Happiness rotation

TTL 51

At Automattic, we have a long-standing practice called the Happiness Rotation.

The classic version is simple. Every year, regardless of your role, you spend a week working in customer support. You answer tickets, debug issues, and talk directly to the people who use our products.

It keeps us grounded and develops empathy for our users.

Recently, we introduced a variation of this practice.

For colleagues in less technical roles, jumping into technical support queues can be difficult. It requires deep product knowledge that they might not use on a daily basis. So we proposed an experiment.

Instead of asking them to help users, we asked them to become users.

The task was to find a personal project and spend the week building it using our own tools. The goal shifted from solving problems to experiencing the product.

I decided to try this experimental path myself.

I started my career at Automattic in support. I am technical enough to answer tickets, and I enjoy the traditional rotation. But I wanted to see how this new approach felt.

It was objectively very interesting.

There is a distinct difference between fixing a broken site and building a new one from scratch. When you do support, you see the product in fragments. When you build, you see the product as a whole. You feel the friction points and the flow in a way you cannot when you are only looking at tickets.

We often talk about putting ourselves in the customer’s shoes. Sometimes, the best way to do that is to stop acting like an employee and start acting like a client.

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I also publish on paolo.blog and monochrome.blog.