Reflecting on the Seattle Tech Leaders Lunch

This past month I had the pleasure of moderating the panel for the Seattle Tech Leaders’ Lunch hosted by Raygun, and it was an interesting, educational, and fun time! The Seattle panel was just a stop on the Tech Leaders’ Tour, and brought some impressive tech leaders together to learn about improving software quality and customer experience.

Our four panelists were Diana Kumar, a Senior Director of Product Development at Tableau Software, Doug Rathbone, a Software Development Manager at Amazon Alexa, JD Trask, the co-founder and CEO of Raygun, and Rory Richardson, the Head of Business Development of Serverless and Application Integration at AWS. So, as you can imagine, I was particularly intimidated and in awe at the powerhouses in front of me!

Throughout the panel, we discussed the importance of prioritization of tasks based on customer desires and development team resources. It’s a tough balance to achieve! The leaders brought up different metrics they use to determine how they’re doing, from backlog size to NPS scores to surveys. Balancing the customer wants, the development team needs, and the product bugs/backlog/features is an art that every software team seems to have to carefully work on everyday.

My favorite question asked was, “what do you wish you could measure?” and every single leader responded the exact same way: how do we get quality, legitimate customer feedback?

It’s a tougher question than you think. You can only give your users so many surveys before they get annoyed. How can you tell if they like a certain release, outside of the generic A/B testing and those “rank us from 1-10” responses?

JD said that the Raygun team attempted to throw in a little survey on the side of the Dashboard a while back, but quickly pulled back when they realized that if users are in the Dashboard, chances are 1) they’re not happy, because they’re facing crashes, and 2) they don’t have time for a survey, they have to stop the errors! And then, on the other end of the spectrum, Rory talked about a release that her team made a while back that users were so excited about. So excited, in fact, that their team baked a cake for it! She found out on a whim because someone sent her a photo of it.

How do you capture those, “this release is so good, we want to bake a cake!” moments, especially if nobody tells you about them? How do you attach data points to those moments? How can you get a general vibe of how your users are feeling, without prodding them consistently for, “do you like us? Really? How much?”

Well, as much as we tried, we couldn’t answer that pie-in-the-sky question. In JD’s wise words, “if you can solve this, your ideas will be worth their weight in gold.”

Overall, the Seattle Tech Leaders’ Lunch left everyone brainstorming, motivated, and hungry for more. Thanks so much Raygun for hosting, and to the panelists for the discussion!

If you'd like to read more about the event, check out the Raygun blog at https://raygun.com/blog/tech-leaders-seattle/