interviews and evaluate people that were champing at the bit for what I perceived as being rightfully be my job. I fell right back into the old habits from Level 1, and I could have stayed there. I was upset to do the work without getting the recognition.

However, after the initial month of so of sulking about not being just given the title, I realized that the best way to show that I deserved it was to earn it. Ben and I, prior to his leaving, had worked on an OKR program to try to drive forward initiatives within the support team outside of the inbox. We’d never done anything like it, and it was a radical idea. We were effectively giving responsibilities that would have normally fallen to a manager to our team to champion, like evaluating and managing the switch to a new help desk, or pioneering a proactive support methodology. We were believing in them to be able to do things far out of the scope of their normal day-to-day. Not only to do those things, but to excel at them.

The team was freaked out about the idea of taking so much time out of the queue, especially when, up until this point, it was their primary method of measurement. But, after the first round and seeing exactly how much they were able to accomplish, they were in. They trusted the process, but most importantly they trusted me to lead them through it.

Ultimately, Trello decided that I was the best fit for the role over the other external candidates that they’d interviewed.

To move from level 2 to level 3, you need to prove to your team that you have the chutzpa to take the things that you know about them and use that to direct them forward. If I had waited that whole time to get started on strategizing and leading the team, I would have lost all of the trust that I’d built and probably wouldn’t have been able to drive the initiatives forward that I did.

I knew, from conversations with my team, that it was important to them to do more and have more impact than working in the queue could provide. Ben and I built the OKR program to address that, and then had the faith in them to be able to do the more self-directed work it took to make it happen.

I could have easily just let myself fester over the anger of being appointed “interim manager.” Had I done that, I would have remained at level 2 with my team until I was given another opportunity to drive them towards larger goals and get shit done. The best way to get to level 3 from level 2 is to show your team that you hear what they are looking to do, then find a way to align it with company goals and get that shit done. Knowing that you are acting with their best interests in mind and that you care what they think about the future of the team helps them to trust you more.

Level 4

Getting shit done is all well and good until you can’t anymore. During this whole thing, I was very pregnant and knew that, at some point, I would have to go on maternity leave. I did as best I could: I made a list of all of my responsibilities and then delegated them out, I prepped the team with a list of everyone they would need to reach out to if anything went awry. I developed a schedule of 1:1s with the person that I reported to so that everyone would have their voice heard. Then, the acquisition happened.

Oh fuck.

The person that was supposed to be conducting my 1:1s left the company, and I was a mom fresh into baby-having-dom. I came back part-time to try to make sure that the team had 1:1s and felt that they were being advocated for during this scary time, but otherwise was absent.

It wasn’t ideal.

I had my feet both in the boat and in the ocean, and wasn’t paying very much attention to either. I needed to pick one. I picked my baby. But what did that mean for the team?

I’d been working to cultivate leadership skills amongst the members of the team, having them participate in interviews, work as mentors when people first came on board, and I knew that there were a few people who had leadership on their list of long term development goals. So, we did it.

I had one of my employees serve as the team lead while I was out on maternity. I gave him all of my trust and believed that he would make the right choices to get it done. Trust had evolved: it was not just him that was putting his trust in me as his leader, but me putting my trust in him to continue leading in my stead. And he did awesome.

You are able to move from level 3 to level 4 in your leadership when you start trusting people enough to let them be leaders on their own, and when they trust you enough to start making the big steps to get there. Mike, the person who I’d appointed to as lead in my absence, had to do a lot of extra things to make the role work, but he knew that I and the rest of the team had his back. Subsequently, the rest of the team seeing this, knew that they could trust me enough to tell me if they, too, were interested in leadership, and believe that I’d do all I could to get them where they needed to go.

Level 5

I haven’t made it to level 5 yet. I have been lucky enough to start in young organizations that do not have so many levels of leadership to allow me to be a leader of leaders who are then going on through the levels themselves. But, it is my goal to get there. Eventually, I hope that the Trello Support team will be large enough that I will allow the people that I developed on Level 4 to truly take the reins and run things--I hope that I will be there to see them.

But, for a great example of a Level 5 leader, I’d recommend taking a look at Mat Patto’s career and what he’s doing in his life right now. Not only did he manage the support team at Campaign Monitor (which was HUGE and multinational), but now he writes and builds documentation for HelpScout’s customer base to make them even better leaders. His net is so wide it’s ridiculous.

All of this is not to say “hey, it’s easy. If I can do it, you can too.” The picture that I’ve painted is definitely much cleaner than it was in the moment, and it took me some time to figure it out. Furthermore, the level that you are on differs with the person you are talking to. Just recently I was speaking with one of my team members, and he said that he didn’t see me as an “inspirational leader” but instead someone that he could come to with his problems and that would support him.

This boggled my mind. I’d never heard anything like it before. I had assumed that I knew where I was at with this person, but I’d never asked. The best way to find out how people perceive you is to ask. I did this by building a survey and sending it out to my team. Here's a version of the survey you can copy and use for yourself: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1nCrv36O4lx55VdLkxe5f-OY6UI2WOLHVZeLDttdcl-Q/edit?usp=sharing.

The responses that I got reassured me, but also let me know where I needed to be doing better. Each section corresponds with a leadership level. I was all “Yes” up until Level 4, where it started to diverge. I need to be developing people more readily and providing them with outlets to grow. I know this to still be an opportunity for me, but it was validating to see it confirmed by my team’s assessment. I’d recommend trying it for yourself just as a gut check.

Leadership is never easy, and there will never be a sure fire way to know how to do everything right. Hell, maybe even the path that I’ve taken isn’t right. Maybe the 5 levels of leadership are a total crock. But, to me, they are a useful map that is sketched out with a gist of kind of where I want to go. That’s what’s so fun about it: it’s a journey. There is not final boss, or way to beat the game, you just have to keep always playing, always striving to get better. So, no matter what you do, keep striving, be humble (as Kendrick Lamar says), and most of all trust others so that they may trust you.

The Art of Idea Midwifery

No offense to anyone, because I love all y'all, but I feel like I see all of the same faces (myself included) speaking at conferences nowadays. The truth of the matter is that, even though I love hearing people that I know and love talk, we would all benefit as an industry with some new faces and stories. Because of that, I've decided to start my new adventure as a midwife...of ideas.

Alright, alright. So, it sounds messy, but it's not so far from what I've already been doing. Here's the lowdown:

• Have you ever wanted to speak at a conference, but you aren't sure what you'd talk about?
• Do you have an experience or story that when you talk to people about it they say "Wow" or "Oh my gosh?"
• Do you have some ideas brewing but just aren't sure how to put them into talk format?

Let me help you!

I'm currently opening some slots in my calendar for idea midwifery. Allow me to help you bring your beautiful idea and proposal for a talk into the world of conferences. I'm here to help you tease out something to talk about, develop already existing ideas, and get your proposal as polished as possible for its upcoming submission to SupConf.

After, if your proposal is accepted, I'm happy to work in tandem with you in the Talk Development program to get you feeling confident and fabulous up on stage. Your content and you will shine!

If this sounds like something you're interested in, or you're not sure and have more questions reach out at hey@mercenator.com.

Parental Leave: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

When I first was making my maternity leave plan, I said that I was going to come back part-time at 12 weeks. When Liz, the head of People for Trello, reached out to me and said "You know, you can change your mind if you want to..." I scoffed. I love work. I thought to myself. What will I do just sitting around the house alone all day?

So, less than 4 weeks into my maternity leave, Trello was acquired! Yay! But this threw a bit of a wrench into my carefully planned and organized maternity leave. The person that I reported to was leaving the company, and I would be reporting to someone else. Not to mention there was a whole lot of organizing to do to figure out where my team would fit in to the new structure at Atlassian.

I decided to come back early, and started conducting meetings with 1:1s with my team members again. Most of the meetings were biweekly, but there were a few people who wanted to meet more frequently and I tried to accommodate that. Luckily, my husband was working from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays and was able to watch the baby if I wasn't able to get him down for a nap at exactly the moment when I had to go meet.

After 8 weeks of this, it was time for me to get back to work part-time. The plan was that I would be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays only and my husband would work from home and watch the baby. Needless to say, this did not work. While I loved work, and I loved being back in the saddle, I couldn't devote my attention to the work like I wanted to. Two days wasn't enough, especially with all of the changes happening, and when I was working I was thinking about the baby, and when I was with the baby I was thinking about work.

So, this only lasted two weeks. After that, I decided that I wanted to go back on maternity leave, and redelegated all of my responsibilities. Luckily, Trello and Atlassian were kind enough to help me organize this, and I've been back on maternity leave since. My team were incredibly supportive, even though sometimes I still feel a little bit guilty that, as the person running the team, I'm not there to help navigate some of the tricky stuff that can come with acquisitions.

