This blog post started as a discussion of our customer support policies, and how unique and cool they are. As I kept writing, though, I realized that it was actually about why I love working at Keen IO. I’ve been working here for about a month, and I’ve never been happier going to work every day.
Prior to becoming a software engineer, I had a bunch of different jobs in a variety of fields: painter, actress, linguist, speech therapist, florist, swim instructor, waitress, clothing salesperson — you name it, I tried it. What originally drove me to become a developer was my love of problem-solving and logic, traits which had served me well in my linguistics studies as an undergraduate, but which I had never been able to parlay into an actual career that I found interesting. Shortly after graduating from a developer bootcamp, I discovered Keen IO and convinced them to hire me.
So, why do I love working here?
I get to work with fantastic people who are passionate about their jobs.
At Keen IO, workplace culture is extremely important. Everyone that works here feels that way, and actively works to enhance the culture. That starts, first and foremost, with a commitment to transparency. We are all transparent with one another, to a degree that I’ve never seen anywhere else I’ve worked. It makes for a really stress-free and supportive work environment, which is very important to me as a junior developer. I need to be able to work somewhere I feel I can ask a “stupid” question and not be judged.
Everyone on the team is so supportive and helpful that I never feel intimidated about needing help. I, like a lot of women, definitely have impostor syndrome. (This article from Slate discusses this phenomenon further.) This means that I usually will avoid asking questions, because I assume that I should know the answer already. Since I started working here, I’ve noticed myself asking a lot more questions, and I’m not self-conscious about it. Every person I’ve asked has been incredibly helpful and non-judgmental, which is key to feeling comfortable acknowledging a lack of expertise.
I get to solve interesting problems for our users.
As a big part of my job, I spend a lot of time in our user chat, providing support for our customers. I love it and find it incredibly interesting, because the problems I’m solving are so varied from day to day. (Plus, our users are just really friendly and cool people!) It’s also been really great for learning about our product. I discover something new about our API pretty much every day, because someone comes into the user chat with a new use case for Keen IO and has a question about it.
It’s good that I love working with our users so much, because customer support is part of everyone’s job here at Keen IO. At first glance, you might think that’s a weird idea, but I think it’s a big part of the reason our users love us so much. If you just code all day and never interact with your users, it can be easy to forget about the actual people who are benefitting from your work.
When you interact with someone who’s having an issue with something you’ve written, you can see how to design it better much faster than if you were responding to an anonymous support ticket, or if you were stuck having to rely on hearsay from the support team. It’s easier to identify with (and want to help) someone you’re actually talking to, rather than some random person someone else tells you to help. Perhaps the most obvious benefit of constantly being in the position to provide customer support, though, is that you’re also usually the one who can fix it. The user doesn’t have to wait around for a fix, and everyone’s happy.
Here at Keen IO, we believe our customers when they say something is wrong. Ever notice how when you report a problem to most companies, they assume you’re the one in the wrong? The support process starts with them making sure you’re not an idiot (i.e., “Is it plugged in?”).
We don’t do that. Our only assumptions are that our users are very smart, but also very busy. If they don’t understand something, it’s probably due to them doing a bunch of different things right now. Maybe they didn’t have time to comb through our documentation. That’s fine! That’s what we’re here for: to help our users actually get to use our API. If a user tells us something is unclear, we go and update our documentation to account for that. Believing in our customers is an important principle at Keen IO, and it’s one of my favorite parts of working here.
The product I work on is really cool and interesting.
The idea behind Keen IO is fascinating. Event data can be pretty much anything, right? Yet most of the event data platforms out there have very specific things they track, and that’s it. If you want to get more customized analytics, you used to have to build that internally. Now, you can just use us. I think that’s pretty awesome.
Some of the example uses for Keen IO, pulled from a Quora question:
- A growth hacker writes a script to send a nightly stats email on detailed actions users take in his or her app
- An enterprise SaaS company provides analytics within their customer portals for their customers to track and optimize their own stats
- A gaming company provides metrics in their gaming platform to help developers track the performance of their games
- An e-commerce site optimizes ads and products that are served dynamically based on a given user’s behavior on their site
- An AdTech company builds a custom advertising data dashboard for their sales team that correlates successfully converted ads with viewer attributes, so they can sell more relevant advertising
You get the point. Keen IO is unique and super useful in the world of data analytics, and it’s fun to get to work on it every day.
I am in charge of what I do here.
The people at Keen IO trust each other to do what needs to be done. From the first day that I started working here, I’ve been allowed to do what interests me. No one is micromanaging me, or assigning tasks to me without checking to see if I’m interested first.
Since I get to choose what to do every day, I’ve been working in a bunch of different areas. On any given day, I could be updating our documentation, jumping on a Skype call with a new user who wants to chat about our pricing, writing a blog post like this one (or this one or this one), working on adding functionality to one of our SDKs, helping us to integrate with a new partner company, or creating our internal wiki.
There’s always something to do here, and something new to learn, so I’m never bored. Every time I cross something off my to-do list, there’s five more things to be added. For me, this is perfect. I don’t do well when I feel constrained in my job, or like I only have a certain purview within a company. Luckily, all of my team members here at Keen IO feel the same way!
When I was first looking for a job, I had two specific things I was looking for. I wanted to work with people I like, and I wanted to be able to do something interesting every day. Obviously, I found both of those with Keen IO, and it’s by far the happiest I’ve ever been at a job. And when people are really happy at their job, great things happen.
