It's time I let go of my seat on the Freshworks Rocketship
As I walked through the entrance of the Chennai office on my last working day, the familiar aroma reminded me of how far I'd come in the ~5.5 years spent at my first company. The meeting rooms, walkways, and hanging out spots evoked a flood of cherished memories I had collected during my time here. I could spend hours at the corner of the 3rd floor cafeteria, gazing out from the glass wall, lost in thought. Throughout this journey, I had the privilege of working alongside incredible people, all of us enjoying the journey.
I feel fortunate to have begun my career at this company, and I'm especially grateful to Body and Satwik for hiring me as an intern on the Developer Relations team. As I walk through the floors on my last day, I'm overwhelmed with nostalgia and emotion. I see the people (both I knew and new) reminds me of the strong connections I've made here over the years...
View from my window seat
When I joined Freshworks, the company was relatively lesser known compared to the industry giants. However, it was the dedication and hard work of the people here that eventually led to the company going public on NASDAQ. The Marketplace team was just set up to allow customers to integrate Freshworks with other tools, while the Developer Platform was newly built to provide developers with the necessary tools to meet their custom requirements. As Freshworks continued to grow, it became increasingly crucial to empower developers with the skills and resources they needed to help customers succeed with their unique needs. The DevRel team I recently joined is a strategic bet to solve this problem by building and enabling a thriving developer community.
As we provided SDKs and a serverless platform, developers quickly adopted these tools, appreciating the convenience of not having to self-host anything. This approach allowed developer partners to start building apps that delivered value to our customers more efficiently.
The DevRel team had to lay the foundations of the developer community:
We sat on support using Freshdesk to guide, educate and take bugs using email tickets. The knowledge that powers these developers is widely helpful. We set out to build a community online at community.freshworks.dev
Recognizing the mutual benefit for developers, partners, and customers, we invested in the Freshworks Certification Programs to help them acquire skills and solve their business problems.
We actively engaged with the community, and Zach was the first developer to join us. We shared updates, release notes, and organized developer events, a responsibility we later passed on to the platform marketing team.
We invested on building the material like sample apps, guides and tutorials that filled gaps for the features our passionate engineers on the developer platform deployed every week.
We were amazingly lucky to have Menaka and her Technical Writing team resonate with us to put out best-in-class developer documentation.
The foundations we laid paved the way for long-term success. As Freshworks grew, so did the pressure on the developer platform and, consequently, the DevRel team. To tackle the diverse challenges that awaited us in the fields of feedback loops, scaling support, and expanding the developer programs, we brought new members onto the DevRel team, each with unique skillsets that allowed us to divide and conquer.
The Platform began clocking around 1 billion monthly serverless invocations, a significant milestone that allowed our developer community to avoid paying for compute resources themselves. This approach helped minimize their margins and enabled them to focus on building apps.
We built relationships with business units to extend the support for our developers working on the respective APIs to bridge support and feedback to the product managers.
We saw an opportunity to serve the semi-technical persona using Low/No-Code platforms.
By improving developer-facing aspects of SDKs and automating support cycles, we reduced the burden on our engineering team, allowing them to focus on scaling problems
As the experience of our first DevRels grew, their insights helped shape the product experiences we offer. For items that took a back seat due to product backlogs, we manually managed the load using ticketing portals.
Ultimately, we established systems to be data-driven, tackling the ambiguity of "metrics" in the DevRel world.
Our investments started to bear fruit, and our confidence in becoming a credible market competitor began to rise. Nevertheless, we encountered setbacks and failures, as any team would.
It's time to dream
Our developer platform team was brimming with optimists, and fortunately, we had the necessary components to position ourselves as an App Platform as a Service provider. As we discovered the extent of our ambition and vision, we identified several key problems we were eager to tackle:
Picture a world where developers no longer struggle with locally installing CLIs and SDKs. Instead, Freshworks App Developers are free to write code and deploy their creations straight from their browsers—a new frontier of development freedom.
The engineering teams on the platforms powered Freshworks products. Why not be ambitious and expose the same power to this developer community in form of APIs?
Freshdesk becoming Freshworks is a multi-proudct strategy. It's time for developer platform to empower developers to build one app, and run on any Freshworks' products.
Frameworks like Vue and React have become the heartbeat of web development. Recognizing this, we've decided to offer first-class support to developers, saving them from the distress of dealing with bundlers. We're on a mission to simplify the process, to make innovation as easy as breathing.
The success to developers demanded developer platform to contain and everyday collaboration with partnerships, marketing, devrels, engineering, product and technical writing teams.
We're also dabbling in an experiment, drawing inspiration from the Shape Up methodology of 37signals. Our objective: to boost productivity within the developer relations team. We're redefining the way we work, aiming to make every second count.
However, we had our own set of shortcomings to address, such as the lack of powerful search functionality in our developer documentation, the need for unified developer docs, and the absence of dedicated, easy-to-use developer sandboxes. This was one of those phases where I found myself thoroughly involved and emotionally attached to the work—an unhealthy approach to delivering meaningful results.
Taking a break
Few years into joy of getting involved I had a fair start of retrospections. Reflecting on my enriching journey with Freshworks, I've decided to take a brief career break. I plan to return to my hometown, relish quality time with my parents, and recharge.
I'm grateful for everything I've learned, the team who guided me, and the culture that shaped me. These experiences have become a part of me and will accompany me moving forward.
Thank you, Freshworks, for this incredible journey. Here's to future endeavors!
About Saif Ali Shaik
Hey, I'm Saif. Writing is one of my favorite habits. I journal about my learnings for the world to read. Some appreciate it if that adds value. This page you are seeing is my only social media. Welcome to my World of shower thoughts!
