Cynthia "Arty" Ng, Staff Support Engineer Everyone Can Contribute: Making Support Effective Through Contributions

About me ● Many Customer Service-related roles ● Teacher > Librarian > Support Engineer ● Management experience ● At GitLab 4+ years ● Staff ~= Manager ● Documentarian

Credit: Mathias Appel, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_Panda_Waiting_For_Lunch_(31133617581).jpg

GitLab as of 2022-10-01 ● 2000+ team members ● Fully remote in 60+ countries/regions ● 130+ Support Engineering (including managers)

Making Support (more) effective

Answer the following questions ● Do you work in Engineering? ● Do you have a Support team? ● Do you have a backlog? ● Do you want to increase your velocity?

Have your Support team contribute docs & code! Yes, really.

Common blockers

Support teams don’t have write access to docs.

Support teams don’t have read or write access to code.

Everyone dreams of Support fixing their problems. So how do we get there?

Part 1: Give your team access ● Talk to Development and Product. ● As many projects as possible. ● Ability to submit contributions to docs or code.

Part 2: A well-defined review workflow ● Build trust with Development. ● Have a process designed for anyone to propose changes, and get it reviewed. ● Make it easy for Support to contribute. ○ Example: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/contributing/merge_request_workflow.html

Part 3: Avoid the small things ending up in your backlog Skip this: 1. Support opens issue 2. Product & Development schedule it (at the expense of other work!) 3. It gets fixed 4. Support finds out later Get this: 1. Support submits a fix (and send a link to the customer!) 2. Development reviews 3. Fix gets merged

Based on: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests Number of MRs merged by Support team member in main GitLab project

Support focus on bugs. Development focus on features.

Build it into Support ● Provide & budget time ● Job responsibility ● Performance review ● Onboarding ○ Example: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-training/-/blob/master/.gitlab/issue_templates/Documentation.md ● Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Source: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/support/performance-indicators/#support-mr-rate Average number of MR merged per Support team member

Source: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/82147

Source: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/79845

Source: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/81777

Source: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/81886

“I've seen minor contributions to the documentation directly deflect tickets, make answers frequently asked support questions publicly available/discoverable, and even mitigate or avoid customer emergencies. [...] I estimate each time the upgrade docs are updated by a Support team member, at least a dozen future support emergencies are mitigated.” - Greg Myers

“If a docs or code contribution I write helps a customer or another team member troubleshoot a problem in a more efficient manner on their own or it resolves their problem completely, that’s a win for me. It’s a very satisfying feeling knowing that something you did is improving the efficiency and user experience for everyone else.” - Anton Smith

“Having your code or docs update reviewed is an excellent learning experience that leads to a much greater, low-level understanding of the product and its components. If this doesn’t make us more effective Support Engineers, I don’t know what does.” - Łukasz Korbasiewicz

How do we make Support more effective?

Have your Support team contribute docs & code!

Everyone can contribute

Thank you

Twitter: @TheRealArty SD Slack: @arty-chan about.me/cynthiang cynthiang.ca Cynthia “Arty” Ng