What Would You Say You Do Here?

The Evolution of My Role at Redbeacon

I’m usually asked 2 questions when meeting someone in the Bay Area:

1) Where do you work? and 2) What do you do there?

Ever since our acquisition by The Home Depot, the second question has been difficult to answer.

I joined Redbeacon as a Sales and Customer Support Wizard, a role named for the “magic” we did to help things run smoothly behind the scenes. Because we were a startup, however, the wizards were tasked with better understanding the operational goals that would need to be set as we scaled, as well as the challenges we would face along the way.

In order to help determine expectations and goals for ourselves (and, we hoped, future support agents), we worked in sprints, determining things like how many pros we could sign up in a day, how many customers we could connect with pros on a weekend, etc.

After our acquisition, it was time to scale the operations team. We started by opening a call center within The Home Depot’s headquarters in Atlanta. In order to get our agents up to speed, the wizard role had to change from front-line grunt to battlefield commander, using the knowledge gained from our sprints to help push agents and supervisors to their maximum potential.

In a few short weeks, we went from a three-wizard team to a substantially larger call center, building documentation, conducting training sessions, and setting sales and customer support goals frantically. Our engineering team built and lauched TACO, a fully functioning call center and CRM tool that utilizes the Twilio API, in 30 days, giving us the unique ability to own and control the product we relied on to run our operational efforts.

As our agents became more comfortable with their roles in the call center, our role as Wizards continued to evolve. We had to think on a higher level in order to operate efficiently. Rather than relying on our personal experiences as support agents, we had to now leverage data to make decisions. We learned SQL and began running reports to help determine where our weak points were. As our CEO often says, pouring more water into a leaky bucket doesn’t do much good — you need to find and plug the holes.

So what would I say I do at Redbeacon? It’s hard to say succinctly. I’m still talking to our users, training call center agents, and using SQL and Excel to build reports. But lately, thanks to the incredible support of our engineering team, I’ve begun the next step in my personal journey: Python.

Almost a year ago, while sick at home and with the help of a close friend, I installed Django and started learning Python. Despite several unsuccessful attempts to do so in the past, I was able to reach a critical mass of learning until I finally felt like I knew what I was doing…kinda. But as I continued to practice, build stuff and break things, my confidence grew and I finally worked up the nerve to approach our engineers about getting access to our code base. After our CTO signed off on it, I was in.

While I am not part of the engineering team, I do commit code at Redbeacon. I am beginning to automate the reports that I’ve been building with SQL and Excel and helping our team operate as efficiently as possible. This is something I would not be able to do most places, proof that Redbeacon embodies the startup culture of nurturing personal growth among its employees.

I don’t know what’s next looking forward, but I do know that every time I look back at the last 2 1/2 years at Redbeacon I am grateful to have stumbled into such a great environment.