Top Performance Metrics in Machine Learning: A Comprehensive Guide

Jordan Drake

Aug 19, 2024

When we first launched Plain and onboarded our early customers, our support strategy was simple: everyone in the company took ownership of support. This unstructured, whole-company support model allowed us to stay incredibly close to our customers – giving the entire team direct insight into their needs, pain points, and areas for improvement.

Stage 1: Just do it

When we first launched Plain and onboarded our early customers, our support strategy was simple: everyone in the company took ownership of support. This unstructured, whole-company support model allowed us to stay incredibly close to our customers – giving the entire team direct insight into their needs, pain points, and areas for improvement.

As we grew beyond having a small number of customers, unstructured support turned into a mess. It wasn’t clear who was looking after what, and took more of the team away from core product work. We still believe in the power of whole-company support. There’s literally no better way for us to learn about our customers and improve our product than by using our product as our customers do – but at this stage, more structure was needed to improve the efficiency of how we did support.

“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”

— Olivia Rhye, Product Designer

Stage 1: Just do it

Stage 2: Nominated support rota in addition

As we continued to grow, we realized that even this structured approach wasn’t enough. The demands on our team were increasing, we were taking on more enterprise customers, adding more channels and features, and we had tighter SLAs in place. We held our first ever support retro when it became clear that we needed to make improvements to how we do support at Plain.

We made a point to always include at least one technical team member on the rota each week to speed up our time to resolution. We also decided that new team members would spend their second week at Plain on the support rota. This has proven to be the best way to get new hires up to speed with our customers, and familiarize them with how our own customers use Plain.

Image courtesy of Laura Davidson via Unsplash

Lack of ownership

Every month, we hold a team retro to review what’s working and what needs improvement. These retros typically cover everything from how we worked together as a team to ship a new feature, to onboarding new teammates and refining how we work. We knew we needed to change our approach to support when we spent a significant amount of time discussing the impact that our support rota has on how we work.

What wasn’t working?

One of the most significant pieces of feedback from our support retro was that being on the support retro felt more and more like a full-time job.
However, we weren’t making any concessions in the expectations for other work from those on the support rota.
It increasingly became the case that as an engineer on support you could basically consider any project you were working on as ‘paused’ for that week.
Ideally, the team on support rota should be able to fix small issues for customers immediately.

Top Performance Metrics in Machine Learning: A Comprehensive Guide