This has been a really long roundabout way to get to talking about something that I think is a pretty common problem. If you are a driven, type-A parent, you probably want to get back to work as quickly as possible, but things might change after you have your baby. With that in mind, I have made a list of a few things that I wish I'd considered prior to leaving:

• Are you wanting to come back early because you are afraid your team will realize they don't need you?
• Will you come back part-time first? Will that be enough time to do the work you need?
• Are you coming back for yourself or for your team?
• Are there things that your team specifically needs you for that no one else can do?
• Are you worried that your team will resent you if you stay on parental leave?
• What are you sacrificing at home to come back to work?
• Will using the entirety of your parental leave set a good example for the rest of your team/company?

Maybe coming back from parental leave early is something that would be a good fit for you, but considering the points above is something that I would seriously recommend prior to making your plan. For me, I thought that 12 weeks would be enough time and I would be champing at the bit to come back. While I was, and it felt good to be working, my motivations for coming back were maybe not in the right place. I also found myself feeling very guilty for coming back and then leaving again, and wished that I had just gotten it right in the first place.

Hopefully this quick checklist helps you accomplish just that! On a more business-y and less personal-mental-health note, check out the post I wrote for Kayako about my three-step plan to prepare for parental leave.

Self-Support Tools

I don't know about the rest of y'all, but I've had a hell of a few weeks. It feels like when it rains, it pours, and it can be so difficult to remember kindness—both for myself, and the people that I work with in the inbox every day.

When I read the prompt for this week's Support Driven #challenge, Tools, the first thing I thought was "Well. I don't use any of those. I guess this week wasn't meant to be the week I started in on this anyway." But then I thought deeper on one of the key tenets that I try to remind my team of every day: support is more than just being in the queue. 

Support, in and of itself, is empathy. As a support agent, you need to be emotionally ready every day to receive whatever the world puts out for you, and you need to be capable of handling that burden. You must handle it, otherwise it will crush you.

Yikes, that's a heavy start, Mercer.

Well, yes, but it's true. We get paid to be empathetic, to feel and take on the problems of everyone else as our own. Even just today I reminded my team of that, and urged them to take an hour or so away from their computer, away from Twitter, Facebook, Think Pieces, and just be quiet in their own minds without the influence of others' emotions. Because it's so important to give yourself the space and to support yourself before you help others.

Anyway, long intro. Here are some tools that I use for self-care and self-support every day that prime me to do excellent work in the queue:

A Regular Schedule

I try to keep to the same schedule everyday. I find that knowing what is coming, especially with the tumultuous nature of support, helps me to feel even-keeled and steady. In all transparency, I am bipolar, and so that was the original motive for this.

I try to get the same amount of sleep each night, and I try to wake up at the same time every day. I set three alarms. The first one wakes me up, and tells me it's time to roll over and snuggle my husband. The second one tells me that it's time for him to roll over and snuggle me. The last one tells me it's actually time to get up. This helps me wake up slowly, and sort out my thoughts for the day.

After that, I get up and meditate. Brush my teeth, wash my face, walk my dog, eat breakfast.

I end work at the same time every day, unless something has happened that requires me to stay late and help. I can count on this punctuation, and my brain now knows that, at that time, it can go from being in work/help mode to self-help/self-care mode instead. Finding this separation between work and home is so important to me not only because of working in support, but also working entirely remotely.

A Journal

I write in a journal every night. Every night. No excuses. Even if the journal entry is "Today was hard. Will write more tomorrow. Going to bed now." I try to write down and acknowledge how the day went and what I did. This helps with unpacking, and allows me to "get things off my chest" in a fruitful way that isn't just complaining. My journal is also a place where I can go and share things that maybe I don't want to say out into the universe, but I still need to say somewhere.

A Hobby/Exercise

I do yoga every day. Whether I teach it, take a class, or just think about sequencing a new class, it is a thing that I can use my brain to do that is not work. I also play video games, read, and make things with my hands. That being said, finding something that you really devote all of yourself to while doing it is important. If you play Magic: the Gathering and, while you are doing it, all you think about is M:tG, then perfect. But if you find your mind starting to creep back to the things that you're worried about, your anxieties and insecurities, you need to find something else.

I know that for the hour that I am teaching or taking, I am only thinking about that one thing. My brain gets a chance to shut off and reset.

A Reminder/Mantra

I have a mantra tattooed on my forearm. Om Namah Shivaya. Translated it means: I invoke Shiva's Name, or I honor the Shiva (divinity) inside of myself. I use this every day to meditate, but also try to think on it when ever I'm having a tough time. I think that having something nearby, whether that be a token of someone who you care about, or just a picture that reminds you of a positive time in your life, can be a huge impact on days when you need to remember to breath, and that things will all be okay.

I realize that this may not give you some actionable new advice to implement a hotkey that will make your support 10x faster, and these might not even be things that fit into your day-to-day life. What I can say, though, is that you need to take care of yourself. You need to give yourself the time to breath and defrag from the work that you do every day. This is how I do it. Being centered and able to step away from the fray of the queue is just as important to providing excellent support as being able to type 125 words per minute is.

Why You Need In-Person Time as a Remote Employee

I love working remotely. It saves me the hassle of having to commute to work and also saves me time on eating out every day for lunch. Every time that I prepare for a company meet-up or a trip to the office, I start to feel equal parts excitement and nervousness. I worry about how much of a toll being alone at home all day every day will have had on my ability to interact with people, but I also get excited about the idea of not being alone all day. I start to get nervous about feeling overwhelmed, or my coworkers not liking me without the filter of the keyboard between us, but excited about the idea of making new friends.

Every time I go, though, I realize the importance of doing it. While companies that do remote culture well (like my company, Trello, does) are making leaps and bounds with cutting out the difficulty of remote communication out of the equation, there are still things that are immeasurably important about face-to-face time. Here are the top three that I am reflecting on as of this past week at HQ with the rest of my team:

Banter

No matter how well you are able to express yourself in the written word, there are some things that are going to be missed. Sarcasm, little quirks and ticks of behavior, and other endearing things are usually missed unless you video chat every single day. Even with the end-of-week beer bashes that all of our remote employees do, not everyone is able to make it, so I don't get to know everyone. Being in person lets me get to know the people who *aren't* on all the video chats, or maybe don't have as much of a DM rapport with me. It is an outstanding way to build bonds and to start achieving that DM rapport that we are lacking.

Faces to names

So many people that I know are working at companies in stages of rapid growth. That is such an intense and confusing (and also very exciting and fun!) time. It can feel like there are 10 new people hired every week. It's easy, in a climate like that, to feel the FOMO or like you don't know who everyone is. Going to the office helps you at least get to know and see new in-office employees that might not come around the remote hangouts so often. That way, when someone says 'Al', for example, you can remember that you listened to him talk to his daughter over lunch that one day, and not feel out of the loop and lost like you would have before.

Cohesion

When you are with a group of people, whether you want to or not, you start thinking along with them and riding the tide of the group think. While in most cases group think is a Very Bad thing, I mean it in this instance as a net positive. As a remote employee, you are your own self-contained office of your company. You are responsible to keep your good-time-happy-feelings afloat, and if you are having a tough time or feeling a little-less-than-stellar, you are also the only one responsible for it. Going back to the office, or on a group retreat, is a great way to get back to that feeling that you had when you first started and to align with where the company is going. It's all well and good to have monthly meetings that *talk* about where the company is going, but when you are actually there with a group of people, you can feel it.

3 Ways to Amp Up Your Support Career; SupConf, May 2016

This is a text-based version of the presentation I gave at SupConf on May 24, 2016.

Hi! My name is Mercer Smith-Looper, and along with being an avid fan and participant in the Support Driven Community, I am a Support Engineer over at Trello. 

In 2010 I moved to Boston for Graduate School without any job prospects or ideas for what I wanted to do for work. I’d slung coffee before and had certifications from the national barista exam, so I relied on that and ultimately found a job making shitty espresso for hipsters and getting paid under the table. I looked like this:

“Wow, Mercer,” you’re probably thinking to yourself, “What impeccable fashion sense! I really love that avant-garde thing you’re doing with your hair there.”

Just kidding.

What you’re probably thinking is “Wow, that was just 5 years ago? How the heck did you get here?” And that’s what I’m here to talk to you about, friends. Specifically, how I started as a minimum-waged barista, and now I’m getting paid well to do a job that I love in a career that is fulfilling. Let’s amp your career up to 11.

Everyone wants to grow their career but, both fortunately and unfortunately, there is only so much of that that your company can do for you—the rest has to come from within and be driven by yourself and your own will-power. When we think about career development, we often think within the confines of our current job at our current company. We try to focus on what we can flex in order to be the best person that we can be there, when really there is a whole wide world out there that we could be excelling in. There is only so much you can do when thinking inside of and limiting yourself to the box of your company and, similarly, there is only so much that you should expect them to do. Here are the three things that I focussed on that took me from zero to hero without using any of my company’s resources or time over the past half a decade.

