i.
Make the process visible & evangelize it.
You can't fix an invisible support process. Name it, document it, tell everyone how it works, and repeat until people stop going around it.
I fixed roughly the same support problem twice — first at Gusto, then at Sprout Social. Both teams had smart people trying hard and users who couldn't get answers. Both times, the fix was the same: a scalable support process that broke down silos and made the answer searchable.
When I joined Gusto to run Design Systems in late 2021, I spent the first stretch onboarding and getting a read on the culture before picking a first project. It turned out that support was the low-risk, high-yield place to start.
A little over a year later, I moved to Sprout Social as Sr. Director of UI Foundations. Same instinct, same read — and the problem waiting for me looked almost identical.
The details differed, but the pattern didn't: users were routing around a broken support system, knowledge was hoarded in a few heads, and Slack answers were inconsistent enough that nobody trusted them.
You can't fix an invisible support process. Name it, document it, tell everyone how it works, and repeat until people stop going around it.
Office hours had failed before because they were transactional. This time, treat them as relationship-building — sign-ups in advance, recap links after, sentiment surveys, follow-ups.
A sprint-long rotation, every team member takes a turn. The Lead runs the Slack channel and hosts office hours. Silos dissolve because everyone eventually holds the context.
Sentiment after every office hours. Annual survey questions specifically about support quality. If we couldn't measure the shift, we couldn't defend the investment.
"The team was table-side service in a company that needed a self-serve buffet."
— The reframe that made the strategy make senseSupport requests routed to the DS Slack channel — the front door. A private team channel is where we hashed out the actual answer. The Support Lead posted the cohesive guidance back to the public channel. Every answer becomes a searchable resource for the next person to ask.
Users sign up in advance. Full team attends — all expertise in the room, and everyone learns from each other. Primary goal: users leave feeling heard, with a clear next step. Secondary goal: shared understanding of guidance within the team.
Sprint-long. Every team member participates. The Lead reviews office-hours sign-ups, hosts and records sessions, follows up with recap links and sentiment surveys, and manages the Slack channel. Because everyone rotates, everyone holds the context.
When support surfaced actual work, a JIRA ticket landed in the backlog for the Product Lead to prioritize. At Gusto we generated tickets from Slack too — noisy, but it let us track hours spent on support and defend the resourcing case. At Sprout, we kept it lighter: one ticket per office-hours session.
I chose this as a first project in both companies because it was low risk, high yield — a fast way to prove that investing in enablement changes user experience of the system in ways everyone can feel.
I devised the model, but adoption was a team sport. I introduced it to partners and managers, and we drove it together. Full leadership participated in office hours from day one — modeling the customer-service mindset, and demonstrating that showing up for users is part of the job at every level.
Externally, I managed awareness upward and outward. Peers in other functions needed to see that investing in enablement wasn't optional — and once they did, I supported other teams in implementing similar approaches.
Finally: once enablement was visible as a horizontal function, I could work it into team resourcing and recognition. Support went from invisible labor to something you could measure, defend, and celebrate.