My name is Matthew Heath and most of my career has been spent in either technical support, support engineering, or engineering. I helped establish the first support engineering team at Zapier back in 2018 and have gone on to do the same at a variety of other tech companies.
I have extensive experience in support and engineering as a result. And no, I don't have a Computer Science degree. You don't need one either! All you need is the right attitude and the right skills (both of which you can develop!)
My how-to guide will take you from "Support Engineering sounds interesting, how do I become a Support Engineer?" to "I've learned the skills necessary to actually be a Support Engineer now, yay" and is based on my extensive experience at fast-growing tech companies as well as contributions from other support engineers from the Support Driven community.
What the book covers
The book is still a work in progress, so the contents below might change. This is just a flavour of what I intend to write about.
- What even is a Support Engineer and is it the right choice for me?
- The soft skills you need to succeed as a Support Engineer
- What do I do if we don't have a support engineering function at the moment?
- How you DON'T need a Computer Science degree to be a successful Support Engineer
- Support Engineering 101:
- Developing your technical troubleshooting skills
- Knowing the right questions to ask
- Getting all the necessary context on the problem
- Tools/tech that can help you day to day
- How to help Engineering help you
- Writing an excellent escalation note
- Writing an awesome bug report
- Tips on working with Engineering
- Sharing your knowledge with the rest of Support:
- Using your skills and training to help reduce your own support load by upskilling other support agents with basic technical skills
- Writing awesome technical documentation for a variety of technical and non-technical audiences
Why read this book?
This book is ideal if you work in a Software as a Service company, or any company that has a technical element to it, where Support needs to work with Engineering to raise and fix bugs, customer quality of life improvements, etc.
If you want to level up your technical career while still working in Support, this book is ideal for you. It will teach you the basics of Support Engineering and hopefully impart enough knowledge that you feel confident in making the move over and supporting customers through some of the trickiest technical issues in your product.
Many of my fellow Support Engineers have gone on to have thriving careers as software engineers, coaches, leading the support engineering function, and becoming subject matter experts in all things support engineering — there's really no limit to where you can take your career!