| Some caveats and related advice, having been on the product side and two different customer-facing sides: Integrate support engineers at least part-time into the product engineering teams. Support engineers who don't know what product is doing can duplicate or complicate product work. Invest in paying and training the support engineers. Don't pay them well and they'll either transfer to product engineering once they get competent or jump ship to someone else. Poorly trained support engineers who "have commit access and can write fixes" will invariably introduce new bugs that will block product work. "Don't distract product from new features" is a great goal, but recognize that it's a goal, not a law. There will be fires that product engineering will have to walk into and put out alongside support engineering, especially if your product is more than an small-team app, exponentially if the problem comes about due to systemic design problems on the product side. It will be tempting to outsource support engineering to save money for in-housing product. Don't. If anything, outsource low-hanging product work before any support work. In-region support engineers make everything about firefighting smoother and customers in every geo will appreciate it. Incorporate support pain into your dev process. That's not bug metrics—measure the _pain_ your product causes customers. Feature requests are pain. Insufficient docs are pain. Licensing issues are pain. You can insulate product from customers, but don't insulate them from the pain the product causes customers. Use it to help guide the roadmap and you'll find low-hanging fruit that product never considers because, chances are, they aren't interacting with painful parts of the product (otherwise they'd already be addressing it). |
The only thing I'd add:
> who "have commit access and can write fixes" will invariably introduce new bugs that will block product work.
All fixes by Support Engineers should go through the normal CI pipeline and Code Review process. This is designed to exactly stave off this kind of effect. But yes, I still agree with your points! I love HN <3