97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 55. Building Tools for Internal Customers that They Actually Want to Use

Vinessa Wan

New York Times

At NYT, no one is required to use my team’s tools or follow our processes. Instead, if we want to win teams’ hearts, we must build tools they want to use. To do so, we adopted a product management view that actively sought feedback in how teams perceived the value of our tools and processes.

Although quantitative metrics are vital, qualitative feedback can be overlooked in internal tooling. How do you find out about user—or, as you should start calling them, customer—satisfaction? You may not be able to collect the same scale of user-behavior data as external products can, but luckily, qualitative feedback from your colleagues is a great way to address that. Being able to reach out to someone in your company directory easily is actually a major advantage.

To start, identify desired outcomes. Are you trying to understand a problem space? Looking for feedback on a design? From there, we use a feedback process that includes a survey and follow-up interview process. A lot of advice is out there for how your team can gather feedback. Here’s my take.

When building a survey, treat it like a product. Keep the user experience central in your survey design. The majority of questions should be multiple choice. Resist temptation to have multiple open questions such as, “Why did you ...