Are you leaning too hard on your support staff to resolve issues? Are they working independently from engineering, siloed from the rest of the business?
I once worked with a support team in a SaaS organization that operated with a fierce sense of independence. They resolved issues on their own without communicating with engineering and without sharing proper documentation of the bugs they encountered. They prided themselves on coming up with clever software workarounds to get customers through difficult tasks.
On the surface, this looked like a high-performing team. Their "time to resolution" stats were excellent, and customers were getting their immediate problems solved. But below the surface, this dynamic was completely detrimental to the company.
The "Shadow Engineering" Trap
While the support staff generated high performance stats, the underlying usability issues were never shared. The product team was flying blind, believing the software was working perfectly because the bug reports were non-existent. The user experience never improved because the pain was being absorbed by the support team's heroics.
This is the "Shadow Engineering" trap. When support acts as a buffer rather than a bridge, they inadvertently hide the reality of the product from the people who can actually fix it.
This misunderstanding became such an issue that, due to the lack of visible product flaws, engineering cuts were made prior to support staff cuts. Leadership assumed the product was stable and mature, when in reality it was being held together by manual labor. This hindered future productivity and caused further customer dissatisfaction as the un-fixed product continued to degrade.
Support is a Feedback Channel, Not a Silo
While a support team that provides assistance with third-party software may have limitations, if your company is the maker of the software you support, you have an obligation to contribute to its continuous quality and usability.
Support should be considered a direct customer feedback channel for improvements, equal in value to user research and sales feedback.
To fix this dynamic, leaders must:
- Change the Incentives: Stop rewarding support solely for "tickets closed." Start rewarding them for "bugs filed" and "product improvements identified."
- Create Structured Communication: Implement regular syncs between Support Leads and Product Managers to review the most common workarounds and friction points.
- Treat Workarounds as Debt: Every workaround a support agent uses is a form of technical debt. It is a manual tax on your business that should be prioritized for automation or elimination by engineering.
When you break down the silo between support and engineering, you stop patching the leaks and start fixing the dam.