On April 19 two new people will be joining 37signals.
Scott Upton: Designer
Scott Upton will be (re)joining us as a UI designer. Long time 37signals followers may recognize Scott’s name. Scott worked with 37signals for a few years back when we were a web design firm (before we launched Basecamp). He’s one of the best web UI designers in the business. Great writer too. We’re lucky to be able to welcome him back to 37signals. To top it all off, he’s a genuinely great person. He’s also quite a mountain climber and backcountry adventurer. Check out some of his adventures and photos at http://couloir.org.
Scott completes our design and development team. We don’t have plans to expand this group any time in the foreseeable future. We’re really happy with our crew. They’re great people. We’re proud to have them all.
Kiran Max Weber: Support
Kiran Max Weber will be joining us to head up the support/service group. Kiran’s a really sharp (and nice) guy with the background experience we need to build and maintain a world-class support team. He was a lead Mac Genius at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in NYC. He helped supervise their 100-person Mac Genius team and acted as the point of contact for customer service escalations and front line support. He also has a design background and speaks English (thankfully), German, and basic French. He’ll be working closely with Sarah and Michael to make customers happy, maintain high support standards, handle escalations, keep tabs on major issues, review and improve our customer interactions, and answer customer questions.
While our design and development group is complete, our service and support group will be expanding over time. This is the one part of our business that needs to scale with our customer base. Kiran’s going to help us 1. make the right choices along the way and 2. be the best in the business.
Welcome
I hope you’ll join us in welcoming Scott and Kiran.
Alex Shaffer
on 31 Mar 10Jason,
I like your hiring philosophy/process. You touched on it in Rework & your most recent Rapid Fire Q&A. “Hire when it hurts” & “Test drive new employees” It just makes sense!
MB
on 31 Mar 10Welcome to the team Kiran! And welcome back Scott!
JZ
on 31 Mar 10Welcome, welcome! Really looking forward to working with both of you!
Paul S
on 31 Mar 10Welcome guys! What does the complete company look like? How many designers and developers do you have now?
scott
on 31 Mar 10Kiran Rocks! Great Hire.
Spencer Fry
on 31 Mar 10Congrats on the new folks!
Mig Reyes
on 31 Mar 10Wow, congrats, Kiran! Well deserved.
K Walker
on 31 Mar 10Bravo Kiran! Congratulations!
Daniel Haran
on 31 Mar 10Curious: what’s the gender ratio like at 37signals? It seems it’s male-heavy; is that a concern?
JD
on 31 Mar 10Scott, great to finally work together! And Kiran, welcome man. Really enjoy your Flickr stream.
RS
on 31 Mar 10It would be really nice to have more female energy around here. Of all the applications we receive, the percentage from women is practically zero. We’d be glad to enhance the mix here if we found the right person.
Jake Vance
on 31 Mar 10Kiran’s a great guy (and a pretty damn fine former-boss), and I’m sure he’ll be a great asset to your support team. Nice job, guys!
Michael Wales
on 01 Apr 10Good to see Scott coming back. I was just looking at 37signals.com today and thinking what a cluttered mess it is, especially once you hit the “Hear what our customers have to say” heading – from that point below my eyes just bounces all over the place without actually “soaking in” or reading any information.
Kevin Conboy
on 01 Apr 10Congratulation, Scott, glad to see you back at 37s.
MI
on 01 Apr 10Welcome Scott and Kiran, really excited to have you both joining the team!
cyan
on 01 Apr 10Welcome,Congratulation,nice guy and harmonious team. :)
Steve Jobs
on 01 Apr 10Congrats Kiran!
Richard Nyström
on 01 Apr 10Hi!
I’m interested to hear how much of your customers that use your support everyday. Is it 5% of the customer base? 1% 0.1%?
Dylan
on 01 Apr 10Go hard! Have fun!
Joseph Teegardin
on 01 Apr 10Couldn’t be more thrilled about your acquisition of Kiran. He’s a great guy and will be a huge asset as the face of your support team. I look forward to seeing the reshaping and development of 37signals’ support system through Kiran’s talent and leadership.
Anonymous
on 01 Apr 10tkanet
on 01 Apr 10Agree with you R. Nystrom. Apart if there are other products in the pipe, wonder how many subs do really use the support in a year …and if it really hurts in support
JF
on 01 Apr 10Apart if there are other products in the pipe, wonder how many subs do really use the support in a year …and if it really hurts in support
It does hurt in support today. We’re seeing upwards of 400 emails a day. Now, all things considered that’s a pretty small number based on usage and the size of our customer base. But, we only have two support people right now and they’re definitely overworked. They don’t have any slack either – they can’t spend more quality time with each customer because the inbox is filling up behind them.
So we definitely need to build out the support team. Lighten the current load, give each customer more personal attention, and let Sarah and Michael (our current support team) some room to breathe and think.
Greg Laws
on 02 Apr 10Is lightening the load for Sarah and Michael mostly to save their sanity, or will giving them more time to “breathe and think” lead to better feedback about ways to make your products better? Is giving feedback about customer experiences to the development teams even something you encourage? Just curious. Thanks!
JF
on 02 Apr 10Greg: It’s for a lot of things. Reducing their load, allowing them to do their job better, making the experience better for customers, getting to know our customers better, etc.
Geof Harries
on 05 Apr 10Hooray for Scott Upton returning to 37signals. He’s always been one of my favourite designers.
This discussion is closed.