Industry knowledge

Most of you have been working in support for a while, I think it’s safe to assume, so you already know that when you’re first starting in the industry there’s a ton of little things to learn: tone, specific product knowledge, pains within your specific company’s user experience. But what happens when you’ve grown beyond that? Do you just stagnate? Ideally, no.

After you’ve mastered the basic tools required to provide excellent support, you can start to get even more macro: how are other people solving similar problems? You move out from the microcosm of personal knowledge, onto product knowledge, onto the universe of providing support as a whole. It’s no longer a question of how you support your individual customers, but how other people support theirs and what you can learn from it.

Start by developing niche knowledge from other companies that do similar things to yours. For example, if you work for a help desk company, find other help desk softwares and read about their struggles and successes with support. It’s likely that they will have different problems from you as, presumably, they have a different audience, but use some of those ideas to make suggestions for your own company’s preemptive support.

Read newsletters. I know, this sounds ridiculous, but round up a few really solid newsletters and subscribe to them. Not only does this save you time from having to go out and actively wade through social media profiles to find useful information, but you can hand select information that is pertinent or valuable to you. Also, reading newsletters designed by other companies or individuals might help you better understand how to make your own if you decide to in the future. I’ll get into that a bit more later.

Building up knowledge of how other people handle support outside of the industry I was in has allowed me to chameleon my way into some very unique and interesting jobs. For example, I started at Wistia—an awesome video hosting company—even though I knew little to nothing about video other than the cat videos I watched on Youtube. I then moved to Campaign Monitor—an email marketing company—despite the fact that most of what I knew about email marketing was from the newsletters I read. There is an opportunity to learn from everything even if it has nothing to do with what you are currently working on. Who knows what you’ll get the opportunity to work on in the future, after all. Try to be an active participant in everything that you engage with, rather than just passively consuming it. You can then pull that information, if needed, and reference it later.

Having this knowledge will make you more valuable to your current company, thus allowing you to level up your support career from an entry-level team member to someone who is able to move and shape the path of support for your company. By taking initiative and learning from other’s mistakes and successes, you will be able to suggest more forward-thinking, proactive options that others on your team might not have thought of yet. You’ll be on the forefront of industry knowledge in an industry that is bursting with new experiments to try.

The benefit of knowing about how other people are doing support or have done support in the past is that you can skip the step of having to make those mistakes and deal with those pitfalls yourself. You can get right into the meaty bits, and reap the benefits. It also sets you up with more data to create your own experiments to learn from and share about.  Cue “It’s the Circle of LIFEEEEEE” music.

Personal Growth

Talking to people is a skill that you inevitably need to have when working in support. If you didn’t want to talk to people, you probably wouldn’t sign up for a job in which you talk to people, sometimes even irate people, for a majority of your day. Because of that, it’s safe to say that you are probably pretty good at that, and have had other jobs that required you to flex that muscle as well.

That being said, as much as I love it, communicating is a soft skill. What I mean by that is: tracking the ability to speak well in any quantifiable, data-driven way is close to impossible. Trust me, as someone who has a Masters degree in Creative Nonfiction. You can use the number of years that you’ve been doing it as a measure, but that is qualitative rather than quantitative. Qualitative skills are helpful and wonderful, but can be tricky when it comes to conversations about compensation and your qualifications for a position. Quantitative skills can be tracked whereas qualitative skills must be experienced.

For example, the writing style at one company may be very different from another. A good example of this is Dollar Shave Club’s support style versus, say, a company in the financial sector. Dollar Shave Club puts value on a jovial, even colloquial, style of communication with their customers, whereas something in the financial sector would most definitely not want you calling their customers ‘dude’. Different strokes for different folks, as it were. So, even if you’ve been supporting people excellently at one company for years, it doesn’t mean that you will be a good fit at another. Because of this, it’s important to develop skills that are measurable and can be considered alongside your impeccable communication abilities.

The next step in your personal growth, after you’ve built up your knowledge of support as a whole and are able to customer service the shit out of people is developing hard skills. Hard skills increase the perception of you as a valuable member of teams because they differentiate you from other candidates and are measurable. For example: if you have been supporting people well for 5 years at XYZ company, but also are familiar with troubleshooting code-based API issues, and know how to record and edit video (you know, just a random selection of skills...definitely not person reference) you are more likely to be a contender for a position than otherwise.

To be clear: “hard skills” does not just mean “code.” There is an upsurgence in support that, in able to be able to do “good support” you also need to be able to code. That is not true. That’s what engineers and developers are for. If you do not want to learn code then don’t. Learn some other measurable, differentiating skill. For example, French. Or Icelandic. Or something else that nestles itself in neatly between your personal interests and professional life. Find what you are passionate about rather than what you feel like you need to be able to do. If you don’t care about something but are forcing yourself to learn it because you feel it is necessary you will just end up hating learning it and resenting the shit out of any job that hires you because of it.

This goes hand in hand with a very important point: you do not need to change companies in order to up your career. You DO, however, have to be with a company that understands where your goals are and is willing to work with you to achieve them. Transparency, in this case, is the best policy. Let your team lead or boss know where you want to go and that you are taking action to go there. Maybe even see if your company already has a skills development program in place, such as a conference budget or something else, that you could use to help pay for your learning. Use whatever resources are in your hands to get what you need and want—the internet has a site for almost anything, and oftentimes it’s free. You have no excuse.

If you’ve spoken with your company about where you want to go with your career they can either help you understand how to get there within your company or they can reciprocate transparency and let you know that that’s not really in the cards where you are at. If that is the case, leave. Even if you love the company, you should love your career and yourself more. You can always stay friends with them after you leave, it’s not like you’re being voted off the island or anything.

Develop hard skills to point you in the direction where you want to go, and you will go in that direction whether or not you stay with your current company (though I’m personally in favor of staying, rather than going).

Exposure

This is the scariest part because it involves doing things not on your own. It involves coming out of your own shell and admitting to yourself and others that you have something to say. For me, this took the longest. Imposter syndrome is a very real feeling and something that plagues support people because, by our nature, we are very humble and fairly supportive (rather than “braggy”) human beings.

You ready? You have to get out there. You have to share your story authentically and help others learn while continuing to learn from others. Doctor Seuss once said “Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.” Let that drive you through every time you start wondering about whether your story is as interesting as you originally thought it was, or if people really are going to be surprised to hear what you have to say. They will. No one else has been in your skin or your brain or had the same experiences as you. It’s the joy (and strife) of the human condition that no one will ever be able to see things the exact same way as you do. Help others learn from what you have seen.

This can be as small as going to local MeetUps, or writing blog posts, or as big as proposing to give a talk at a conference and then going and doing the damn thing. Make talking about support and caring about support as second nature as biting your finger nails or wearing lipbalm. Not as natural as breathing, though, because no one wants to be working all the time. Gotta have that good, good balance.

A good way to start this, if you’re not sure where your path lies, is to talk about what you’re reading and doing. If you’re already following my advice from the first two parts of this talk, you’re doing tons of reading and development on your own time. Share information about that. If you like a link, Tweet it out, if you find a great place to learn new skills, share it with your network. This is an easy way to start having dialogue with people, even if just in a casual manner and to set yourself up as an “influencer” in the Support space. And you don’t have to do anything extra, just actually Tweet or link to what you’re already doing.

Remember: talking about what you know is not bragging and it is useful. There is someone that wants to hear what you think and wants to engage in a meaningful dialogue with what you have to say. Even if it seems small and second-nature to you there is always going to be someone out there who has not thought of it before. Remind yourself of this every time you start to get that niggling “but why does any one care about XYZ” thought in your head. You’ve built the industry knowledge, you understand the temperature of the support world, you know what is out there and what isn’t. Talk about what isn’t. Talk about the things that come into your brain late at night when you are just about to go to bed, or what you wish that someone had said to you when you were just starting out. You can do this and it will be important and valuable and you will feel like a boss after you share it.

Create a social media presence. I know that this sounds like a crock of shit, and 5 years ago I didn’t even have a Twitter. Having a social media presence not only helps you more easily connect with people who have similar opinions, it allows people who are just meeting you to see what it is you have to say and how you think and to engage with you in a way that isn’t face-to-face. The internet is a magical place that, along with being total crap sometimes, can help you meet and speak with people who otherwise you’d have no chance of meeting. Use this to your benefit by talking about your career and forming relationships with other people who do the same. Pstttt, you’re doing it right now! Support Driven is literally built for exactly this!

What the theme tying all of these things together? It drives me crazy when there are three unrelated things in a talk and they are just left floating amorphously with a smile and a goodbye at the end. The theme that ties all of this together is you. You are the person that accomplishes these things for yourself—not the company that you work for—and that makes them simultaneously harder and easier than anything else that you will have to do in your career.

It’s easier to do something for yourself because it means that you are self-driven and directed and are able to pursue the things that you care about, rather than the things that need to get done because they are on a list of tasks for the day.

