Support And Enablement

Why this matters

As a Platform Engineer focused on Developer Experience (DX), Support & Enablement is how you remove friction so developers can deliver quickly and safely. Strong enablement means fewer blocked engineers, fewer repeated questions, and faster onboarding to your platform.

• Real tasks you will do: run a dev-support channel, triage requests, write how-to guides and runbooks, host office hours, track SLAs, and create golden paths for common tasks.
• Impact: reduce time-to-first-success for a new service, cut wait times for help, and increase platform adoption and satisfaction.

Concept explained simply

Support & Enablement ensures developers can self-serve most of the time and get fast human help when they can’t.

• Support: how you respond to questions and unblock developers (channels, SLAs, triage, escalation).
• Enablement: how you prevent questions in the first place (docs, templates, training, golden paths, sandboxes).

Mental model

Think of a 3-layer cake:

• Layer 0: Self-serve. Clear docs, FAQs, runbooks, templates, paved roads.
• Layer 1: Assisted. Chat channel, office hours, tickets with light SLAs.
• Layer 2: Escalated. On-call/escalations for platform-impacting issues with stricter SLAs.

Your goal: strengthen Layer 0 so Layers 1–2 are needed less often.

Worked examples

Example 1 — Lightweight support policy for a chat channel

Use this as a pinned message in your dev-support channel.

Example 2 — Triage workflow runbook

1. Check if the question is answered by existing docs. If yes, link the doc and capture a doc feedback note.
2. Classify: Question, Bug, Feature request, Incident.
3. Tag: area label (e.g., ci, k8s, secrets).
4. Prioritize: P1 (blocking incidents), P2 (release-blocking), P3 (normal), P4 (nice-to-have).
5. Assign: route to area owner; if unclear, keep a single responsible triager.
6. Update requester with status and next expected time update.
7. Close with a summary and link to any new doc added.

Example 3 — Golden path for a new microservice

A golden path is a step-by-step, low-friction route for a common scenario.

1. Create from service-template (preconfigured build, deploy, logging).
2. Run bootstrap script to set repo, CI, environments, secrets.
3. Local run via container compose; smoke test passes.
4. Merge to main; CI builds image; CD deploys to staging.
5. Observability auto-wired: dashboards and alerts created.
6. One-click promote to production after approval.

Example 4 — Knowledge base structure

• Start Here: platform overview, glossary, access instructions.
• How-To Guides: short, task-focused steps (e.g., “Rotate a secret”).
• Runbooks: operational procedures for common incidents.
• Reference: limits, quotas, policies.
• FAQ: top 20 recurring questions with concise answers.

Exercises

Do these to practice. You can compare with provided solutions. Keep your drafts — you’ll reuse them in real projects.

Exercise 1 — Design a tiered support model

Create a one-page support policy for your team including: tiers, channels, hours, first response/resolve targets, escalation rules, and expectations for requesters.

• Deliverable: a policy text you could paste into a chat channel or team page.
• Success checklist:
  • Clear Tier 0/1/2 definition
  • Specific response targets
  • Escalation pathway
  • Expectation to search docs first

Exercise 2 — Issue template and triage labels

Draft an issue template for platform requests and a label scheme for routing. Include required fields and severity selection.

• Deliverable: template text + label names and meanings.
• Success checklist:
  • Minimal required fields
  • Severity or priority
  • Area tags for auto-routing
  • Field to confirm docs were checked

Title: [Area] Short summary

Checklist:
- [ ] I searched the KB/FAQ
- [ ] I can share logs or screenshots

What happened?
Expected vs actual:
Steps tried:
Service/repo:
Severity: (P1 blocking / P2 release-blocking / P3 normal / P4 nice-to-have)
Area: (ci|k8s|secrets|observability|networking)

Common mistakes and how to self-check

• Only reactive support, no enablement. Fix: invest time weekly in docs, templates, and golden paths.
• Unclear expectations. Fix: publish and pin a short support policy with hours and targets.
• No triage ownership. Fix: assign a rotating triager; track unassigned items daily.
• SLAs too aggressive without capacity. Fix: start conservative, measure, then tighten.
• Knowledge base rot. Fix: add review dates and “report doc issue” pattern to each page.
• Solving symptoms, not root causes. Fix: for repeated issues, file an enablement task (doc/template/tooling) before closing.

Practical projects

• Build a “Start Here” page and link 5 top how-to guides. Measure if support volume drops after publishing.
• Create a one-click service template that auto-wires CI/CD and observability. Run a pilot with one team.
• Run weekly office hours for a month; track attendance, topics, and resulting doc updates.

Who this is for

• Platform Engineers aiming to improve developer productivity and satisfaction.
• Infra/SRE engineers who support internal developers.
• Tech leads responsible for platform adoption.

Prerequisites

• Basic knowledge of your platform stack (CI/CD, container orchestration, secrets, monitoring).
• Ability to write concise documentation and simple runbooks.
• Access to your team’s chat/ticketing tools.

Learning path

1. Define and publish a lightweight support policy (Exercise 1).
2. Create issue templates and label scheme (Exercise 2).
3. Draft a golden path for a common task (from Worked examples).
4. Set up a weekly triage rotation and office hours; review metrics after 2–4 weeks.
5. Continuously prune and improve docs based on questions received.

Next steps

• Pick one team to pilot your policy and golden path. Iterate fast on their feedback.
• Instrument metrics: number of tickets, first response time, repeated question rate, and time-to-first-success for new services.
• Prepare a monthly summary: what improved, what remains painful, and one bold improvement to test.

Mini challenge

Choose one recurring question in your org. Create a 5-step how-to and add it to your Knowledge Base. Announce it with a short message in your support channel. Track if the same question appears over the next week.

Quick Test notice

Take the Quick Test below to check your understanding. Available to everyone. If you sign in, your progress will be saved.