In this edition of DirectorPlus, Jack Tam, SVP and CTO at Intuit Mailchimp, shares how he encourages engineering leaders and developers to prioritize the customer.
Many organizations talk about being “customer-first,” but few actually walk the talk. At Intuit MailChimp, however, “customer outcome is the first priority,” says Tam.
For Tam, this translates into “outcomes over activity.” User-facing applications need to be stable and effectively manage high-traffic peaks. Simultaneously, you must routinely collect user feedback to detect bugs and refine the engineering roadmap. But, perhaps most importantly, you need to give developers a reason to care.
Intuit Mailchimp gives engineers a direct window into customer outcomes through qualitative feedback and quantitative metrics. “The engineers appreciate the direct connection and transparency to customer feedback,” says Tam. “This helps them connect their work to what matters to our customers.”
Prepare to scale from zero to one thousand
Tam has been with Intuit for 21 years. Before Intuit acquired Mailchimp, he led the TurboTax and TurboTax Live engineering, operations, and technology efforts. And at TurboTax, it all comes down to one day: April 15th.
No one likes taxes, so everyone procrastinates and files on or near the deadline, leading to a predictable but mammoth usage spike. “Imagine the operational excellence that is required,” says Tam. “It’s very different from a SaaS project that works 365 days a year.”
Email newsletters are less dramatic, but online marketing similarly spikes from Black Friday to New Year’s Eve each year. Still, the problem is that engineers typically think about the positive use cases, not the customer usage realities that might kill availability or uptime. “99.9 is not good enough,” says Tam. “You have to think about that 0.1% and all those edge cases.”
Taking lessons learned from TurboTax, Tam is encouraging increased rigor in engineering execution to hit release dates and validate product dependencies. He adopts Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), a framework to test for errors or bugs in a product, similar to white hat or black hat testing. “Ultimately it has to work end-to-end – there can be no seams,” he says.
Close loops and share
It’s on engineering leaders to set the stage to be customer-first. “How you show up as a leader, and the type of meetings you have can drive that mindset,” says Tam. With every decision, you should ask, “How does this enable the customer outcome?”
To help direct positive customer outcomes, Intuit Mailchimp routinely collects feedback with traditional customer surveys. This often identifies defects or performance issues. Many employees talk to customers daily, from product to design, engineering, marketing, sales, and customer success roles, and these accounts are also captured and shared with engineers. “These metrics are one of several customer feedback loops we share so engineers have a clear line of sight on how their work directly contributes to customer benefits,” says Tam.
Customer satisfaction scores can indicate quality. But so can quantitative site metrics – like availability, performance, ease of use, or failed customer interactions.
At Intuit Mailchimp, security and compliance are always the number one priority, closely followed by availability and prioritization of production incidents. Next comes defects, including performance, quality, and usability issues correlated to service-level agreements. “Our first priority is to ensure our foundations are good,” says Tam. “Then we prioritize from there, including ease of use issues that may be ‘not great’ but still usable.”
Follow the 80/20 rule, with exceptions
Even with all the feedback and metrics in the world, determining which features to support isn’t always obvious. “We are constantly trying to focus on the highest value add for the broadest set of customers,” says Tam.
This goal is especially challenging for a business-to-consumer product like Mailchimp, which serves small-to-medium businesses in various industries. Its user base includes everything from non-profits to professional services, photographers, bands, landscapers, lawyers, and contractors.
All the input that comes in must be prioritized. “We have to balance customer feedback with where we think the product should be headed,” says Tam. “Is it going to move the overall strategic vision of where we want to go?”
Sometimes, individual users can expedite new features or suggest new ones that could benefit all customers. For example, one high-value customer sent over a laundry list of ideas, including SMS marketing, a feature Mailchimp was already actively looking into.
They empathized with the customer, fixed “broken windows” like bugs and performance issues, expedited the SMS rollout, and added other suggestions to their roadmap. The single client requested 100 features! “Within 90 days, we prioritized about half to be executed and delivered,” says Tam, who was the executive sponsor on the account.
Give developers a reason to care
Intuit Mailchimp employs about 650 full-time engineers across three locations. Tam says the customer-first mindset can get lost in large organizations. This is exacerbated when developers feel three or so degrees removed from the actual customer.
He stresses the importance of connecting those engineering teams to the user. One easy way to do this is by routinely sharing product recommendation scores (PRS) and customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) with developers. This gives them more context so they know what they’re working toward.
“We want our teams to have customer empathy,” says Tam. This empathy is wide-ranging, including how customers conduct their business, use their products, and their opinions. According to Tam, inching developers closer to the customer helps solve real-world problems and be more successful.
