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Why continuous deployment just keeps on giving - The Intercom Blog
Intercom has practiced continuous deployment since its early days, deploying code automatically after each merge to master. The pipeline uses GitHub, Codeship for the test suite, and an internal tool called Muster to push code to production EC2 instances, typically in under ten minutes. The company now deploys over 80 times a day, aiming for 100 by end of 2015, and a dashboard tracks this history over three years. This rapid feedback loop allows engineers to iterate features through internal, beta, and public stages, learning how people use the feature and how code performs in production. The automated system helps new engineers ship code on their first day and a feature in their first week by removing deployment barriers, and they demo their work at Friday sessions. Additionally, a fast and reliable deployment process discourages engineers from bypassing it during critical bug fixes, reducing risky behavior.
Podcast: Margaret Gould Stewart on designing at scale
Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook’s Director of Product Design, discusses the challenge of designing products for over a billion users, citing Google Search, YouTube, and Facebook as examples of universal human needs. She emphasizes balancing audacity with humility, taking oneself out of the design process to focus on user needs. User research remains critical, using both quantitative data and ethnographic studies across different cultures and regions, with products tested extensively before release. For business products, usability must come before beauty, but delight on top of a usable foundation is powerful, as seen in consumer expectations. Stewart also highlights the importance of diverse teams and inclusive hiring programs like Facebook University to better represent the global user base.
How ProfitBooks used Intercom to increase renewal rates by 40% - The Intercom Blog
ProfitBooks, an Indian cloud accounting startup, faced a fragmented toolchain as it rapidly grew to over 1,000 customers. They previously used separate solutions for customer support (Zendesk), email marketing (Mailchimp), feature tracking (Asana), and a self-built CRM, resulting in low customer engagement. After adopting Intercom as a unified platform for support, email marketing, and sales, their customer message volume increased 15 times, revealing previously hidden user feedback. Intercom’s automated messaging and user segmentation enabled targeted emails, boosting open rates from 7% to 45% and driving measurable business impact. By sending a payment reminder one day before account expiration, ProfitBooks achieved a 40% increase in renewal rates, and a follow-up promo converted 18% of churned trial users.
Brian Balfour on creating meaningful growth - The Intercom Blog
Brian Balfour, VP of Growth at HubSpot, defines a growth team as distinct from product and marketing, focusing on getting the target audience to experience core product value quickly and often. He argues that the lines between marketing and product have blurred due to technical, data-driven marketing and accelerating growth speeds, necessitating a new team structure. Growth teams should not build core product value but rather optimize the funnel, such as onboarding, referral, and engagement, using a rapid experimentation process. Balfour warns against chasing vanity metrics and emphasizes that growth is a mentality and process, not just tactics, and that the right time to build a growth team is after clear product-market fit, typically around Series B. He recommends getting executive buy-in, educating across teams, and securing early wins with data to overcome skepticism and establish the growth team’s value.
Beware of icebergs - Inside Intercom
The post warns that features like search, rich text editing, and email processing are ‘icebergs’ whose visible simplicity belies weeks of development work. Search requires deciding what to index, whether to segment results, and whether to pre-index, making it far more complex than a text field suggests; frequent search requests often indicate a different need, such as quickly finding a specific user. Rich text editing, even when limited to bold and italics, causes maintenance problems when content moves between app, email, and mobile, and the HTML produced is often poor. Email processing involves two icebergs: detecting when users have read notifications to avoid re-notifying, and handling replies by parsing inbound email with context and signatures. The author recounts a ‘Merge accounts’ button that required six weeks of work and was scrapped, illustrating the hidden cost of seemingly small changes, and advises planning for all cases.
Has visual design fallen flat? - The Intercom Blog
The post surveys the flat design trend of 2013-2014, characterized by flat rectangles, minimal shadows, large photography, bold typography, and slick animations, inspired by iOS 7 and Material Design. It argues that while this minimalist style brings clarity, its ubiquity has created an aesthetic monoculture where many products look indistinguishable, making design a commodity. The author draws a parallel to Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture, warning that repeated simplicity can become lifeless, and cites Jane Jacobs on the value of organic diversity. He speculates that future design diversity may be driven by new technologies, cultural influences from a growing global online population, or a backlash against flatness. The post concludes that flat design may persist but will likely eventually give way to new styles, though it offers no definitive prediction.
This is not a map - The Intercom Blog
Intercom added a map feature showing customer locations worldwide, kept it live for three years, and recently sunset it despite its popularity because the use case was unclear. Customers primarily used the map to show off at conferences, on Twitter, and to investors, not for geographical analysis. Realizing the map’s true job was as a showpiece, Intercom shifted improvement focus from cartographical accuracy, clustering, and borders to aesthetics and shareability. They redesigned the map to automatically hide sensitive data, look impressive, and provide a unique shareable URL, making it easier to show off. This approach resulted in a geographically inferior map that better served customers’ actual needs, proving that understanding usage trumps the feature category.
