Schedule - PostgreSQL Development Conference 2024
Lessons from the Support Desk
Date: 2024-05-30
Time: 10:30–11:20
Room: Sauder(2270)
Level: Beginner
In theory, there's a practical feedback loop between customer facing teams, like support, and product development teams, like product engineering. In most organizations, this takes the form of feature requests, or specific complaints, which are evaluated and built into future releases. And this is great! It makes our venerable database better.
But there are some inherent assumptions about support engineering that can be missed by the developer experience. Sometimes it feels like the two groups are talking past each other. A fix that the developers provided, and are really proud of, might not meet the expectations that support, and customers had. Or customers’ software requirements are so unreasonable as to be nonsensical from a developer perspective.
This presentation will get into the assumptions and otherwise unnoticed experiences that support organizations have when interacting with developers. In doing so, I hope to help illuminate why feedback comes to developers in the way it does. This will give developers a better understanding of the expectations mismatch that underlies misunderstandings between developers and support engineers. This will lead to stronger collaboration, and in the end, better solutions.
