Who is "The Fixer"?

Every week, one of the engineers is The Fixer. This rotating role is essential to Resend, ensuring that our products maintain high quality and reliability.

Principles and Values

Quality over features: While we may not always match our competitor's features for features, we can surpass them in quality. Our commitment to quality is our top priority and is a key differentiator, reducing customer frustration and engineering incidents.

Collaboration and communication: Effective communication and collaboration within our team and across departments are crucial for resolving issues efficiently.

Customer-centric approach: Our primary focus is on delivering a delightful experience to customers. We work hard to quickly and effectively solve any issues they bring to us.

Operations

Weekly rotation: The Fixer role rotates among the engineering team weekly. This approach ensures that everyone understands the support process and can effectively contribute to resolving issues.

Proactive bug management: We aim for a zero-bug policy, prioritizing addressing and resolving bugs sooner rather than later. This approach helps maintain product stability and ensures customer satisfaction.

Two-week resolution: We commit to resolving all identified bugs within two weeks. This SLA ensures that issues are addressed promptly, minimizing disruption for our users. Issues from the Customer Engineering board have their own SLA and must be respected.

Assigning bugs: If The Fixer cannot fix a bug, it should be escalated and assigned to another team member with the necessary expertise. This ensures that all bugs are resolved.

Responsibilities

Customer engineering board: Help the Support team keep the board up to date by investigating and fixing reported issues that respect the SLA.

Timely resolution: Engineers must work diligently to resolve issues within the two-week SLA, ensuring minimal impact on our users.

Quality assurance: Every fix is tested thoroughly to ensure it meets our quality standards and does not introduce new issues.

Closing the loop: Once an issue is resolved, communicate with the customer to confirm the fix. This step is crucial in maintaining transparency and trust.

Knowledge sharing: Document solutions and share knowledge with the team to foster a culture of learning and growth.

Delegating: It's important that The Fixer is able to delegate tasks to different teams and areas to help with it. It's a front-end or UX bug? Design team might be able to help, it's an infra bug? DevOps team might be able to help. Keep in mind to have a balance delegation to not over distract other teams.

How can I help The Fixer?

Feedback and triage: Report bugs and improvements on #all-triage Slack channel.

Ticket and SLA: Create the Linear ticket from the Slack report, add to the engineering team and add the the-fixer label.

• We have a label called the-fixer and an automation of adding a SLA of 14 days to fix the issue.
• That helps us organize the bugs and fix in time instead of backlogging issues with no owner.

Time budget: It's important for all areas to have a budget on their week to help The Fixer with one or two tasks if needed.

Questions

How do I know who's The Fixer this week? We track the rotation on Incident.io, and it will be communicated in the All-Hands.

How can I ping The Fixer on Slack? You can tag @the-fixer. Incident.io automatically updates that group with the rotation person.

What do I need to focus on? You should focus on the Customer Engineering board on Linear. Plan the week on engineering planning with bugs and improvements in the product.

I don't know how to fix it. What should I do? Raise your hand and ask for help.

How do I manage my time between The Fixer work and feature engineering projects? Ideally, this person should have time to focus on the product's bug fixes and improvements and be available for the Support team. We don't expect you to work on both fronts.

Should I only fix bugs reported by customers? No, reported bugs from customers are part of the responsibilities. The team also shares bugs on Slack; these issues should be tracked on Linear and prioritized in planning.

What about the Design and DevOps teams? Are they in the rotation? They are not on rotation, but they are areas that will assist.

Does focusing on bugs slow down the development of new features? In theory, it slows down. In reality, think of Resend, but without the quality. We don't believe this is the right approach.