Product People Led the Discovery and Delivery of Ometria’s Status Page and Developed the Communication Plan

The Client: Ometria

AI-powered customer marketing platform allowing brands and retailers to personalize marketing messages.

Ometria is a customer data and marketing platform that helps retailers create personalized experiences customers love. Founded in 2013, the company raised $6m in series A funding in 2017. Two years later in 2019, they raised $21m series B funding, won “Best MarTech Startup” at The Europas, and grew to 100 people or as they call themselves, Ometrians.

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The Mission: Interim Product Manager

We joined to lead Ometria’s Status Page Initiative to develop a brand new Status Page for their services. We were also supporting and leading initiatives about the existing and new integrations of retailers on various e-commerce platforms with Ometria. This came with a range of mini-missions and tasks to be done with coordination of Engineering and Customer Success teams.

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How We Helped

Developed a Status Page

We led and delivered the initiative of developing a Status Page for Ometria: https://status.ometria.com/

This initiative added business value to Ometria and helped improve customers’ confidence in the product and platform by giving the customers reassurance that they will be continuously updated about the incident status.

Our hypothesis was that integrating this status information shown on the status page into the Ometria application and Zendesk (Service Desk Tool) would prevent clients from raising multiple support tickets for known issues. This, in turn, reduced Ometria's support overhead as the number of duplicate tickets being created was minimized.

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Status Page: Discovering the Problem

One of their biggest customers expressed concerns about Ometria not being proactive in detecting and acknowledging issues related to the platform. Our hypothesis was that other clients may share these thoughts.

• The client wanted to know if Ometria was aware of an issue and also get reassurance that the team was actively working on it, with regular updates for high severity incidents.
• The client wanted status updates to understand what Ometria was doing to resolve the issue and to set expectations for what happens next and how soon. For this, support needed to have better insights into the alert so they could proactively post it on the status page.

After looking closely into this matter, we concluded that Ometria’s clients had no visibility into the status of their systems. Once they faced any issues with the platform they created Zendesk tickets to report their issue. Many times multiple tickets were created by different clients all pointing to one single issue. This happened because the clients were unaware of the existing issues and raised tickets or sent emails for these issues which Ometria engineers were already aware of. This created an overhead for Customer Support to cater to.

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Status Page: Implementation

• We did the initial discovery to understand the defined SLAs for the different services. We gathered inputs from Customer Success and Customer Support to understand what are the critical services for clients (UI Availability, API status, Messaging/Emailing system status, etc).
• From an Engineering perspective we worked with the Infrastructure team to understand how we could automatically update the Status Page with the status of critical systems via the monitoring/alerting that is already in place. For the automation, we would automatically post updates/status for critical systems that have an impact on customers to the Status Page. Red, Amber, Green would be used to indicate status for these critical systems.
• We also worked with the Product Marketing and Product Design teams. This was done to ensure we communicated the services shown on the status page in a way that was consistent with the terms the clients were used to on the platform. We also ensured Ometria’s Design System was kept in mind while designing this status page.

As a result, Status Page was developed and released:

Other Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests

As Interim Product Managers we supported Ometria’s Professional Services Team with multiple missions:

• We helped with the initial kickoff and driving the development of Java Script tracking of Big Commerce web stores to ensure contact, product, and order-related data are correctly pulled into Ometria’s database.
• We gathered existing pain points for Ometria’s clients on Shopify web stores and helped with prioritization of the issues to be worked on by the Engineering Team based on Ometria’s client profiles. We prioritized the pain points based on the outcome we would be able to achieve in the next quarter, understanding the commitments for clients and the estimates of the level of engineering effort required for that.
• We collected qualitative data (from clients and Customer Success) and quantitive data (from Heap) and analyzed the most viewed pages and time slots of less traffic to recommend appropriate times for Ometria to schedule maintenance of the platform and services.
• We led multiple internal stakeholder interviews to understand critical User Journeys and coupled the findings with an analysis of Ometria’s competitors’ public SLAs and Status Pages to understand the critical services that need to be part of the SLAs shared with clients. We then worked closely with the engineering team to collect performance data from Honeycomb to translate the SLAs into SLOs for the Engineering team.
• We collaborated with an external development agency to deliver a new API-based integration of Magento and Ometria. We helped support an external development agency that was involved by ensuring any blockers/open questions are resolved with inputs from Ometria’s internal Engineering team. We did the end-to-end User Acceptance Testing to ensure all the data related to user interactions on the Magento-based e-commerce web stores are available within the Ometria Platform and Dashboards.

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Delivered Outcomes

💡 Discovery and Delivery of Ometria’s Status Page and developed the Communication Plan to inform external stakeholders (Ometria’s clients) and internal stakeholders (Customer Support and Customer Success) about the Status Page Release.

💡 Identification of Critical Services and thresholds that ensure SLAs are met.

💡 Critical User Journeys with thresholds for SLAs and SLOs.‍