Blog | Yetto

Expected vs Actual May 23, 2025

The value of Support

How do we show the value of Support? What does that even mean? Why are we doing this?

Expected vs Actual April 11, 2025

May you live in just-interesting-enough times

Leading through challenges - political, financial, social, personal - is difficult. Let's talk about it.

Expected vs Actual January 09, 2025

On taking time away

Taking time off from Support is easier said than done. How can you and your team relax and recharge when customers always need your help? Let's look at some options together.

Expected vs Actual December 11, 2024

Proactive support

Hey, Product and Engineering teams. You want some ideas on how to work more closely with your Customer Support teams. I've got some thoughts on that.

Engineering December 04, 2024

How I learned to stop worrying and love Dockerfiles

Here's a closer look into leveraging Docker's `ONBUILD` command to generate base abstractions.

Expected vs Actual November 15, 2024

Patterns emerge from practice

In the field of software development, it's said that 'patterns emerge through practice.' The same is often true for our team workflows. So why do we let other people write our patterns for us?

Expected vs Actual November 08, 2024

Support is a cost center - part 2

Making support a profit center has its problems. We can mitigate them... but let's just not do it in the first place.

Expected vs Actual November 01, 2024

Support is a cost center

There. I said it. But that doesn't have to be a bad thing!

Expected vs Actual October 11, 2024

Automaton and on and on

Automation is important. But understanding the work comes first.

Expected vs Actual August 22, 2024

Hiring your first Support Professional

How to hire your first support team member and how to build the team from there. It's not hard, but small mistakes here can cause problems for years.

Engineering August 20, 2024

Chainable filters, flexible HTML

Turning text into HTML for fun, profit, and creative expression.

Engineering August 01, 2024

How our labeling system works

How everyone else does it doesn't matter.

Expected vs Actual July 30, 2024

Why do we do this?

Different people have different reasons for getting into support. There's no common path here. And that's a good thing for us.

Expected vs Actual June 28, 2024

Not now, we're too busy

Support is often 'too busy' to implement changes that could positively impact the team and the customers.

Expected vs Actual June 13, 2024

The reverse Anna Karenina theory of support

Unhappy support teams have reasons to be unhappy, but they don't know what to do about it.

Expected vs Actual May 01, 2024

Support work is done by teams of people -- not a collection of individual queue crushers -- and it takes diverse skills, dispositions, focuses, and areas of expertise to do well. The way we measure that work, however, doesn't reflect that.

Expected vs Actual March 21, 2024

Conway's Law and Order

In an organization's hierarchy, the tools we use are a reflection of two separate, yet equally important, identities: the culture of the teams who build it, and the identities of the people they affect. These are their stories.

Expected vs Actual February 29, 2024

AI can't do your job

AI isn't going to make your job obsolete. Capitalism might, but there are other options.

Expected vs Actual February 21, 2024

Building and maintaining sources of truth

What is and isn't a source of truth and why that matters.

Expected vs Actual February 14, 2024

Support is a dead-end job

Support is a bad job with no career path. Or so it seems if you look around. We can change that, but it won't be easy.

Internal Comments June 14, 2023

You're already doing all hands support

From escalation-via-founder to sales calls and customers pinging employees on Twitter, your company is already doing all-hands support..they're just not doing it well.

Internal Comments June 07, 2023

Stop doing all hands support

Company-wide all hands support is more harmful than helpful. It's become an industry standard for reasons that seem great on the surface. Those reasons don't hold up to close scrutiny. Let's scrutinize.

BCC May 31, 2023