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The New Notification Stack for Developers - Shreya Gupta
Developer Advocate, Courier

Transcript

Noah:

Welcome back, listeners. Today we are continuing our series entitled The New Notifications Stack for Developers brought to you by our longtime friends and sponsors of the Code Story podcast, Courier. As a reminder, Courier is developer infrastructure for product notifications, making it easier to deliver the notification experience that your customers expect. Check out their product to learn more at Courier.com.

Noah:

Well, today I have another special guest on the Code Story podcast, Shreya Gupta, developer advocate at Courier. Shreya, thank you for being on the show today.

Shreya:

Thank you so much for having me.

Noah:

Absolutely. Before we jump into our topic today, tell me and my audience a little bit more about you.

Shreya:

So like you said, I'm a developer advocate here. I work on a lot of product awareness and education strategies. So what that means is that I build a lot of content, whether that's video blog posts, I host events and just generally try to bring Courier to the right developers who are, you know, working really hard at their jobs and just could use a notifications API to make things a little bit easier.

Noah:

That's awesome. Have you been a developer advocate anywhere else?

Shreya:

No, this is my first job out of college. I've been here for a year and a half now.

Noah:

Nice. Very cool. Did you study engineering technology? Tell me a little bit more about that for sure.

Shreya:

Yeah, I did computer science and engineering in college, and to be completely honest, I hated it. I went to these classes with, like, hundreds of students, and I found myself not, you know, being able to keep up with the rest of the class. And so within my second year of college, I started working with some of my friends to learn coding outside of classes, which slowly turned into like little study sessions, which then grew into workshops and eventually we started a nonprofit organization just to help students like myself who feel left out of the tech world find a place for themselves.

Noah:

I always find it really interesting the folks that go into computer science that end up not liking it, right? But understand technology can really do great things when it comes to developer advocacy and areas like that. So kudos for you. Well, let's jump into the media then. So in our previous podcasts, we've spoken about the mobile SDK and the new Segment integration, both fantastic conversations.

Noah:

You recently launched a new version of Inbox compared to last year. Your roadmap has been moving really quickly. What's changed?

Shreya:

Two months ago, our CTO did a presentation about how we were going to start moving really quickly and I sort of looked at the presentation and the timeline and I was confused about how we were going to accomplish that. Last year I'd say we might have been launching like one or two new features a quarter, and this new timeline was showing that we were going to have new launches almost every week, maybe every other week, which is, you know, a crazy difference.

Shreya:

And so I asked him what his plan was and he sort of laid it out as just we need a really strong change in mindset. We need to change our pace. We need to get faster. We need to start developing for our customers. And our customers needs to come and go really quickly. And so we need to keep up with that.

Shreya:

And at the time, two months ago, I genuinely was confused about how a change in mindset would allow us to keep up with that type of a timeline. But honestly, our engineering organizations done an incredible job. We have been keeping up with that timeline. And like you said, we had the mobile SDK come out a couple weeks ago.

Shreya:

We even had a Segment last week and RudderStack. And then we're also talking about the inbox launch and there's so much more that I wish I could talk about, but I can't just yet. Yeah, it's crazy to see how things are changing.

Noah:

You know, it's really fun. Time for releasing the products as a team at such a fast clip. I think that's super exciting and also can be a lot to manage, right? Can you tell us a little bit about the Inbox journey and how that has evolved over time?

Shreya:

So Riley is our senior engineer who's been working on Inbox for a couple of years now. I think they launched it in late 2021 for the first time, and I got a chance to speak to her about the whole journey of, you know, ideating it, to bring it to life and then improving it. Riley had previously worked at eCommerce Company where she had started building embeddable components, and unfortunately she wasn't able to ship it there.

Shreya:

So when she joined Courier, she really wanted to bring this idea of embeddable components that engineers can sort of just like take a piece of an inbox and just implement it into their front end without having to think too much about it. And so that's how Inbox came to be. And the interesting part about the story is that the first product wasn't great, it was too complex, it was overdesigned.

Shreya:

And when we shipped it out to our customers, we started realizing that customers were sort of using the customizable aspect of it and tearing it down and just using it in a very simple form. And so I think one of the engineering learnings over the years have been from that product that we need to build something that's simple, get it out quickly to our customers, build something that they can then build on top of and then make their own.

Shreya:

And so that's, you know, one of the most important aspects. And I think that's also what's helping us put out features so quickly this year is where we're just focusing on giving customers what they need as quickly as possible, getting feedback from our customers and then moving onwards.

Noah:

So, you know, shipping features as fast as possible. I hear you saying that with the roadmap and the journey, but also as small of a feature as you can ship lined with what the customers are telling you that they they want. So then you're rapidly able to put stuff out there and get feedback, change it or pull it back if needed.

Noah:

Is that is that what I'm hearing you say?

Shreya:

Exactly. Yeah. We don't need to build anything too fancy. I think that's the main learning lesson over here. Just give them what they need and allow them to decide what the direction is.

Noah:

Okay, So I'm an engineer. I'm sold on Courier. I understand how it works. Since the first time I talked with Troy. Love the platform, but I want to hear your perspective as a developer advocate. What do you say to developers to help them choose Courier over building notifications in house?