It’s harder because it means you need to commit the time to do these things outside of your regular work hours which means that you really need to set aside time. It reminds me of something that one of my old professors used to say: “If you want to be a writer, you need to set aside at least an hour a day to write. Even if you just sit and stare at your keyboard for that hour, in that time you are a writer. Without that schedule, you are not.” Set aside time every day to work on these things: whether that be to read articles, or to practice your language or code or whatever other hard skill you want to work on, or practice your talk for the next Meet-Up that you are speaking at.

Time is the one thing that is not infinite in this case: there are endless things to learn, read about, understand and subsequently speak about. I can’t tell you what direction you need to take, just that you’ll need to find a passion and move towards it. Support is an endlessly growing scene, and there are opportunities blossoming for the right people to take them. Do you get amped up on analytics? Maybe you should master SQL so that you can be a database master. Is writing support emails what gets you going? Maybe try learning a language so you can do so in another tongue.

What I mean is, because time isn’t infinite, you will never be able to learn everything. Set your sights on something and plod your way to that point. Your career isn’t about what you think you should be doing, but instead what feels good for you. If along the way you realize “hey, this isn’t for me” pivot as quickly as you can, because you will never be able to regain your lost time. If you are making a ton of money, but you aren’t satisfied with your day-to-day, make shifts to change it. Find a thing that makes you passionate, that wakes you up with excitement for the coming day, and drive yourself towards that. As you find your passion, as you grow your knowledge, all of the other things will fall into place: your career will blossom and your finances with it. 

Why should you do this? Because nothing that is worth it is going to be easy. Would you pick up a guitar and immediately put it back down again after you couldn’t form a note on your first try? Not if you really wanted to play guitar. If you really want to make a career in support, you need to dedicate time to practice it, just like an instrument or a sport. Will it always be fun? Probably not. There will be times that you will probably get frustrated because you aren’t as good at something as you wish you could be or you’ll still be working on something when everyone in your house is asleep. Take those moments and remember them. They are the fuel for your success, possibly even more so than when everything is easy.

A little over a year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post about how if you say that you don’t have time to do something, you probably just don’t care about it enough to do it. In the blog post I noted that this was neither a good or a bad thing, but that if you genuinely cared about something and wanted to do it, you would find the time to. You would stop making excuses and prioritize it over something else that might come more easily.

I will be the first person to say that taking time out of your regular life outside of work to work on self-development is hard. But if you do, and you take the time to actually implement these three practices into your life on even a weekly basis, you will see greater success in your professional life, whether that be where you are right now, or somewhere else. It might take a year, five years, ten years, but what you put in will be exactly what you get out.

When I left my first support job to move on to a bigger, better paid new position, I cried as I gave my notice. I was sad to leave a company that had taken a chance on me when I was just starting out, but I knew that I needed to try to push myself further in order to advance my career. I was scared that I was making the wrong choice and that I would be a small fish in a huge pond at my new company, unable to make any impact or actually bring anything to the table. I knew, somewhere, that the work I had done in my own time had set me up for this bigger, better job (Heck, I met the person who hired me at a conference), and that my current company wasn’t going to be able to support my growth, but the leap into the unknown horrified me. Luckily, I made the right choice. And now that I’ve made a few pond-hops since then, I can tell you that there will always be larger ponds as long as you can grow to fit them.

Don’t stifle your growth. Be scared, break things, get stronger. Focus on yourself, practice and all things are coming.

Trello Training: My First Week with Trello

I just got back from spending my first week with Trello in their New York offices, and am vibing off of successfully spending my first day remotely at home. With that in mind, I wanted to jot down and share some quick thoughts about what I thought was awesome:

1. Two words: dog food.

Trello uses their own product for everything. All of my training and onboarding was done (or directed by) a Trello board. For example, here is a sample Trello board that is very similar to how the internal IT team handles support for employees. Perhaps this is because it is such an easy and diverse tool, but it was great to see a company that so sticks by what they have created that they use it for all of their internal processes as well. As a serial list maker and keeper, I am right at home here. 

2. Remote-first can work, and it can work well.

Every time I walked through the hallways of the all-glass cubicles in HQ, a majority of the people were on video calls. Not just video calls for the sake of meetings, but also collaborating on code or working together in another way. In fact, often the video screen would be open on a secondary monitor while they worked through something else entirely together. The video was a secondary aspect, but seemed to simulate what it would be like if they were there together and working on something.

To further emphasize this, they used to have company meetings in which, like most other companies, all of the HQ employees would sit together on one monitor, and all the remote employees would call in to view the meeting. That is no longer the case. All employees participate in the monthly meetings from their personal computer in their office, whether they are remote or at HQ.

3. Values are more important to me than they used to be

When I was younger, I mainly looked at jobs as a source of a paycheck. As I get older, I find myself looking for a home, which means that I really need to feel aligned with the values at the core of the company. When I first realized that this had grown so important to me, I was honestly taken aback. Not only is the company committed to happiness and living a healthy lifestyle (as is evidenced by their latest #ReadySetGoal campaign), but the core tenets of the product run through their culture. Trello believes in living agilely, and finding the core essentials—that's why we have the limits in place that we do on our boards—and that leads to a lack of clutter which I find very appealing. I am most excited to be here because I feel like I am on the same page with what the company cares about and what they value in decision making.

4. The people genuinely love each other.

I have been at a lot of companies who have tried to encourage group bonding activities: weekly drink nights, or special events where everyone gets together in the office. That being said, I have never seen them include remote people. Each month the Trello and Fogcreek teams get together to play games and just generally hang out in-office. At the same time, the remotes hang out in a group call together, drinking beers, talking about video games and speaking with various people in the office that drop by the sharing screen. Further more: both parties hang out for hours. Doing nothing, really, besides playing Drawful or asking after one another's holidays. It's truly inspiring and obvious that the hiring team totally kicked ass when it came to looking for culture fits. I am honored to be a part of it.

Alright, /endfangirling.

Cultivating Transparency

I am regularly told that one of my best qualities is my transparency, which is  one of the greatest compliments that I could be given. But, in a world where almost every company is billing itself as "transparent," the word seems to have picked up an occasional inauthenticity associated with its buzziness. How can we collectively work against "transparency" becoming just another meaningless catch-phrase  that companies use to brand themselves? We can take it upon ourselves to truly cultivate it in our life and work. Below are a few steps that I've found helpful in growing my own personal and professional transparency and allowing it to thrive.

Admit your mistakes

It is hard to say that you've done something wrong; it's embarrassing and requires eating a pretty large slice of humble pie, especially when it's in the face of someone else's success. With that being said, mistakes are a great learning opportunity both for yourself and your company. If you've made a mistake, or done something less well than you expected to, use it as a chance to reflect on what you could have done better. What went wrong? What was the cause of it? It might be good to talk about with your team, team-lead or partner in the project, as sometimes they have some outside perspective that puts things into focus and sways the possibility for self-hate and doubt into a learning opportunity. Just because something didn't work out as well as it could have the first time doesn't mean that you can't do it better next time. 

Also, write post-mortems always. Do it whether the project was a screaming success, or perhaps went a little bit sideways. This keeps a record for things to think about moving forward, and gives you a catalog to look back on for reviews and your own personal goal-setting.

Encourage open dialog

Create an environment where you and your teammates are comfortable giving and taking feedback. Feedback can be both constructive or positive, and you should expect both freely. The above example of admitting your mistakes is a great opportunity to open up the floor for commentary. Something that I've taken to doing, after each wrap-up meeting for a project, is asking for feedback from the members of other teams. "Is there something that I could have done better, or that would have made the process go more smoothly for you? What would you have liked to see more of? Was there anything that I did particularly well?" It might seem a bit like overkill, but it is super-important to make sure that you invite the feedback—some people might not feel as comfortable just coming right out and saying it, especially if it's constructive. By opening the floor and letting them know that you want to hear it, you will get much more valuable critique and compliment for your future growth.

Make your goals public

I am of the firm belief that both team and individual goals benefit strongly from being made public. The first reason for this is because of an increased sense of accountability: if you tell your whole company that you will do something by a certain time and don't end up doing it, you should expect them to ask why. Companies and teams fragment when goals are not aligned. It is also possible that you'll be asked why you made your goals in the first place. Being asked "Why" is one of the best things you can do when you are planning out the future of your team. Why do you want things to change? You should be able to explain this with clarity to the rest of your company, and have them be on board. If not, you might want to set different goals or reassess what's driving you towards them.

Secondarily, making your goals available so that any one in your organization can find them shows a sense of trust. You want people to trust what you are doing, and also want to trust them to have faith in your choices.

There is a ton more to transparency than I would ever be able to fit in a single blog post or blog, especially if you are trying to implement it into your company culture. With the three things above, though, you should be cooking with gas in no-time. What are some ways that you promote a transparent culture in your company or team?

 

Why Should I Care? UserConf SF, 2015

This is a text-based version of my presentation given at UserConf in San Francisco on 11/13/15. 

Are you happy with the way things are in your life currently?

Do you believe that things could be better?

