Vanilla News - March 2020 Edition!

Hi Vanilla!

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

It is entirely your imagination that I have missed the last couple of months.

Administration

We are recruiting a Director of Finance to lead the finance team. As we grow our budgeting, cashflow management, tax and reporting is getting more complicated. This new role will help us more efficiently run the business and make sure that we are compliant with government financial requirements.

Development

Team Lazer Unicorns is excited to be onboarding David as a services developer, and Carlos as Project Manager, both are coming along nicely and our services team will be back up to full strength very soon. We continue to be 3M's number one consumer of post-it notes.

The ICB Force had a great February closing issues, with 27 issues dealt with above and beyond what came in. Webhooks is also coming along very nicely with our "big three" events (discussions, comments, users) getting delivered to webhooks through our robust message queue that Operations built. Thanks ops!

Team Supreme has continued to iterate on Vanilla Knowledge and our new theming system to support customer launches. This feedback loop of customer to product has been working out really well, and we are really excited to see real people using the product. Val has been an amazing influence as a part time product manager. We can't wait to get more of her time there. Come over to the big supreme whiteboard to see what Val has put up and get an idea of what Team Supreme is working on.

Success

Success is onboarding Mila as a new CSM, and its going well! New CSMs are great indicator of our growth and success as a business. We're also helping to finalize a Vanilla 101 guide to help with employee and customer onboarding. You can read what we have so far (for customers) on the success KB, and the internal version on the staff KB.

Sales

Slowly we are moving towards finalizing with Oracle, a considerable project that will involve input from the entire company. The Charter visit went very smoothly this week, their team was very impressed and excited about the partnership in general -- a lot of nice comments. This could be the start of a string of TelCo wins as we push towards decisions with Telus and SaskTel in Canada in the coming months. We continue to seek a 3rd Enterprise AE to add to our amazing team, and are working with Marketing towards improving our penetration in the upper mid market.

Infosec

Our SOC II work is ongoing, with active engagement with our auditors. Thank you to everyone who has been actively helping with this process, and answering slightly annoying questions! We are undergoing third party penetration testing by Rapid 7 in March, commissioned directly by Vanilla. This will be a great opportunity to compare the results of more traditional pen testing against HackerOne, and to have a report we can provide to prospects. Keep up the good work on reporting phishing attempts and asking security questions - this engagement keeps us safer.

Marketing

Marketing is Ready to Spring Forward!

We were invited to speak at Oracle's Modern Customer Experience summit in two weeks... But thanks to COVID-19, that's been postponed to September. 

March is on pace to be our strongest marketing month yet with two webinars and a new ebook, one of which was met with resounding success on the topic of ROI. Our next webinar is on the topic of Community Powered Knowledge Sharing. We also launched our Customer Success Playbook. 

Special shoutout to Irina. She has done a killer job sprucing up our templates, including our new case study template and our gorgeous new demo request page. 

Support

Individual support agent schedules are now posted in the staff KB, along with a link to our weekend coverage calendar. The doc also outlines what is expected from the on-call worker, so please look over it if you think you might need help with a client during off hours.

There is less overlap on our shifts now, so support is focused on strong communication and thorough passing of information at the end of our individual days. If you happen to be on Slack at odd hours, maybe toss a coin to your witcher and say hello to an agent!

HR

A big thanks to everyone who completed the Employee Satisfaction Survey. As you know, the goal of the survey is to get your feedback on areas we can improve. The results were very positive, which is great, but we feel that it may not be designed in a way to facilitate the type of feedback we are looking for so, we are currently evaluating how to tailor it more to our needs.

Operations

Operations is working on 3 major projects: Advanced Monitoring, Kill The Worker, and Kill Papertrail.

In Advanced Monitoring, we are trying to increase our insight into what's going on behind the scenes with our servers and infrastructure and end our dependence on our existing "agent" tool, which is getting old.

Kill The Worker is a project to reduce our reliance on Cloudflare, and consequently the amount of money we're paying them, by moving our routing from their Worker product into our own infrastructure.

Kill Papertrail is in the same vein - we want to start aggregating more logs (Cloudflare, haproxy, nginx, and php), increase the length of time those logs are accessible for, and simultaneously reduce the cost of doing all that. So we're building our own version of Papertrail right inside our environment. NBD.