Vanilla News - October 2019 Edition!

Hi Vanilla!

Welcome to the second edition of Vanilla News. The previous post is available here.

CEO's Office

The Ottawa office is up for sublet and we are hoping to move to a larger office by Spring. Our Ottawa lease was up for renewal last year, just around the time we hired Derek Bayford. At the time, we didn't know if we would find a VP sales in Montreal or Ottawa and did not know where we would be staffing up sales. Unfortunately, we are only 1 year into a 3 year lease and will have to find a sub-tenant before we can move.

The budget has been finalized! As you may remember from the presentation made at the last staff meeting, we are expected to add about 20 people by the end of next year if our sales continue at this pace.

Haya has been helping me with our Oracle partnership listing and we expect it to go to Oracle for approval this week. We continue to be in contact with a different team at Oracle in the hopes of becoming their vendor for their communities and displacing Jive/Khoros.

COO's Office

The COO, aka News Anchor, has been working on floor plans for the newly leased 7th floor. We're using the same design company as before and plan to create a similar vibe downstairs. That said, I am experimenting with some new layouts inspired by offices at Spotify and Netflix.

Accounting

Sept 30th represents the end of our fiscal year and accounting will now be working on our year end financials and preparing our federal and provincial income tax filings. Part of our income taxes includes our submission to the SR&ED program to get funds from both levels of government. SR&ED stands of strategic research and experimental development and is a subsidy program to encourage Canadian companies to spend on R&D. The submission requires that we describe our technology projects (ex, the new editor), show that we are trying to solve a novel problem or do something that has never been done before, and show that it comes with risk and uncertainty. The 'scientific' portion of the claim is written by R&D and Ops and the financial portion is prepared by Luc and Sussan.

Product

Internal Combustion Beavers

The Internal Combustion Beavers had an awesome end to Q3. They fully cleared out the HackerOne backlog while also paying down a good chunk of support debt. They started work on scaling our email notifications and are expecting to have the major pain points addressed in October. Note that our notifications improvements will also mean that our emails will begin to include the full bodies of discussions/comments. This will ultimately be a positive UX change, but will have to come with some necessary iterations due to the complexity of the task. This is just a heads up so you are aware if customers start reporting formatting issues in emails.

Team Supreme

Team Supreme (formerly Suitable Comrades) just finished federated search within the community, which we know a lot of customers have been asking about. It's been deployed to the staff forum so have a look (or search) around. The team is also continuing to work on subcommunity and localization support in Knowledge. This has proven to be more of a challenge than expected due to the variety of edge cases. Hopefully, this will be wrapped up soon so that the team can continue on to this quarter's goals. Finally, thanks to all of you that participated in theming interviews. We found this to be a great help and we will be adopting interviews as part of our standard product development toolbox to help us kick start new features in the future.

Professional Services

The search for a replacement Project Manager continues, but we are moving along at a good pace and making progress. We've had some promising interviews and should reach a decision soon. JUST KIDDING, Lauren O'Loughlen has accepted our offer and starts on October 22!

Lazer Unicorns

The Lazer Unicorns are doing well in the absence of a PM, delivering on their projects as expected. In fact, Pat D and Chang pulled together to help out Jane (one of our newest customers) who needed to move off of Lithium only 2 weeks after signing on with Vanilla. We successfully migrated all their data before they were shut off by Lithium.

Support

Support is expanding, so we're on the hunt for a new support agent. This person will give us the coverage we need to expand our support phone coverage on weekdays!

We’ve also opened up communication with Happy Fox and are investigating if they’ll be able to resolve our workflow issues (and looking for new products in the meantime)

R&D has been chipping away at the support backlog as the new process begins to fall into place. As we dig into the backlog, we hope to prioritize making the process more streamlined, and working with the devs to write troubleshooting docs to better equip current and future agents to solve more complex issues without escalation.

Marketing

We had two trade shows - CMX Summit and The Community Roundtable, along with two webinars, one with the TSIA and the other with Fidelum which accounts for this strong performance.

Our Customer Conference was a smashing success. Thanks to everyone that helped us make this happen. Speaking of events, October will also be quite full. Vanilla will be exhibiting at the TSW Las Vegas (Technology Services World) on Oct. 21st to the 23rd and Incite's New York Customer Service Summit Oct. 23-24th.

Our newest ebook: Online Communities: The Benefits and Impacts on Organizations 2019 is live! Sarah lead the program from start to finish along with the support of Adrian, Zoey and Haya to design the questions, gather the responses and distill the findings. You can read it here. (Please do not share this link, if you'd like to share it with your prospects and customers, please direct them here.)

Have a funny and light hearted story about life at Vanilla? Haya and Zoey want to hear back from you for a special project they are working on. There's a raffle for a $25 Amazon gift card for everyone that shares a story with them.

Success

The Success team continues to build an internal training curriculum to help onboard new CSMs and act as a resource for those already with us.

More work has been done to standardize our slide deck. Kick-off, training and community strategy decks have been completed and look great.

SFDC and Hubspot are being integrated with ClientSuccess which should provide a clearer picture of customer accounts moving forward.

Operations

The Operations team is still working on Image Resizing and Monitoring as its primary focus. Jarvis received a major update which is expected to launch on October 7th, making him more responsive and easier to use. Expect much more sass.

Eduardo is in the process of deploying his Database optimizations to more and more clusters. It is already showing promising results on cl2x, 3x and 4x cluster, so databases there are much healthier!

We're also trialing a new workflow/agile methodology called Kanban. That's why the Saint Jacques meeting room window is covered in stickies :) We're hoping that this approach helps us gain more visibility into our work, the rate we do it, and reveal anything preventing us from getting tasks "done". So far so good!

Infosec

Paul continues to work with our newly retained auditors to prepare us for our SOC2 audit. In addition, he has rolled out Backblaze to replace our clunky old Timemachine-based backup system.

HR

Bamboo has been launched! There is finally a decent way to request time off and to see what your available balances are for Vacation, Personal and Sick days. If you haven't logged in yet, now would be a good time to explore it: https://vanillaforums.bamboohr.com. Stay tuned this month for some revisions to our time off policy itself, hopefully making it clearer and easier to understand.

We're also doing plenty of hiring! Neena Dev started on Team Suitable Comrades last month, and Vanilla's first QA Automation Developer, Geetika Muthyam, starts on Wednesday. We still have quite a number of jobs open on our site, so take a look and think about whether you know anyone that would be a great addition to Vanilla's growing team: https://vanillaforums.com/en/careers/

Thanks for reading!