Building a Product Your Customer Actually Loves - DevRev Enhancements

Show & Tell

My first Show & Tell presentation was a good one — a black, locomotive-shaped eraser for my first grade classmates to ogle over. But as these things often go — you guessed it — it was gone from my backpack by the time we returned from recess.

Years later, weekly Show & Tells were a fixture in our team’s schedule, a whimsical twist on demo days. Finished a unit of work? Find a way to describe the achievement; don’t just tell us, show us your achievement.

What is this issue resolving?

Who are the target customers?

How does the user benefit?

Example: We’ve enhanced our auto-routing feature by introducing support schedules. Now, support admins can define and manage agent or team schedules, ultimately leading to lower resolution times on customer conversations. This was an early ask from n customers, namely Acme and Brick.

And, by the way, what constitutes a “unit of work” or a “done condition”?

Know the Parts

DevRev organizes work around parts, so products, capabilities, and features that make up your offering. If you want to understand how a set of issues — work done by developers — fit into the greater context, simply look at the related parts and you’ll understand how these issues connect to product or get consumed by customers.

Of course, new features aren’t launching every day, so there’s one more thing.

Enter Enhancements

Simply put, Enhancements improve existing features or lay the seeds for new ones. Enhancements go through stages, perhaps an idea that eventually gets prioritized, developed, and delivered. Once completed, an enhancement can become part of an existing feature; in this case, you can view all the enhancements done to the feature over time, a nice way of characterizing the evolution of a feature. And of course, some enhancements may be promoted to become features in their own right.

Personally, I love enhancements! Not only are they the perfect-sized capsule for sprint plans and work grouping, but teams can discuss ideas & progress within the enhancement timeline — no need to create, manage, and archive private channels or find the right email thread.

At DevRev, our engineering pods have gotten into a nice rhythm with weekly updates in the enhancements we’re working on in the current sprint. If you want to see what the engineering teams are working on, you can group issues and see all the active enhancements; with their relationship to features and customers, it’s a clear view into product and customer priorities. Also note that enhancements aren’t just an issue capsule with built-in chat; you can tie artifacts, technical docs, and design mocks so everything’s in the right place; no more chasing people down for the latest specs and designs.

I should add not all active development ties back to an enhancement; you’ve got one-off issues to resolve customer tickets, for example. Given this, it’s incredibly convenient to see how much development work ties back to enhancements as opposed to ongoing maintenance and the rest. Rocks, pebbles, and sand, as we like to say.

Customer-centricity

DevRev’s mission is to help create the most customer-centric companies. If you’re using DevRev to handle support tickets, they can be tied directly to Enhancements.

In fact, you can use DevRev’s neural engine to group tickets based on similarity and create new Enhancements easily!

Combined with DevRev’s Support offering, Enhancements are linked to related tickets, tied to customers, and connected to relevant articles. Incidentally, these articles will help DevRev’s chat engine respond to customer inquiries (more on that in a future blog post).

Final thoughts

Developers benefit immensely from task clarity. By articulating achievements in the context of product and customer, teams can help all parties know how their work matters and build the basis for customer-centric planning.

DevRev Enhancements offer a simple tool that can help development teams stay consistent with this practice and build towards a culture of customer-centricity.

And what’s most important: with the completion of each Enhancement, we can look forward to another Show & Tell!