Chances are, it's because they could be.

My name is Mercer, and I’m the Integrations Manager at Campaign Monitor, an email marketing company with an office right here in beautiful San Francisco! Today, I’m here to talk to you about self-care and how you can help promote it within your company and personal life.

Self-care. What’s that, huh? Sounds kind of...icky, right? Self-care is, wait for it, the act of caring for yourself. I’m not talking about making sure you’re clothed and fed and that you have a roof over your head, though in the most basic sense, that is self-care. I mean ensuring that you are taking care of all of your basic needs (of which there are six categories), and being the happiest and most productive human that you can be. And that your company is supporting you in doing that.

Here’s an example, for those of you thinking that this is about to be the basic bitch of all talks: how many people in here have gone to work when they were sick, because there was some deadline they had to meet or some other important “something” that had to get done? Raise your hand. Basically all of you, right? I can’t really say anything about that because I’ve been there too. The point of this talk and why I am giving it is because we have all been there. If it’s a friend that was saying “Yeah, I’m going to come into work even though I’m not feeling well,” you would tell them “No, no! Stay home, rest up!” Whereas, if it’s you, you’re all about being Typhoid Mary for your entire team. Why would you treat your friend any differently than you would treat yourself?

Support and customer-facing people are all innately nurturing, caring and kind people. It’s why we have the jobs that we have. If we weren’t all of those things, we’d be developers (hyuck hyuck hyuck, just kidding)! We spend every second of every day thinking about how we can make other people happy or solve other people’s problems, but never thinking about our own. For some, it’s because we feel selfish putting ourselves first, for others, we don’t even realize that we are doing it. You are your own most important asset. Without yourself, you could not do anything. Literally. Which means that all the people that need you around to help them and assist them couldn’t do anything either.

Self-care helps everyone. It might feel selfish to start off, but it isn’t. Taking a few moments (or even an hour or more!) for yourself, means that the rest of the time that you have in your day can be spent more productively. You do better work when you are happy, healthy and all of your needs are being met. You will be a stronger contributor to any groups that you are a part of, professional or otherwise, if you give yourself the space to take care of yourself. If you take just a few moments of each day to do some self-caring, you will be that much more open to caring about and helping others. Plus, it feels good. It’s a goddamn miracle drug. It lights up all the pleasure centers of your brain, and helps you do things like remember more, learn faster, and even beat out depression. Even further, you could be responsible for helping to implement something truly awesome for the rest of your company, and helping to pass that good feeling on to others.

We talk about work-life balance as if it means that the two, working and living, are separate, but I think that’s an outdated idea. We don’t need to spend equal amounts of time on both, but instead put equal commitment into feeling fulfilled at both. But, there are many different things that make up a “balanced” happy life. In comes the self-care wheel or self-care pizza if that speaks more to your tastes.

Your professional needs are some of the hardest to have met, primarily because they so often depend on someone else: your boss. In my own life, it has been hard to overcome the guilt associated with professional self-care: it’s meant leaving jobs, turning down opportunities, and sometimes even severing ties of professional relationships which might have started out as healthy. All of these things, though, came out of the motivation to ensure that my needs were being met, something which I have turned into my own personal guiding light after living a lot of my life very unhappily.

Think back on the past year of your life and the question that I asked at the beginning of this presentation: could things be better than they are right now? When was the last time that you worked overtime, on the weekend, canceled a personal engagement that was important to you in order to make a meeting? We are here at a professional conference to all learn how to do our jobs better, which implies how important it is to us as a whole. “Professional” is it’s whole own chunk on the sociological self-care wheel, which shows how important it is in terms of your overall wellness, too. As I dug deeper, though, I discovered that each of the other slices of this delectable pie were intrinsically tied to professional life, as well. Because, when you think about it, most of your life is work. We think about it when we are on the train, we spend 8 or more hours a day at the office and, if we are given the tools we need to be happy, we enjoy it.

Other than the professional aspect, there are five other pieces to healthy self-care: personal, physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual. To be a healthy, balanced individual you theoretically need to have aspects of each of these needs addressed in your everyday life. And, because so much of our every day lives are spent working, you should be practicing each of these at the office as well. While you might not hit it out of the park with each different aspect at your own company (if you’re batting a 4 out of 6 average, I’d say you’re doing pretty well), I wanted to share some great examples of ways other companies are bringing this balance into their DNA. 

How’s your body doing lately? Are you getting 8 hours of sleep every night? Do you have a regular workout schedule? Your company should encourage you to get out and be active: it’s proven to be psychologically as well as physically beneficial to get your heart rate up and participate in group physical activities: does your company have a sports team, or promote physical activity and exercise in another way? Trello, for example, gives employees full reimbursement of gym costs, while Help Scout recently implemented a Slack bot that randomly pings their remote team members to do crunches, push ups or squats each hour. If your company doesn’t offer things like this, it might be a good opportunity to talk to them about it: ask why that isn’t something that is being encouraged, especially if its something like a Slack bot that can be built in for free. Exercise, along with producing and releasing endorphins in your body, enacts something called neurogenesis which generates new and protects existing neurons. This promotes better memory, learning and reasoning capabilities, all just from a tiny jog or some crunches. For me, this entailed going out and getting my yoga teacher certification so I could teach others, but maybe for you this looks like asking to have a fitness instructor come in and teach at lunch, or taking it upon yourself to lead some calisthenics if you feel so inspired.

When was the last time you bonded with someone over your profession? Do you ever go to support meet-ups, or have any kind of group you can talk with about support issues? There are tons of great opportunities for professional learning through sites like Meet Up, or Eventbrite—especially if you are living in a big city. Maybe, if you’re in office, you could even host a Meet Up at your space. If you’re a bit more isolated, online communities like Support Driven, and conferences like this one here are outstanding places to bond with others and gain great perspectives about what you could be doing better, or might be able to do more of at your own company. Many companies, like Zapier and my very own Campaign Monitor, provide very generous options for conference meet-ups that help you develop professionally, meet like-minded people, and gain some psychological self-care points. Belonging to a group or participating in group activities stimulates the same part of our brain that is responsible for feeling physical pleasure and pain, along with a sense of self-worth; as fun as it can be to talk with likeminded people, it’s also immensely psychologically important and rewarding. Take these opportunities as often as you need, and fully devote yourself to learning—no answering tickets the inbox when you are supposed to be focussing on a talk!

How often each week do you tell yourself (or hear from others) that what you are doing is valuable? Do you and your team have any kind of recognition system in place? Support is so often an unsung hero that it is even more important to implement in-team recognition as regularly as possible. The support team at Campaign Monitor, for example, has a weekly email that they send out that notifies the whole company of really awesome support interactions or work that their team members are doing. This is also something that I worked on when I worked at Wistia. Providing this kind of recognition serves as encouragement to keep working, even if the job can be difficult or frustrating at times. Further more, in such a sometimes thankless job, it can be important to remind yourself (whether that be by someone telling you, or by you telling yourself) that you are important. Providing and receiving positive recognition from your peers can help to validate your sense of self-worth and empowerment, and may even make you (or others) more inclined to tackle goals that you wouldn’t have without that encouragement. Many of the things happening at your company would not continue to happen were it not for your and your team’s tireless and great work. Make sure you are as loud and proud about that as possible.

Does your office have a meditation room or quiet space? Do you have any kind of volunteering policy? Participating in volunteer work with people less fortunate is a great way to feel more connected with the community around you and to feel more spiritually fulfilled. Volunteering and donating time or money provides us with a dopamine rush—the same kind of experience we would have if receiving a great gift or eating a delicious meal. So, while it feels good, emotionally, to give back, it can also lead to feelings of euphoria, happiness and physical well-being. Campaign Monitor offers one paid day off a quarter to go and participate in volunteer work at a local non-profit or charity organization. Something that we did while on our company trip to Fiji, for example, was help to renovate a school house by painting a new mural, building and varnishing furniture, and bringing a new library and sports tools for them to play with. Maybe, if your company doesn’t already have these opportunities, you could be the one to spearhead them.

How often do you ask yourself “what do I want to do with my life?” And, are you currently doing it? Personal self-care means taking the time that you need to focus on yourself and where you are going. Maybe you want to be a support team lead, maybe you want to move into a role in marketing. Start visualizing what needs to happen in order for you to get there, start making moves. How transparent is your growth cycle? Neurologically, each time you set a new goal or think about steps in your future, your brain already perceives that goal as being an intrinsic part of yourself, and releases dopamine each time you take a step closer. Scientifically, your brain likes it when you set goals—it is important and beneficial to its chemical makeup. Buffer, as most people know, is a great example of a company where transparency in how you are doing and where you want to go is key. How much everyone is being paid is made open not only to the internal teams, but to all Buffer customers as well. This helps employees to understand where they fit in the scheme of things, and even feel more brave when asking for raises or new job titles. 

