Challenge: During this time, I started at Sendgrid as a support engineer, leading support teams. After some time, I noticed that a large volume of our support tickets were coming from specific issues that required development escalation. As such the challenge was to reduce these incidents, and remove the engineering dependency

Opportunity: Analyze the support incidents, determine the overall effort/contribution/impact, and create products to address them. The first major issue was that  customers were missing events over periods of time to their endpoints which support would have to recover. The second was getting many of our customers started with API integration at various levels and samples of their code. 

Product Strategy: Leveraging support team beginning engineers and problem solving, I enabled my teams to design and code for solving the aforementioned problems. The internal “Replayr” product allowed our teams to query Splunk over a date range for missed events, generate an API call, and send missing data to customer endpoints. Our next product “Code Workshop” allowed developers to plug and play their chosen language, providing libraries, and generating code on the fly for API integration.

Results: Support tickets in these specific categories decreased drastically, the engineering dependency was removed for support teams for these ticket types. Code Workshop became a customer facing product, and as a result, developers were able to self serve for API integration needs.