Engineering a culture of psychological safety
When I worked for Google as a Site Reliability Engineer, I was lucky enough to travel around the world with a group called “Team...
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Having the right amount of process at your startup
Discussing software development and engineering processes is a great way to end unwanted conversations at parties. Dull because it feels...
What to do when a feature grows faster than expected?
When you launch a new feature, what has worked for your beta users won’t always work as well when your code and your databases are...
Empathy engineering: bridging the gap from code to customer
My name’s Dale, I’m an engineer and I have a confession to make. I like talking to customers. I know I’m supposed to spend all day...
How we convinced everyone to care about technical performance
Be it a marketing site that’s slower than your competitors’, an app that crashes on install, or a blog post that never loads, technical...
Giving customer support a seat at the product table
At Intercom, we’re ferociously focused on two things: our product and our customers. Keeping a strong bond between these two parts of our...
Building better mock servers for mobile with Speakeasy
If you have a mobile app which communicates with a server through HTTP, then you (hopefully) have tests which ensure this communication...
The good way to file a bad bug
Great bug reports are the the oxygen of quality control. Take them away and everything turns sour. As a Customer Support Lead, I spend a...
When a cupcake becomes a wedding cake
One of the core principles we apply to building product at Intercom is “think big, start small”. What looks like a small piece of UI can...
Why we sacrificed product capability for availability
When your company is experiencing growth, you need to concentrate on mitigating downtime – even when that means sacrificing capability....
People leave managers, not companies. Don’t let that manager be you.
Do people really leave managers, rather than companies? And if so, how do you fix the problem? The data suggests bad management is a real...
An engineer’s take on the theory of dominant design
As an engineer, things that don’t make sense keep me up at night. I need to find some underlying order in things. Lately, the thing...
How to run 1 : 1 meetings that work for 2
As an Engineering Manager it’s not always obvious where to allocate time for maximum impact. Time spent in 1:1 discussion with my direct...
Finding your way from maker to manager
The transition from engineer to engineering manager can be a tough one. But become a manager of engineering managers and you’re even...
Opening up the power of Intercom’s platform
On Good Friday in 1962, Lou Groen trialled a new sandwich in his Ohio burger restaurant. It was a last-ditch attempt to save a failing...
The golden mean of design and engineering
There was a time when I viewed designers with the same scepticism as I viewed homeopathy. When I pictured designers I thought of Mad Men,...
Building a cross-platform product
Our product teams pride themselves on working in small, autonomous units. Each team has their own roadmap, their own weekly goals, and...
The programming of everyday things
Software has become an everyday thing. Our TVs are smart, our thermostats learn our routines and our cars will soon drive themselves. How...
There’s no hand off in product design
What makes or breaks a product team? Strong design principles are one. A clear, effective roadmap is another. But one of the most...
Lessons learned from scaling a product team
There’s been lots written about how Internet businesses should build software, from books like The Lean Start-Up, and posts from Google...
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