Many people leave jobs because they are looking for advancement that they don’t perceive as available in their current company. By making paths of growth as clear as possible, companies give their employees the autonomy to think for themselves, and be truly aware of whether or not what they want to be doing in the future is possible at their current job. From the employee side of it, this means that you need to be speaking up and asking for more transparency if you don’t see a feasible way to get to where you want to go. Talking about it, and encouraging that, perhaps, a new process be built will help you meet your personal self-care goals, and will help others moving forward.

Just like in an airplane, you have to put your own oxygen mask on before you can help other people put theirs on. You have to take care of yourself so that you can continue to take care of others. Once you make the commitment to start paying attention to and working on these things, whether you do so for your company or by yourself, you will start to see all kinds of things fall into place. Start slowly: make relaxing or meditating, or thinking about your future a TO DO on your list of things—forcing yourself to consider it as an important task will help you reframe the way you think about self-care.

Create a plan, set your boundaries, go forth and conquer. Things can be better, and you can make them that way.

What Yoga Can Teach You About Support

As I move towards my UserConf talk on self-care, I keep thinking about how much yoga has helped me to frame my own perspectives on life, work, and how I handle things. Increasingly, I find myself repeating yogic practices in my every day support interactions. About a quarter of my day is answering or helping answer technical questions about our API, API implementations and other integrations-related quandaries. While that's definitely not as much support as I am used to doing, the technicality and difficulty of the questions can sometimes make it feel like it's much more. 

With that in mind, I thought I would share three yogic strategies which have really helped me through some of the tougher days or interactions in support (and life!).

You are Enough

Yoga can be very challenging and difficult and, if like me, you are a Type A person, you can quickly grow frustrated with not being able to be as strong, bendy, or inverted as you would like. Something that I like to remind my yoga students and be reminded of is that they are enough. Where you are right now is exactly where you are supposed to be. If you wish you could answer more technical questions, or you feel stupid having to ask things of your coworkers, remind yourself that where you are right now is exactly where you are supposed to be. The longer you do it, the more you will learn. Everyone starts somewhere. Keep practicing those areas that are flat sides, and eventually you will be able to do them with ease. It's just like a handstand or backbend: you need to train yourself to get there.

Take a breath

In vinyasa yoga, the yoga that I teach, we link movement to our breath. With each inhale and exhale we change our pose. In combination with the heat, sometimes we can lose our breath or it can get choppy. At that point, I usually advise students to sit down on their mat in child's pose and try to reconnect with their breath to bring it back to a less-choppy pace. Sometimes in support, we can get caught up in things, feel like we have to go-go-go, and lose touch with what brought us there in the first place. If you start feeling anxious, aggressive, or maybe even just a little out of touch, take a step back, take a breath, realign with yourself and your goals. This can be anything from taking a walk, playing a game of pingpong, or literally just stepping back. The important part is that you focus on yourself, what you brought you to work, what makes you love what you do.

Leave it off your mat

As support people, we work all day with others. In fact, most of what we do is talking and interfacing with customers. Because of that, if you are feeling less-than-stellar, it can come across in your responses. In yoga, we advocate people to take whatever they were thinking about when they walked into the studio: dinner, that fight with their best friend, how stressed they are about a project at work, and leave it off of their mat. The hour that they spend in our class should be devoted to that: the class. When they leave, they can choose to pick it up those thoughts if they want them, or leave them if they don't serve them. I like the idea of physically leaving those bummer emotions, and most often don't pick them back up when I leave. When you come into work, if you're feeling particularly unhappy, try to leave it outside of the office. It will help you focus on doing your job better, and it also gives you the opportunity to be free of the burdens of those emotions. After work, choose to pick them up again, or leave them where they are at—if you survived a whole day without them, they probably aren't that important, after all.

Even if you don't do yoga every day, like I do, there are still some aspects of a yogic lifestyle that may help you in your day-to-day. Give these a try next time you're feeling pressured, anxious or bummed, and let me know how it goes for you!

I <3 APIs Masterclass: Building a Successful Developer Program

I am lucky enough to be spending this week in beautiful San Jose at Apigee's I <3 APIs conference. There have been a number of great insights shared, but few as valuable as the masterclass that I attended yesterday on building and marketing a successful developer program. Here were some of the points I found most valuable.

Jeff Hadfield, @jhadfield

• Deloitte, API Trends 2015
• Iot is a bunch of sensors talking to bunch of data in the cloud using both cloud and big data processing. Not just a wearable, not just your smart fridge.

How can we convince management that developers are important?

• Software is eating the world “we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the industry.”
• Hardware value increasingly in software. John Deere recently implemented a developer program. Why are tractor people having/using APIs? Sensors, etc, “precision farming”. IF TRACTORS CAN DO IT WE CAN TOO.
• Uber as example: of all the spaces you thought would get disrupted, taxis probably wouldn’t have been it. 
• APIs ties services, social media, data. Uber, for example, used a map via API, used available trackers on the iPhone, used APIs via square, hooked into existing social.
• APIs drive purchases, consider>adopt>ops>add value.
• The New Kingmakers, Stephen O’Grady
• Apple’s App Effect

Exercise: Value proposition building

• Every framework is flawed, but are they useful? 
• Peter J Thompson: Value Proposition Canvas
• Product: Benefits (why) + Features (how start here) = Experience (what?)
• Customer: Wants (emotional) + Needs (rational) + Fears (hidden, deep whys)
   
• EVERY ONE is different, best way to get to know your customers is to actually talk to them. Not trying to sell, just trying to ask.
  •     What does your usual day look like?
  •     What are your biggest challenges.
  •     What do you want to learn?
  •     What would make you a hero?
  •     What makes our API good and what would like to see made better?
  •     Why are some better than others?

Demographics—how to market/what motivates devs.

• Stack Overflow 2015 survey
• 84% of dev use open source software.
• Developers trust things that they can see inside of. SHOW them as much as possible.
• The hierarchy of developer motivations.
• IBM research: developers want:
  • to solve a business problem
  • to solve a specific technical problem
  • to build existing or learn new skills
  • “fame and fortune.”
• Computers are stupid, and that is why we have developers
• The pragmatic programmer
• Developer personalities: 1 in 40 people in the US is a software developer. 25% of people are INTJ, ISTJ, ENTJ, INFJ or INTP. 71% of devs are those types.
• Please understand me: character, temperament and type.
• Developers are “rationals”: represent only 5-10 percent of people, value intelligence, pragmatic, skeptical (need to think of all the things the stupid computer could do wrong), focused on problem solving, seek knowledge, prize technology, understand systems to make them work better. 
• Break down of Myers-Briggs:
  • introvert (69% of devs, focus on the inner world, like to think about things, concepts. Do NOT want to talk through things with others) 
  • Intuitive (69% why things happen, long range implications, big picture, understand today and future)
  • Thinking (65% of devs, objective analytics, prefer to make their own decisions, logical)
  • Judging (77%, impatient with long descriptions, can make premature decisions just to be ‘done’, organized, structured, decisive)
• Developers just want to find out where they need to go to do the things they want to do (action you want to take needs to be visible all the time)
• Show benefits, let em touch it, let em test it out.
• Developer relations is really just technical marketing. (we all like to buy, but no one likes to be sold to).

Developer Program Best Practices

• Events and Community, Web site & Support, Marketing and Outreach, evangelism and strategic account management. 
• Events and Community/Marketing: Standalone dev events are not as effective as they could be. Many choose to focus on one-to-one outreach. Local events, virtual events (webinars?), paid participation (showcase at apigee is a great example), owned events/hackathons (having our own event right out of the gate is never a great option). MVDP: participate in vertical events: speaking, exhibiting, content marketing, local events.
• Online portal and content: MUST HAVE ONE. Used to drive engagement and inspire developers. Fundamentals: documentation, downloads, support. Balance between providing pre-purchase information and technical info. Involving engineers brings more people into the picture. Look at Twitter and Twilio,[ MSFT, SFDC, so much here] Facebook, Google. Make it clear where people need to start. What is the pain point? Advertise to that (features and benefits)—build them a path. Maybe sample apps for first stage of customers? Discussion community or links to external communities for discussion. If you’re going to have your own discussion board, you need to maintain impression of activity, or at least pay attention. Or, maybe you point them to a specific tag on stack overflow,
• Tech support & evangelism: they should not be as different as they initially seem. Tech support should take place from early in the dev experience, during product, and not just later in the process. Closely align evangelism and support to make sure that there is excitement. Twill and Google both kill this here. You need to make sure that there is a content creator/community participation to see community.
• Account management: if you get this customer, others will follow. Managed accounts are important. Microsoft, Intel, Apple. Task developer relationships team with care and feeding of strategic flagship, bellwether and other metaphorically signifiant partners.
• Demand maturity determines strategy. When dev are drivers, you can rely on quality product, and scrappy tactics. When IT drives adoption, you must spend more money on that. 
• Github, docker, very dev driven. MS, SFDC, IBM, SAP all very corporate it-driven/costly.
• Evangelism is dev driven, marketing is corporate it driven.

