Month: October 2013

Why remote teams are the future:

It’s now easier than ever to create a messaging system that doesn’t result in a flooded inbox.

A great post from Help Scout about how their team works. Really cool to see that they use P2. I wrote a bit last week about how we use similar tools and ideas with our support team at Automattic.

My co-worker, Alx Block, writing about his experience at UserConf:

The only way that your start-up will set itself ahead of the pack is by providing the best customer experience. Loyalty drives us, and without support, we are nothing…I’m passionate about helping WordPress.com users be the best that they can be. I’m proud to be a Happiness Engineer. I’m proud to call myself support.

Seminars About Long-Term Thinking: Thinking, Fast and Slow. I’ve been reading Daniel Kahneman’s, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” lately. It’s a fantastic book and this lecture acts as a high-level summary to it. If you dig the lecture it’s well worth picking up the book.

Distributed Happiness

Last Friday I spoke at UserConf about how we run distributed support teams at Automattic. The talk was about 30 minutes and I’ve written it up, with slides included, as a blog post below. You can also download the full slide deck. The video is now online, too.

UserConf 2013.001-001

Read the full post →

Good Support:

If you want to show your customers that you care, it starts with your support team.

Work break

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Because going on an 8-mile hike at 2:30pm on a Wednesday is something you do.

The person they’ll become:

there’s a lot of future perfect people. People who have the potential to become the perfect person in the perfect role if just given the right opportunity.

Flying out of SFO

San Francisco from the sky

Snapped this while flying out of SFO yesterday morning.

How do good ideas spread? A great New Yorker piece from Atul Gawande about how some ideas take time to spread. More than just a theoretical piece, too, it includes specific examples.

Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops:

The true power of feedback loops is not to control people but to give them control.