Best Vends The How and Why to befriend your vendors
summary
Vendors are “secret teammates” in your stack and investing a little time returns features, influence and saved engineering effort. Specific, low-effort actions: click the in-app pop-ups (example: Slack’s red gift unlocked Google Calendar integration), filter vendor emails into a folder and skim weekly, read vendor blogs and CircleCI docs for practical tips like anchors/aliases, file constructive feature requests, report incident impact to your customer success rep, write a case study, and when possible participate in betas to steer product direction (PagerDuty’s business‑services is a concrete feature to map customer‑facing services).
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chapters (30)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:26Paige Bernier
- 0:44Where this talk came from
- 1:51Definitions
- 2:33Disclaimers
- 3:30In defense of vendors
- 4:09Vendors are just like us
- 4:52Celebrity gossip magazines
- 5:16Keystone Arch
- 6:35Bestfriendship Spectrum
- 9:10Participation on both sides
- 10:37Be strategic
- 11:33Low effort activities
- 13:37Maximize money spent
- 14:28Influence the product
- 15:14I want to be best friends
- 15:26Try this
- 15:45Inapp popups
- 16:10Slack gift
- 16:55Unsubscribing
- 17:07Filtering
- 19:10Write a blog post
- 19:53Complaints
- 20:20Feature Requests
- 21:03Vendor Incidents
- 21:23Customer Success Rep
- 22:22Vendor Ship Secrets
- 22:49My Personal Favorite
- 23:01Betas
- 24:22Recap
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