“developer relations is a longer term customer attraction and retention strategy, not a metrics-driven, lead gen tactic.”

• For a fledging developer relationships effort, a budget of 2m. a team of 2-3 is ideal. Budget is seed units, content development, travel, event budgets, advertising budgets and so forth. Team members, manager, director Vp), evangelist (marketer), tech team (api, sdk and web devs).
• Developer relationships usually work with a direct report to sales for the most part.

More on marketing

• Apigee’s developer program hierarchy of needs
• Awareness can be complex—maybe they know it’s important, then you need to show them you are better.
• Awareness: word; understanding: sentence; engagement: paragraph; adoption: buy it and keep reading.
• Through your marketing funnel, you are increasing trust. You are decreasing reach, number of people you are talking to lessens. The need for touch/engagement increases. Dev influences increase. Search becomes less valuable all the way down to the bottom, and also only become applicable about halfway through.
• It’s okay on twitter to retweet one billion times. Content reach is limited with our social efforts.

Michael Raslan, @eatabagel

Director of research at Evans Data Corporation - Understanding the development landscape for APIs

• The only developer relations conference (in march) run by Evans Data
• Why developers? They are the barometers or technological change
• Largest pop of developers in APAC and EMEA. 2021, dev pop in APAC up by 50%
• Def of developer: someone who works with apps and software development. Also people who have influence in the developer lifecycle (executives, management)
• Consumer/commercial are one of largest segment at 28%, corporate apps are also 33% and are largest.
• Back end, 28%, DB (25%), client/server apps (20%), business logic development, b2b/b2c.
• Over half of developers are now spending at least half of their time on mobile development (APAC and NA)
• EMEA less likely to focus on new technologies, effected by more conservative habits.
• Iot dev expecting to at least double in the next 12 months.
• Iot focus: office automation, industrial space, NOT wearables. Interesting.
• 20% of devs list cloud as their dev environment. (also expected to double, like IoT)
• 27% of dev involved in big data, increasing need to analyze information coming in.
• External public cloud, mobile clients = largest security concern.
• Is security about perception or actual compromises? This specifically has to deal with perceptions of vulnerabilities. Weak server side security and client injection are the two weakest security points.
• 11.5 million working on publishing APIs or working at companies who have published APIs. 60 percent of dev pop. Almost *all* developers are using APIs. 
• To grow your brands and your product adoption, you need to make UI offerings available to a larger audience (via APIs)
• What business problems are dev trying to solve? No one size fits all understanding of what dev are doing—depends on industry and market habitation.

Bruce Jones

Hadfield Jones, technical field evangelism.

• Questions that they often hear: how do we convince people internally, what should our strategy be? How do we do outreach.
• Why do developer outreach? Who should represent the company in the field? When should he program start? How long will it take? What’s the outcome.
• Early integrations, experimentation and partnerships get other people talking.
• Sphero: 4 years of dev programs/other learning opportunities built into one awesome new product (bb-8 droid toy)
• What other toy companies have open APIs? Furby, etc.

Michael Leppitsch

Global digital transformation services at apigee, Recruiting Partners

• Enabling the digital value chain -> User (customer), Apps (product, but adaptive), Developer (also a customer), APIs (more product, but contextual/predictive), API team, Backend. (how do your assets become valuable to the developer ecosystem?)
• Analytics, personalization, demographics all provided via API. Ability to differentiate.
• A lot of your direct value comes from changing the processes that your customer is using to engage with you.
• Audiences for APIs: APIs reach developers to create brand/awareness, reach partner’s developers for distribution/adoption, reach internal developers (employees) for process efficiency.
• How to be sticky with partners: reduce friction (quick onboarding, self-service for APIs), improving connectedness. Increase openness (hackathons, dev events, participate in forums), increase creativity (don’t create rules and boundaries, potentially exciting/new technology/ideas?)
• APIs reduce stranded investments, reduce risk in partnerships, and lower cost for all parties.
• You’re able to “light up” partnerships more quickly, because you already have the APIs there to use.
• New partners, current product offerings -> increased market share, and thus expand our market.
• New product offerings, existing partners -> product innovation, and thus expand portfolio of products.
• New product offerings, new partners -> new business models, and then create brand new markets.
• Single channel (single place to buy), multi-channel (multiple places, not connected), omni-channel (multiple places, all connected)
• Omni-channel -> careful between creepy, convenient, and compliant.

• Best practices: 
  • Co-marketing. allocate a budget to work with partners to take value to market downstream (marketing money), feature on your digital properties (or vice versa), promote at events.
  • What does trust look like? What do you contractual obligations look like? Easier because APIs are not custom development efforts, APIs belong to us, what the partner builds on the API is theirs.
  • Design a EULA/leverage APIs to standardize partnerships. Manage partnerships at the edge with API policies.
  • Data has tremendous value, data shared with partners is more valuable than data is siloed. Approach data conversations with value creation in mind.

Matt Carter, @itsmattcarter

The Developer Marketing Game Plan

• Forces us to feature the developer as a HUMAN.
• Two core components of developer marketing: track progress of your audience, preferences and evolve to meet them. Track how you audience is progressing towards your objectives. Build, Measure, Learn framework (best stuff you can learn is what isn’t working). 
• Tracking enables us to see what customers/developers are doing so that we can do it better (let them do it on their own). As you measure, you do a better job at meeting their needs. 

You want to do better by your customers, not build your own mini NSA.

• Steps to buy-in:
  • Awareness(do they know they have a problem and there are solutions available and that you have a solution to offer them)
  • Understanding (do they understand your key value prop), engagement (Is there need great enough to want to try your API and see if it works for them)
  • Adoption (do you remove enough pain or provide enough gain to justify the effort of using your API?). Adoption is bottom of the funnel. Then, maybe, you can move them to advocacy, which broadens the funnel back out again. 
• If we do not get people to understand “hey this is amazing, this is what you can build” they will not buy our product, they will go with a competitor.
• Everything in developer journey is related to marketing automation—things change depending on what their behavior is.
• Github.io. Nirvana is if customer issues a pull request.
• Lots of tutorials and white papers, then they realized they had too much stuff. Wanted to create a more structured journey. developers.hortonworks.com
• If you have a buddy and they are wanting to learn about our product, where do you send them first?
• Key KPIS: Awareness (views, conversion, perception baseline), understanding (content consumption, convert to lead, baby steps to trial), engagement (first successfully pilot), adoption (usage and renewals), advocacy (holy grail—developer program participation [social media, hashtags], user groups, number of groups, participations, geographic distribution).
• Test driven marketing: start with you outcomes, work backwards, simplify, prioritize, have your scorecard set: goals (I need 50 leads), KIPs (I want to improve my conversion rate), qualitative (I I want to be perceived as a market leader ahead ofmy competition).
• Tactics for marketing is really important to connect to the end result. For example, why are you doing a hackathon? What is the end goal for your company. 
• Paid, earned, owned, social. Owned is digital properties, like you sites. Earned: partnerships, syndication, paid: advertising. Social: social platforms.
  • Paid: (use sparingly, super targeted), launching a new product, support for a marketing “moment in time” competitive Judo, supporting your SEO strategy. Hypothesize, test, repeat, own your mistakes.
  • Earned media: search is everything—70% of web traffic comes from Google/others (developers looking for answers). Tips for success: basic site hygiene (title tags, attributes). get your team to tweet about you. Don’t gate your KB. Every landing page should be a beautiful home page, essentially.
  • Owned (your marketing annuity): website, developer network/program. Ask for likes and followers, listen and respond. LinkedIn, publish story and advertise. Get people accustomed to providing answers, and your community engagement will change drasticly. YES YES.
• 9 dollar marketing stack

Notification phobia is a real thing

Did you know that there is a legitimate phobia of having those little notification badges that pop up on your smart phone show without being able to get rid of them? It's called nomophobia, short for no-mobile-phobia, and is surprisingly a very real, chemical problem. I know this because I have it.

Each time you see a notification from your phone, you get a little upsurge in dopamine, whether it be a text message, a spam email, or notification on Facebook. This then compels you to keep checking your phone, hoping each time that you get another one of those little bubbles, hoping that it's something good and not something, well, crumby. As Business Insider writes: "it's like the world's smallest slot machine." 

Chemically, you are being compelled to continue the behavior of checking your phone, just like a rat pushing a button for a treat. Your brain says "Yes, you have to do this to feel good," and so you do it. The only issue with this is that you can then start to feel overstimulated or, if the response to the impulse is negative (a spam email, a negative text message), your brain starts to feel agitated, and even anxious with each new stimulus. Crazy, right? So, if you (like me) start to feel crazy when you see that little red bubble with a "35" in it next to your email client on your phone in the morning, it's because you want to get rid of that potential stimulus. You want to get all of that gratification at once instead of your brain waiting to find out whether it's good or bad. You want to ease the tension in your mind.

