Need some feedback for workflow
Hey so I’m an SE in fintech for many years now but always had a really decent workflow or teams to work with. The best org I ever worked for had an amazing process I’m trying to potentially replicate it here but tbh idk if it’ll work either.
Here’s the workflow from the “best” place I worked at:
How I see it every deal comes in should be a case in salesforce or a CRM tool.
Then that should go thru a vetting process with an SE manager and they assign it to an SE to do. Some deals shouldn’t come to an SE in this region or maybe it’s a biz we can’t get underwritten etc.. manager is constantly vetting with legal or product or whoever. I was never really on those calls.
From there the SE would work with an AE who’s managing the deal from the commercial side and SE manages it from the technical side.
Get on initial discovery and SE creates an initial BRD. That BRD lives in a shared drive.
Sandbox is provisioned, api docs are shared along with a shared thread to communicate with the client and AE is copied in.
Additionally there’s a slack channel made per deal you work on and in the channel all relevant ppl are in it for the deal.
Constant comms is how we did it. Comms to make sure we are driving the deal forward. Comms channel are also available for the SE team to ask each other help but also product and eng as well to answer any deeper “hey can we do this” or “hey this is an error they’re seeing anyone can help me” type situation.
Ofc in the pre sales you run into technical debugging and so we had tools to debug esp api related stuff. Or we had support look into it if it related to support.
While deal is moving along we should see more progress leading up to a final BRD and that final BRD gets sent to the client. Client sees it and agrees and gives the okay that they are good to go on the integration and integration into sandbox is working and a handoff process is past off to a post sales engineer to do certification. pre sales SE goes away and repeats his cycle and makes updates to salesforce case and assigns it to the Post Sales SE
Post sales SE will get on a call to do a final check making sure everything is kosher. (Typically tho it’s multiple calls but I’m simplifying it) they ask for the client live on call to perform a few test transactions and records the results live in a certification doc. Literally just copies and pastes the logs to prove it’s working.
After that they provision out production creds along with a final copy of the results so the clients dev teams can look back and see the full picture from final BRD to final Cert doc.
After that the post SE guy hands it off to the AE or CSM at that point and the cycle continues.
Here’s my current issue:
Got hired at a new org but they have nothing I just described^ they have some half baked version. No BRD no case management in fact there is no case management each deal is basically coming in rn on the AE side and they randomly copy me into threads with random subject lines. They also randomly throw me into calls with zero context.
They also have no BRD process but in lieu of a BRD they have a crude tier sheet. Meaning it’s a menu of options a client can “purchase” from and integrate. And the more they integrate the higher the tier they are and therefore the higher rev share they earn from the processing of the transactions. (If ur tier 1 then you will earn 5% or if ur tier 2 u might get 10% rev share as an example) the idea is to incentivize the client to integrate more of the API into their platforms making them “stickier”. I get the logic but in practice it doesnt actually happen. Bc most of the time they want us for this one process and thats it.
It’s my job to construct the three tiers and based on the initial call I had with them I will make a tier sheet and hand it off to the AE to discuss with the client but the AE does not include me back into the convo after that so on subsequent calls or emails I have no clue what they want to “purchase”. Or what tiers they went with. When asking the AE for context they make me ask their manager bc it needs approval for me to see it for some reason.
but the issue I’m running into isn’t just that there isn’t a clean process it’s also that I’m the only person rn. The other issue is everything is done via one shared inbox what I mean by that is they also have me doing integration support along with SE. Meaning I’m helping existing clients debug their issues like support would be doing and it’s all within the same inbox as my SE job. It gets messy fast. This is bc the current support team isn’t trained on the APIs. They only know about the modules we sell in-house and regularly address those support issues related to the platform. There’s also no help system for me to get answers back to clients on both the api support side and the SE work. I’m still new here but there’s no clean way for me to ask for help. Often times the knowledge is siloed and when asking eng or product they may know this or that but i spend most of my days piece mealing a solution to the problem.
There’s also no AI adoption not really. I was hoping to automate the process more with AI. And also I asked them to put in a ticketing system to handle all the actual support stuff so it leaves the inbox for purely SE concerns.
A ticketing system lets me link issues, escalate to the right teams or track SLAs but since it’s one giant inbox with only subject lines and no ties back to salesforce I’m guessing half the time who I’m speaking with.
Then there’s the certification piece. Every deal has to be certified. Just like how it was in the “best org I worked at” same thing here. This is bc we need to make sure each time the client transact it is passing the correct values to the interchange so it doesn’t hit any violations at the card network level. If it does then they lose money and so do we. But normally in order to certify we ask them to perform basic checks live on a call with us. Then we internally use tools or VPN into the servers to check the logs. Issue here is I have no tool or access to the logs. I actually have to take their api key and plug it into a postman collection and replicate their calls and see the logs from there.
Once it’s deemed certified I have to email a bunch of specific people internally to getting them the production account. That can take days bc the people I email internally are actually senior directors of eng and they’re jam packed in meetings all day.
I’m getting burnt out and it’s only been 12 weeks what can I do to help make this better? Thoughts? Yall can ask more clarifying questions