How to predict technology flops - The Intercom Blog
Technology flops share a common trait: they fail to perform a clear job for customers. The Segway, for instance, offered marginal speed and height advantages that only appealed to niche markets like tourists and security guards, not the global walking market it targeted. Google Glass and Google Wave also suffered from impressive technology without a defined use case, leaving them without a job to be done. In contrast, disruptive products like modern weather apps succeed by precisely understanding the simple jobs customers actually need, such as knowing if it will rain soon. Game-changing products like the iPhone combine new technology with concrete, useful applications, focusing on what users can do rather than what the product does, and 47% of first movers fail because they cannot explain their product’s job.
Why happiness at work really matters - The Intercom Blog
Research from the University of Warwick found that happy workers are about 12% more productive, and Shawn Achor quantified benefits including 37% higher sales and 31% higher productivity. However, the post argues that common perks like free food and high salaries are overrated because humans quickly adapt, citing a study where lottery winners were no happier than accident survivors. Instead, factors such as meaningful work, recognition, and strong relationships are more critical, supported by Gallup research on engagement. Alexander Kjerulf, a management consultant, recommends five practices including random acts of kindness, hiring for attitude as Pret A Manger does, and celebrating mistakes like Ben & Jerry’s flavor graveyard. The post concludes that making staff happy is about offering meaningful work, not expensive benefits, and that any company can afford that.
On magical software... - Inside Intercom
Product design is a cost-benefit analysis, and software feels magical when it dramatically reduces user effort relative to the value delivered. The post identifies three modern sources of magic: Uber-fication, which reduces repeated tasks to a single tap; eliminating data entry by pulling existing data from external services; and ambient awareness, which delivers insights automatically without user action. Uber-fication requires unbundling complex products into single-purpose apps, as Facebook did with Messenger, and using context-aware defaults based on time, location, and previous actions. Eliminating data entry involves connecting to services like Facebook for friends, email for receipts, or Stripe for revenue, rather than asking users to input information. Ambient awareness means designing systems that push valuable analysis to users, such as Intercom’s daily report on new users and slipping customers, rather than requiring them to log in.
Is asking why always the best strategy? - The Intercom Blog
The post argues that asking ‘why’ repeatedly in product design interviews is not always the best strategy because digging too quickly to the deepest reason can miss valuable insights. Instead, the author recommends exploring three productive layers: usefulness (what the tool does), usability (the result of using it), and desirability (the emotional outcome), each revealing different design opportunities. For example, with an electric drill, the usefulness layer suggests power and speed settings, the usability layer suggests lighter weight and prescriptive settings, and the desirability layer suggests a docking station or attractive design. The author cautions that going beyond these three layers, such as asking why a more personal home matters, becomes too abstract and rarely actionable for product design. Taking time to explore each layer thoroughly yields more actionable and interesting insights than rushing to the root cause.
Doubling down on content - The Intercom Blog
Intercom hired John Collins, a former print journalist with 20 years at The Irish Times, as managing editor to lead its content efforts. The company’s blog, Inside Intercom, has been a key driver of its success by sharing insights on web design, search, and business evolution, not just product features, and increasingly reflects the views of its customers. Intercom avoids typical content marketing tactics like link baiting or artificial publishing schedules, instead focusing on evergreen content that builds a lasting knowledge base and gets referred to weeks and months after publication. This approach allows direct engagement with customers without intermediaries like PR agencies or trade magazines, which have declined, and the company is not setting up a corporate newsroom. The company views this as an experiment putting a journalist among engineers and designers to create content that attracts and engages prospective customers on its own terms.
How we do product design at Intercom – Inside Intercom
In a 2014 email to Intercom’s design team, Paul Adams shares a deliberate ten-step process focusing on deep problem understanding. Designers must first read all research and customer feedback, consult the Customer Success team for clarification, and use product instrumentation to avoid assumptions about user behavior. They are instructed to generate at least three or four different solutions, research how other products solve similar problems, and iterate through feedback from multiple designers. Work proceeds systematically through four design layers: outcome, structure, interaction, and visual, with the principle of not mixing levels and always optimizing for simplicity. After shipping, designers must proactively measure success against defined metrics, talk to the Customer Success team, and learn from mistakes, as truly great designers are dogged in understanding problems even after a solution ships.
7 things I wish every search box did - The Intercom Blog
Search in web applications often fails to deliver speed and relevance, yet it is critical for findability as users cannot browse effectively through large amounts of content. The post, by Algolia’s CEO, presents seven principles: show real results from the first keystroke, search across multiple attributes like name and company without field specification, rank based on object importance and context such as user activity or location, highlight matched terms to explain results, offer faceted filters instead of complex syntax, accept typos and synonyms while ranking approximate matches lower, and ensure consistent mobile and desktop experiences. Ranking should consider dimensions like recent activity or geo-location rather than text frequency, making users feel the search reads their minds. Results must explain why they matched to help users quickly identify the best result. These principles help users find results with minimal effort and make search feel intuitive, addressing the iceberg of search complexity.
