Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Back in early 2018, I embarked on a side gig with a few partners - the idea was to make ridesharing socially engaging and fun. We made a ton of mistakes and never really got the product off the launchpad, however in retrospect, the biggest mistakes we made were wasting precious time in writing code for authentication and authorization as well as user notifications. We learned to focus on customer value the hard way.

Some time back, our engineering leaders suddenly noticed dramatically increased billings from AWS that far outpaced typical benchmarks. The problem turned out to be data insights tools sending an unexpectedly large volume of data. The solution required a deep dive into how AWS billing works and an intricate series of steps to discover the location of the firehose of data.

On our smartphones or in our web browsers, push notifications are part of our daily online lives. Hate them or love them, when implemented correctly, they can be extremely valuable to our experiences. An average of 20% of active website users opt in to receive web pushes, which, while the figure may seem low, is four times the best email subscription rate. The statistics are even higher on mobile devices, with 44% and 91% of iOS and Android users respectively opting in.

Transactional emails may seem dull and unimportant compared with marketing campaigns. Yet 64% of recipients find them the most valuable type of message in their inbox, making them the most important communication you can have with your customer.