When we revamped the Inside Intercom blog, we wanted to provide readers with a truly editorial experience — something you would get from reading a high quality editorial publication, and not a run of the mill corporate blog. Key to that was working with a wide array of talented illustrators and artists from around the world to help bring our posts to life. …

“I sometimes laugh because here I am, sitting, looking at Excel spreadsheets and talking and worrying about margins. How have I become that person?” Like many creatives, Tina Roth Eisenberg, aka Swiss Miss, didn’t think sales spreadsheets would become part of her day-to-day. But the New York-based entrepreneur and blogger has managed to turn not one but five side projects into successful, profitable businesses. First, there’s her popular design blog, Swiss Miss, which averages…

Building a successful product means getting good at saying no. But exactly how do you say it? What if you’re on the front line, representing your company’s product decisions, how do you deliver that news successfully? Working as part of the Customer Support team at Intercom, I’ve experienced first hand just how tricky this can be. Ultimately, the information that you’re about to share is not going to be what the customer wants to hear. …

A fact of startup life is that no matter what team you work on, you’re guaranteed to run into problems you get stuck on. The challenge is deciding how much time to spend on each problem. …

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a brave and handsome prince. He passed all his prince school exams, expertly avoided any encounters with dragons, and lived happily ever after. Not much of a story, right? Where is the adventure, the struggle? …

Words in a product evolve. They start with the people who first invent the product and name its parts. They change when new teammates bring in fresh influences. And they change again when they need to communicate to a new audience. All that change happens incrementally, word by word. It reminds me of the Ship of Theseus, a 2,500-year-old thought experiment about the nature of identity. …

The road to being a keynote speaker at a multi-thousand seater event is paved with many a dingy hotel conference room. Des Traynor, Intercom’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, spent much of 2016 speaking at major tech conferences around the globe from Mind the Product in San Francisco to Web Summit in Lisbon, clocking up over 100,000 air miles in the process. …

Cultivating design leadership is hard when you don’t fully understand what design can do for a business. Ask an entrepreneur what they think of when they think of “design” and you might find they get a bit uncomfortable. Is it branding? The look and feel of their product? …

No matter how good your support team is, it’s an inescapable fact that some customers simply don’t want to talk to them. But great support doesn’t always involve a conversation with a support team. Perhaps the issue they are trying to resolve feels so simple they just want to be quickly pointed in the right direction. …