The subtle art of supporting mature products - Flavia Circiumaru - NDC London 2025

This talk was recorded at NDC London in London, England. #ndclondon #ndcconferences #developer #softwaredeveloper Attend the next NDC conference near you: https://ndcconferences.com https://ndclondon.com/ Subscribe to our YouTube channel and learn every day: / @NDC Follow our Social Media! https://www.facebook.com/ndcconferences https://twitter.com/NDC_Conferences https://www.instagram.com/ndc_conferences/ There comes a time for every engineer to be part of the support rota of their organization. Embellished with a long list of recognition opportunities to expand their knowledge, be closer to the client, and extend beyond their everyday project, the challenge is usually welcomed. With 12 years of experience in the financial compliance industry, at FundApps we have done support in the standard rotational model for as long as we can remember. Each engineer would allocate, on average, a fortnight per quarter to handle customer queries while the rest would be spent on roadmap items. At least, that’s what we thought. As our services and features expanded, our handovers became frustrating transactions of context switching, disheartening ambitions to detect opportunities for automation, and unrealistic expectations that something helpful would be left behind before going back to our BAU. Half-answered queries, unfinished tickets, and undocumented changes became a weekly trend, that eventually reached a point where entire roadmaps got postponed. As a result, in a single year, we faced no less than 900 engineer days of unaccounted work, causing significant budgetary challenges. One of the values we’re most proud of is #do-more-with-less, and this was not it. With a much-needed change of perspective, we decided to build a dedicated support team. Come along to learn from our trials and errors, diving into the practices that worked best for our support ecosystem to drive resiliency, high-quality customer response, and planning our success in the long run. By the end, you will have a clearer idea of how your product can benefit from a different support model.