Onboarding as a new support leader
Ready, fire, aim. Wait, no, try that again.
I see that I’ve been talking about the hiring and onboarding process for the past two months, so it’s high time I switched topics for a while. Since I’m in the middle of onboarding into a new role myself right now, it’s a great opportunity to talk about this very situation: joining a new organization as a support leader.
If you’re in this boat yourself, it’s probably for one of four reasons:
The company you’re joining doesn’t have a support function yet
The company you’re joining has a support function, but wants to systematize/scale/improve it
The company you’re joining has an established support team but something is broken and you need to fix it
You’re replacing or supplementing an existing support leader but are expected to maintain the status quo
You’ll need to approach each of these cases differently, so it’s important to be clear why you were hired in the first place. If you’ve arrived at Day One and still aren’t sure, make it your top priority to figure out what’s going on and what you’re expected to do. I’ll look at each of these situations separately, but today let’s talk about some of the things you’ll want to be doing regardless. One thing they all have in common is learning. For your first weeks and months in your role, you should focus on understanding the existing landscape, for good and for ill. Only once you have a solid working knowledge of the environment should you start thinking about changes and improvements, however well-intentioned those changes might be.
Learn the product
First, both in importance and in sequence, you’ll need to understand the product you’re supporting. Over the first few weeks you should learn everything you can about the product by
Reading documentation
Running through any available training, internal or customer-facing
Going hands on with the product
Understanding how the product fits in its overall field, including complementary and competing products
Your goal, at least at first, is to gain enough proficiency in your company’s product or products to have context for the next step: how do you support this thing, anyway?
Learn to support the product
Now that you have a good understanding of the product itself, it’s time to figure out how support works in this organization. After all, it’s impossible to effectively lead a support team if you don’t have a deep understanding of what your team does and the challenges it faces. If there’s already a support team, or anyone who’s been doing support, look at old support issues and have conversations with the folks who’ve been handling them. Get a feel for what an average day of support looks like, typical kinds of issues that are brought to your team, and how those issues are investigated, addressed, and followed up on.
Learn the organization and meet your counterparts
Concurrently with learning about the product and how to support it, the early days of a new job are a perfect time to get the lay of the land across the organization. Where does support fit in? Who else interacts with customers on a regular basis? Do all those teams report up the same chain or to different leaders? It will be hugely important for your future success to figure out where the support team fits into the overall organizational structure. Get to know the leaders of the customer success organization, of the sales organization, of the product organization, and of the engineering organization. You’ll be interacting with all of those teams regularly and, as you are getting your feet under you, those leaders will be useful to provide insights into how well support is working already and any points of friction between your teams. Building those connections now will also help down the road to promote smooth interactions between the teams you lead.
Make a plan
Only once you’ve established yourself and have a handle on how support operates today should you start planning for the future. At the same time, keep in mind that you’re still new to the organization, and any ideas you have now may yet prove to be impractical. Always run your plans by your counterparts in other departments, and your own supervisor, before settling on a particular course of action. That being said, you should now have enough context to start thinking about:
Systematizing support issue handling and best practices
Improving documentation to address frequently asked questions or confusing parts of the product
Clearly delineating boundaries between support and other teams, including explicit handoffs
Establishing standards and training programs for team members to improve support quality
Team scaling or improvements that you were brought on to specifically address
Over the next few weeks I’ll talk in more detail about the four different scenarios I mentioned above, since you’ll need to take a different approach for each of them. But for your first weeks in your new role, follow the steps above to quickly gain knowledge and confidence in order to prepare yourself properly for the work to come.
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