Jeff Gardner of Intercom shares his lessons learnt

Jeff has been at Intercom for seven years, as the fourth employee he headed up customer support while fixing bugs and odd engineering tasks. He then went on to lead the support team. In the last 18 months, Jeff has taken on the role of Head of Platform Partnerships.

We asked Jeff to share three lessons he has learnt during his time at Intercom.

Do something that matters

Intercom has a really compelling mission; how to continually connect businesses to their customers.

Jeff explains that it’s vital to have a mission you can get behind when it comes to growing and hiring teams.

Put your principles down on paper

Your principles are how you go about solving problems, building products, or helping customers. Having principles written means you have a reference point when you’re in a meeting or working with many people.

Intercom recently shared their product development principles here.

Jeff goes onto explain that understanding the problem, before solving it, is vital to crafting the best solution.

It’s all about the people, and it’s all about the long term.

When you look back over the company you built, it’s the relationships you’ll cherish. The way businesses make it through hard and stressful periods is by having a team of people to help prop up the idea. Jeff goes onto explain that we should be looking 20 years ahead, rather than just hiring a team for the short term.

Sometimes you outgrow people and sometimes people out-grow you and often the best thing to do is it part ways.