How we pulled off the launch of Customer Service Suite in 2 months

On August 3, Freshworks launched its new Customer Service Suite, a unified omnichannel solution powered by AI.

Barely a couple of months old, the Suite is beginning to impact how businesses interact with customers—through capabilities such as seamless conversation management and intelligent automation.

Here are some of the best practices we followed in pulling together this solution in two months—a feat that, in ordinary circumstances, would have taken four to six months. But then, aren’t we living in extraordinary times? Come to think of it, ChatGPT isn’t even a year old, but it already seems like it’s been around for ages!

“This project exemplifies how a team can unite to overcome challenges and successfully deliver results, driven by a clear goal, a well-defined execution plan, and a highly motivated team,” says Avaneesh Rajkumar, director of product management at Freshworks. 

The project involved over 200 members of 20+ teams across product management, engineering, and design, as well as customer-facing teams. We dissected the initial minimum viable product (MVP) plan at the module level, with multiple revisions on design prototypes.

Let’s dive into some best practices and strategies we adopted to successfully finish the project in time: 

Alignment across multiple engineering business units

One of the key challenges was ensuring contextual collaboration between multiple teams across Freshworks. This involved product management, engineering, testing, and release teams working together seamlessly.

Achieving this level of alignment required effective communication and collaboration. To communicate the product vision and goals to the entire team, the product managers organized storytelling workshops for all the features. These were small-scale, two-hour workshops that helped teams clarify and precisely understand each requirement, thus refining the project scope. 

Calculated risks due to timeline crunch

With the compressed timeline, every team had to take calculated risks to meet the project deadlines. This required careful planning, prioritization, and a willingness to adapt and iterate as needed. Risks included faster production releases with thorough monitoring and testing in a limited time frame while de-prioritizing other roadmap items that required less attention—without compromising on quality. 

A major product launch involves unavoidable changes to the scope, and the CS Suite was no exception. We accommodate such variations through a change request process that takes care of resequencing and rescheduling of work with minimal delays and setbacks. 

Parallel execution and integration

As various teams worked in parallel, there were challenges in managing dependencies and ensuring smooth integration of what each team worked on. The solution? A series of stand-up meetings in the Scrum of Scrums methodology ensured all associated teams were always in alignment throughout the lifetime of the project. 

360-degree testing

To ensure the stability of our product, we implemented a group integration testing strategy where all individual features were  integrated at once—creating a complete system with end-to-end user journeys and test cases. Our QAs across teams collaborated to perform integration testing while adhering to entry and exit criteria to certify the release.

Frequent outcome reviews

These were held every week in the form of demos to review the project progress, as it involved participation from more than 20 teams. The demos were crucial components of the feedback loop, which played a vital role in the success of our project. It is an iterative process that helps teams to gain early feedback and identify gaps to make the necessary adjustments to deliver the required features.

Release planning

Handling deliverables from multiple teams was challenging. With a blue-green deployment strategy, we enabled features for a smaller slice of users, with a few customers in early access program (EAP) for a warranty period of a week, followed by new signups and gradual rollout to all customers. The strategy helped reduce deployment risks, thus simplifying the rollback processes upon identification of any deployment failures. Once testing was completed on the green environment, live traffic was directed to the green environment (new product version) and the blue environment (live product version) was deprecated. 

“An agile mindset to overcome numerous course corrections, meticulous planning, and timely checkpoints were some of the things we did right,” says Ramgopal Swaminathan, senior director of engineering at Freshworks.

In a nutshell, Freshworks put together a project team that had high confidence, took calculated risks, and collaborated and communicated well.

“If you do all those things effectively, anything is possible,” concludes Balamurugan Radhakrishnan, senior director of engineering at Freshworks.

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