Wednesday, August 17, 2011

one team for the customer

What have you done lately to make your customers happier?

Have you called them more often? Have you stopped developing new features until you reach a Zero Known Bugs state? Did you hire the best Information Engineers to make your docs all bright and shinny?

If a lot more than this, or none, or none of the above, let me give you another idea of what we do:

We built a cross-feature team staffed with the brightest people who analyze customer escalations, observe trends and write beautiful code to make sure future escalations in the area are near to impossible. Out of 30 customer escalations on how slow your server compliance checking runs, they would come up with a new way to access your compliance rule repository using a proven web server instead of your custom (slow!) python multi-threaded code.

How would this setup work? Would they sprint together with the rest of the teams? When will they sync with the feature teams to make sure they are not writing the same optimizations? Would you have this team on a permanent basis or build it ad-hoc depending on the number of current escalations?

Know what, these are all up to you, in the end it's the client 'smile' that matters.

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