Customer Partnerships:
Release Management

Context:
 We had recently moved symplr’s flagship workforce software to a twice-yearly release schedule. This extended timeline solved many problems, but customers continued to report release high levels of critical bugs in each release—especially edge-case configurations not covered by our internal testing. It was becoming a repetitional issue, undermining trust with long-term clients and threatening retention on our flagship product.

Direction:
I decided to shift our approach from reactive support to proactive partnership. My team collaborated with a customer whose top notch IT team was known for operational excellence and we created a new release phase: “partner preview.” The partner customer would take an early version of the release and put it through their first testing phases. This allowed us to simulate real-world environments and uncover edge cases before general rollout—bridging the gap between internal QA and production success.

Key Actions

  • Identified a trusted customer with a mature testing program and operational flexibility

  • Aligned release calendars to introduce a “partner preview” phase ahead of general availability

  • Established a weekly QA sync with the partner customer to document, triage, and prioritize bugs

  • Coordinated with engineering to allocate sprint capacity for near-real-time fixes so we could catch and patch most bugs in a 2-week cycle

  • Documented findings and updated internal QA scenarios based on field results

Impact:
 The partner customer saw faster resolution times and felt invested in shaping the final release. After implementation, the general releases that followed reported a noticeable drop in critical bugs. Internally, engineering appreciated having validated bugs reported on a foreseeable timeline—reducing firefighting and improving morale.

Relevant Skills:

  • Customer collaboration and stakeholder management

  • Software release planning and operational coordination

  • Agile sprint prioritization and bug triage

  • Process innovation and cross-functional alignment

  • Communication between engineering and external users

Curious how to align customer needs and business interests for better products?  I would enjoy connecting with you about how to move beyond patching fixes to building scalable, customer-centered systems.