From someone who works on application experience teams, this is fascinating to me. Each additional, redundant notification that we send via push notification could potentially be making or breaking our customers' days—we are chemically affecting them. Here are a few things that I've seen applications do that could be done another way to potentially avoid the over-stimulus that is leading our customers to uninstall, turn notifications off, or feel a heightened sense of tension and anxiety.

Birthday Notifications

I'm looking at you, Facebook. Every day I wake up to an extra bubble attached to my Facebook app on my iPhone telling me that it's my best friend from second grade's cousin's birthday. Is this a necessary use of screen space and dopamine? I think not. We should not be sending inane notifications for things that people did not ask to be notified about; whether it be birthdays, holidays, events I didn't RSVP to or any other item that I have not specifically indicated interest in. This is a false positive signal to dopamine, and can leave your customers and users feeling chemically borked.

In-app Update Notifications

Are you sending an email to your customers about updates to your mobile offering? Probably. If you are, you shouldn't be doubling up on notifications by also pushing an update badge to their smart phone. When they wake up, they will look and think that something notable has happened (someone has liked or interacted with their contact, they have a new personal message, etc), and will instead be greeted by stale news that they might have even already overlooked (or deleted) in their inbox. Keep your in-app notifications for truly important things, such as broken features or functionalities.

Random person did random thing Notifications

Did Biff Jonsington like my newest post on Google+? No? Have I indicated that I wanted to receive updates about what he's doing? Probably not. Then why are you notifying me that he posted a two-year old article about saving killer whales? Companies should not be sending badges or notifications to their users about anything unless they have indicated express interest and concern in the things that they are being notified about. What you are doing is essentially a more invasive method of spam emailing. This is like coming into someone's house during breakfast and shouting at them to read the newspaper just to have them discover that there's nothing in there that they care about anyway.

Notifications can provide real value, especially if they are telling someone that there has been a meaningful interaction with their content, or they are being notified about something that they genuinely care about. However, if your app is perpetually the cause of a negative dopamine response with false positive notifications, people may turn them off, move your app to another screen to avoid it taking prime real estate, or even uninstall it all together. Strategizing your notifications is a much better way to move your app up in priority, encourage user interactivity, and avoid being banished to the third screen in. It also helps to show that you care about your customers, their personal sanity, and don't want them to spend the next thirty minute just deleting inane red bubbles from their homescreen.

Don't help customers help themselves

Automation is the way of the future, or so I am told. We want to automate our interactions away to the point where, ideally, a customer does not one have to speak with another human in order to accomplish every single goal or task available within your product.

But why?

When we automated in the machine industry, it was to cut costs—robots were cheaper, in the long run, to have working in mass-production than humans were. There was less room for error, products were more perfect, they were able to create more. Is that why we are trying to move to automate questions away for support? People can do things faster? Less room for error from an unprepared support person? Not having to staff a full support team (or hire more) is cheaper for the company?

I might have slightly over-exaggerated in my title, but in the event that any of these above issues are motivators for your company's move to automation, I think it may be worth a reassessment of value. Here are the reasons why I think that keeping a strong human touch, especially when it comes to customers, can be helpful:

Nuance

Robots, documentation, and other automated tools do not understand nuance. There is a reason that a human operator instantly picks up as soon as someone starts swearing or saying "trigger" words to an automated phone service. Your customers will all have different learning styles and preferences, and there is no way that you will be able to speak to all of them using the same singular method. I hate to break it to you, but even the most expansive of documentation resources will still lack something that someone needs. You can recommend related articles as much as you want: if they don't recognize the signals your titles are trying to give them and they don't have anywhere else to go, they will stop using your product. 

Living creatures of all kinds are able to communicate and understand the nuances of tone, message, and intent. Documents, chat bots, forms and surveys can not. Your customer knows this just as well as you do.

Representation of Brand

What would you rather have: a perfect brand or a human brand? Humanity is what will help you stand apart from your competitors. If there is no life to your brand, nothing that helps your customers align with your values, you will have significantly less engagement, and probably less sales than your more human brethren. Just like in Ex Machina, robots and automation sure are pretty and shiny and definitely get the job done, but they are no replacement for humans—no matter how much they pretend to be.

Your customers would likely rather deal with a few typos or apologies for misinformation than they would trying to jump through one million hoops to find the right documentation or video gallery that they needed to find to get the job done. Plus, no matter how well-crafted your long-standing content may be, you will undoubtedly still need people to keep writing more in order to keep up with the pulse of your business. 

Longevity

Manufacturing machines break down and become outdated. Once they do, factories need to spend a whole 'nother boat load of cash buying the newest, shiniest edition. In these days where technology is evolving so rapidly, a company can find themselves needing to upgrade technologies as often as every few months. The idea of automating away support is still so fresh and new that tools come out every day promising to make it easier and easier to never have to touch your customers again. Instead of interviewing them, you can record them browsing your app; instead of having an employee watch your chat, you can have a bot monitoring it designed to look human. But things that look human and aren't human will eventually become rusty and need to be replaced. Stick to the rivers and the streams that you're used to, as TLC would say: use the fancy new support tricks as a test in tandem with the tried and true methods that are working for your company.

I'm not saying we need to be high-touch, holding-hands-with-customers-every-day, love reps, but I do think that putting a barrier in some places to require human support can be helpful. It can assist your product team in gaining new insights into what customers are looking for, it can help your developers uncover bugs, marketing develop personas—things being broken and real humans solving the problems ultimately helps give revenue back to your company. Your customers are your customers for a reason; if they knew everything about your product they would be your support team. It is very likely that, as much as you want them to help them selves, they will not always be able to, or even know where to start. In that case, you need humans. Sure, it may take longer, you may end up with some frustrated customers, but hearing about those frustrations with human ears, rather than letting them fall on deaf machine ones, may make a ton of difference to your customers and your brand.

Latte with a side of tech support

Every time someone asks me how I got to where I am today and I go down the long list of coffee and food service jobs I've had, their mouth is agape. How could someone who is seemingly successful in the tech industry have been slinging espresso just a few short years ago? The truth is that there are more than a few similarities between working in a restaurant, as a barista, or as a waiter and our friendly neighborhood customer support person. What are they, you might ask? Hold on to your butts, because I'm about to tell ya.

Commitment

My last job in coffee was at a coffee shop here in Boston called Wired Puppy. I was the opening barista which meant that I had to get up at around 4 AM, get to the cafe prior to the trains running, bake 60 muffins, 12 scones, brew 8 huge canister's worth of coffee and prepare the cafe for the rest of the day, all while taking customers' orders and making their fancy latte drinks. I was the only one there until around 7AM when a second barista would come in and help assist me through the morning rush.

That might not sound like it, but it's a lot of pressure.

If I didn't show up on time or overslept, the whole process of the cafe would be hosed for the day, and they would constantly be playing catch up, trying to bake more, trying to make sure iced tea was ready, running out of coffee...you get the drift. A lot of that was a deep-seated commitment to perfection, knowing what had to be done and doing it. This is incredibly important in a support role—your customers are depending on you, your teammates are depending on you, your company is depending on you. You need to get there and bake the metaphorical muffins.

Patience and Acknowledgement

People come into coffee shops or restaurants and bring all their anger and emotions with them. Maybe their boyfriend just broke up with them, or they got bad news, or they just started their day off on the wrong foot. To them it is a huge deal that there is 2% milk in their latte instead of skim, or that their muffin wasn't heated to exactly the right temperature. A good barista, waitress, bartender or other food-servicer understands that these small details can be a huge detail, and will always pay attention to, acknowledge and correct any mistakes that have been made. They'll remake the drink, get a new muffin, or maybe even offer a free credit for next time.

In support, there is a whole lot more nuance, but people will still bring their outside pain and frustrations into an interaction. If a person has handled a customer getting really angry, and maybe even yelling at them over using sugar-free hazelnut syrup over regular, they will also be able to handle an aggressive customer over email, chat or phone with patience and understanding. They are already natural mediators.

Practice and Memorization

When you first start serving, waitressing or being a barista there is a lot that needs to be learned. There are tricks to doing things that will help speed up your processes, people that will be able to help you do things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to, and tools that you won't even know about until a few months in. This is all even before you are tasked with learning the immense process of how to make a perfect latte, or a drink, or even plate a meal properly. 

I liken these to the soft and hard skills that are required in support. The little practices, like learning that you can brew a vat of iced tea in the time that it takes for a batch of muffins to cook, are similar to finding the tricks of the trade like which screenshot sharing tool works for you. The big practices, like learning how to make cappuccino foam properly, can be likened to something like learning how to use Chrome Extensions to debug a nonfunctional script. Both people in food service and support people practice these tricks and methods tirelessly and essentially memorize them in order to boost efficiency and multitask.

Obviously there is a lot more to support than that: natural aptitude towards technology, overall demeanor, culture fit, and so on. But, if you can find someone that has worked in food service as a waiter, barista or bartender, you can rest assured that they have the grounding bits needed to excel in support.