Intercom Product Principles: What You Ship Matters

At Intercom, we take pride in what we ship - from the planning stage through customer feedback and iteration.

When I started designing digital products, my goal was to bring the design of the solution to its final destination: the engineering team. I handed it over to the engineers and by the time they started coding I was spent focusing on the next project.

This is the eighth article in a series exploring the principles of our products. Here, Eugenia discusses our engineering principle "What you ship is what matters".

I quickly realized that I was missing the opportunity to ensure that what I designed matched what was shipped and, more importantly, that the solution actually solved our client's problem. I was missing the opportunity to answer key questions: Does the solution successfully solve a customer problem? Is it useful? Does it impact the company's business results?

"Launching a solution is just the beginning of the journey"

As a designer, I had to take initiative and take ownership of what I was shipping, both to make sure the client got the best possible solution and to keep learning and improving my design skills . I quickly realized that launching a solution is only the beginning of the journey.

Take ownership of what we ship

At Intercom, when we say "What you ship is what matters", we are essentially saying that our deliverable is the end product or feature that our customers use - whatever comes to hand. Customers don't pay for design files, they pay for solutions that solve their problems.

Designing a solution means not only building the ideal design states, but also anticipating how the product will actually be used in the customer's context. We work closely with product managers to establish a common understanding of the problem at hand. We do scoping calls together and are heavily involved in the solution shipping process.

"Rather than simply entrusting our designs to the engineers, we work with the team at every stage of the production process"

Rather than just handing our designs to the engineers, we work with the team through every step of the production process. We are constantly collaborating, communicating, getting their feedback, making compromises, reducing ambiguity and iterating when necessary. There are no big transfers or surprise reveals.

We remain the owners of our solutions after they have been dispatched

But shipping is just the beginning. As designers, we also have some responsibility for what happens after shipment. Does it solve the customers problem? Are we done (however we measure the fact)? If not, what is wrong? Why is this important? How can we solve this problem?

Shipping is when we start to know if we need to improve the solution or do something different. We love seeing customers start using our solutions and telling us what's good and what's not. We review data, talk to customers, gather feedback and prioritize it. Thus, the iteration cycle begins.

Understand post-launch issues

In 2020, I worked as part of a team to find a way to sync company data between Intercom and Salesforce. But after launching the solution, we noticed that there was little sync activity. Why was this happening? We wanted to understand why sync activity was low. Was it the setup? Was it a problem with the data? Due to the complexity of the issue, we couldn't make any changes that would work for all of our customers.

We decided to do a series of small experiments. One simply made the details of sync activity visible to the client, allowing them to debug their own configuration; a simple design solution that was not obvious to the team at first.

"By controlling the problem, we were able to gradually improve the solution for our customers"

After implementing these tests, we saw an improvement of 10 to 15 percentage points. We still had a lot to do, but by getting the problem under control, we were able to gradually improve the solution for our customers.

As designers, we take ownership of what we deliver, because we believe that the quality of the solution is the responsibility of everyone working on it, not just the last team to touch it. We are responsible for it, even when we work with others. We sweat the details and strive for quality. And, as a team, we take pride in the work we ship to our customers, before and after launch.

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