Shreya:

We have this conversation a lot internally, especially along the lines of build versus buy. Think a lot of people have that conversation and tag, especially when you're offering an API and we sort of like to consider ourselves a build versus composable. Composable is the word that my manager used earlier and what that means is we're not giving developers a tool that they can just purchase and just, you know, have to put into their product and not be able to do anything with it.

Shreya:

But we're giving something that they can start off with a very rudimentary notification system and then build on top of it. We're not taking away the fun from building, but we're allowing you to not get distracted by notifications and really focus on the product that you really want to build. I think it also depends on where you're at as a product or as a company, right?

Shreya:

What your needs are. I think there are some products that just want to get email sent out as quickly as possible, and that's where a lot of our customers start before they start using Courier. They're just sending out emails or they're just sending out SMS notifications. It's sort of when you start thinking at a much deeper level, when you want to go from that first channel to multichannel routing, when you want to start thinking about what your user's preferences are and building something that's a little bit smarter and more in tune with their needs so that you can, you know, maximize user retention when you want to start thinking about unified logging and having all

Shreya:

of your data in one place as opposed to looking at like five different APIs and trying to figure out errors on five different platforms. Having things like designers, having automations that allow you to schedule everything in one place. So just really allowing you to bring everything in one place. And so you don't have to focus on building notifications.

Shreya:

You can focus on building your actual product. We're not just offering this one API or this one UI to build notifications. Our engineering team considers them to be a part of the customers team. And so we're offering you a lot of support that you wouldn't necessarily be able to get on your own as well.

Noah:

That brings up a question for me as a startup guy, as an engineer who likes to build stuff, I hear you saying that a platform notification strategy is essentially important. Is Courier helping me as a indie developer, right, Building something on the side just to get up and running faster and then switch over to that platform notification strategy?

Noah:

Or do you guys advise that that sort of started out from the very beginning?

Shreya:

So we do provide you with the option of getting started with single channels and then building on top of that later, I think multi-channel routing or omni channel routing, as you were talking about earlier, is something that the larger your product gets and the larger that your audience gets, the more important it becomes. So as an indie developer, you might not necessarily see a need for it, but the more people start using it and the more you want to start focusing on giving them notifications that they want to see and in a place that they want to see it.

Shreya:

You might have users that absolute love getting text notifications, but there's a lot of people that absolutely hate that, right? And they really would rather just get an email or just get that push and not have to see like three different notifications every time they make a purchase on your app or something. So really just fine tuning that aspect of notifications.

Shreya:

That's what I mean by smarter notifications. That's when you really want to start thinking about using something like Courier.

Noah:

Okay, so you know, Courier. There's a lot of moving parts inside Courier and it makes me as the product user super happy because it's easy to use while all that stuff is going on behind the scenes. But as a product guy myself, talking to customers, getting their feedback on a complex product can be a complex task in itself.

Noah:

So how do you prioritize talking to customers while building a product that requires so many moving parts?

Shreya:

Within engineering, this is something that we talk about a lot where building a good product doesn't necessarily just depend on what we think a good product is. And this also goes back to that inbox example where we were saying that we were only able to put forward a good version of Inbox when we heard from our customers, when we saw what they were building, when we saw that they were or like specifically the way that they were using our embeddable component.

Shreya:

And so we have to prioritize going in to customer calls, having external slack channels with our customers and making sure that we are having a one on one discussion with them about what they want to build, how they want to use our product, and making sure that it's not just that we're helping them integrate Courier into their app, but we're also helping them integrate Courier into any other technology that they're trying to integrate.

Shreya:

Whether that’s Segment, whether that's any other integration, right? So notifications will only work when they work well with those other technologies and tools that our customers are using. And so you'll often see our engineers just sitting on calls and helping them debug these issues, but that's what helps us build a product that our customers want.

Noah:

So as a developer advocate, you are the liaison between, you know, Courier and the developer community, right? You're promoting your product, you're helping the developer community access all of the Courier offerings. That's a super rewarding job, especially when you are promoting an amazing product like Courier. Tell me a little bit about your journey there. How has that been for you?

Noah:

And tell me about some of the rewards along with the journey.

Shreya:

This year especially has been really rewarding when you start to see all of these features coming in week by week. I have been working on this weekly live workshop series where we bring in guests from other companies like Twilio and Segment and just other partners that are also invested in the Courier journey. And we just hack on a bunch of different projects and it's great to see that every single week we're growing as a product and that helps me grow in the type of content that I'm making and the type of events that I'm engaging in and the ways in which we're able to really grow our developer community.

Noah:

Well, you obviously made a solid choice right out of school to jump in to work with Courier. I really appreciate you being on the show today. I've learned a lot from what you've told me about the journey of Inbox, how Courier is prioritizing customer development when building such a complex product and all of the inner workings there. Really appreciate you being on the show today.

Shreya:

Thank you. This was really fun. Thanks for having me.

Noah:

Being a developer advocate is such a cool job, and Shreya at Courier is not only ensuring the developer community is informed about notification strategies, but also that they know about all of the great stuff that the company is shipping and fast. As a reminder, Courier makes it easier for you to deliver a world class notification experience that your customers expect to learn more about their product and get started today.

Noah:

Check out Courier.com and thanks again for listening.

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