Interview with Bob Moesta on Jobs-to-be-Done (Part 2) – Inside Intercom
Bob Moesta explains how startups can apply Jobs-to-be-Done theory by identifying struggling moments and understanding the switching mechanism, including why people switch, the cost to switch, and how they choose alternatives. He advises focusing on people who have already switched rather than hypothetical buyers, because actual purchases embed a value code that reveals trade-offs and what they are willing to give up. Moesta argues that beta tests must include a payment component to reveal what customers truly value, otherwise feedback is unreliable and leads to over-engineering features no one will pay for. He illustrates with a home building example where reframing from selling homes to helping people move increased sales, and including a moving service or furniture for a divorced mom sold more homes. The interview also covers competing against non-consumption, as seen with Siri enabling texting in situations where typing was avoided, increasing texting by 300 percent.
Show, don't tell, with GIFs - The Intercom Blog
Often dismissed as outdated, the GIF format has found a crucial new role in customer support for showing users how to perform tasks, replacing inefficient convoluted text instructions. Intercom uses GIFs to demonstrate actions, following the “Show, don’t tell” principle, which removes the need for step enumeration and annotations. They are particularly effective for reporting interface errors such as broken transitions or animations, removing the need for arrows, lines, and wordy descriptions. Recording a desktop area into a GIF is easy with free tools like Licecap for macOS, or GifGrabber and GifBrewery as alternatives. Customers respond enthusiastically to these GIFs, often asking how they were made, and they can be used across emails, in-app messages, and documentation.
Interview with Bob Moesta on Jobs-to-be-Done – Inside Intercom
Bob Moesta, who works with Clay Christensen to develop an online course on Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD), applies the framework through his company The ReWired Group, which helps Fortune 500 companies find innovation whitespace and incubates technology startups. JTBD is gaining popularity because Christensen promotes it, markets are saturated, and traditional marketing methods target large markets rather than seeding niches from existing consumer struggles. The method starts with the consumer’s situational context and motivation, stopping abstraction when the consumer cannot think about the problem, as in the milkshake example of solving commute boredom. Products often perform multiple jobs; the decision to split products depends on conflicts in how consumers measure value, not just benefits. Branding can be structured with endorser, driver, descriptor, and ingredient brands to clearly communicate the job a product solves, as with IBM Thinkpad and Intel Inside.
Is machine learning hard? Not always - The Intercom Blog
The post argues that machine learning does not always require advanced mathematics and, as described by Intercom’s Fergal Reid, is about systems that improve with more training data. It contrasts a naive keyword-matching approach in Ruby for a ‘You might also like’ feature, which produced irrelevant results, with a basic machine learning method using K-Means clustering. The machine learning approach first represents each blog post as a binary vector indicating the presence of each word from the entire corpus. The K-Means algorithm then iteratively assigns each post to the nearest cluster center and recalculates centers as the average of assigned posts until assignments stabilize. The post demonstrates that roughly 40 lines of Ruby code can produce relevant recommendations and encourages readers to try libraries like Scikit Learn.
How to Educate & Persuade Customers - The Intercom Blog
The post presents a framework for product messaging that categorizes user tasks by ease of execution and user desire, using a quadrant to determine whether to educate, persuade, or nudge. Tasks that are desirable but daunting require education to simplify the concept, while easy but low-value tasks need persuasion to highlight benefits, and tasks in between may only need a nudge. The author warns against simplifying tasks users do not want, citing failed startups, and references Ev Williams’ formula of removing steps from long-standing human desires. The post also discusses the cost-benefit trade-off in user decisions, distinguishing honest growth hacks that alter the trade-off from dishonest ones that deceive users or move goalposts. It advises against building a business around complex unwanted tasks and notes that Intercom itself uses this approach by teaching customers about drip-feed marketing.
How to launch with a validated idea - The Intercom Blog
The post describes a three-step process for launching a validated idea, called the three I’s—Ideas, Input, and Iteration—mirroring the lean startup approach. The author explains how his team validated their idea by drafting mockups, creating a sign-up page, and running AdWords, and they got lucky when blogs shared their landing page, giving them a base of potential users for product preview sessions. They then launched a minimum viable product (MVP) and used Intercom to send surveys and automated in-app messages, creating a continuous feedback loop. To iterate, they formed a CoPilots program of users highly likely to purchase who provided weekly feedback via Google+ Hangouts in exchange for free use. The entire team was involved in reviewing interviews, and the cycle is presented as an ongoing process for SaaS startups.
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