Not every engineer works on software that sends rockets into space, enables cars to drive themselves or brings virtual worlds to life. The excitement of being a developer isn’t defined by the scope or size of a project but rather by the challenge being tackled.
One challenge the world’s brightest minds haven’t yet mastered is getting online shoppers to leave reviews.
The undertaking truly is immense: According to software company PowerReviews, just 5 to 10 percent of shoppers leave reviews. Solving this problem is important because reviews are incredibly valuable to e-commerce companies. Reviews can increase a product’s credibility and build trust between consumers and a brand, which can lead to higher conversion rates and increased spending.
Marketing automation company Klaviyo is the latest to take a crack at this challenge with its new reviews product, which is designed to give marketers more control over when and how they ask for reviews.
Senior Software Engineer Alexandrea Suri led Built In Boston on a deep dive into just how challenging and exciting it is to build something that moves shoppers to share their opinion.
Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that enables brands to send personalized and hyper-targeted messages to consumers at scale.
What was a product or feature you recently helped develop at Klaviyo?
I worked alongside a small team of engineers and product leaders to bring Klaviyo Reviews to market. I contributed to nearly every corner of the product at every stage in the process. On this nimble team of talented people, I iterated against early customer feedback and made decisions to direct the trajectory of the project. From a high level, Klaviyo Reviews enables brands to collect reviews and responses to custom questions that they can leverage in their intelligent marketing strategies.
Unlike in traditional engineering roles, it was my responsibility to weigh in on product strategy and debate the best path forward for the product and customers. I participated in research calls where we discovered a need for customers to easily drop their best review quote into an email campaign. From there, I partnered with additional teams and data scientists to build our reviews quote block. Similarly, I championed a more robust editing experience for our on-site widgets that includes a live preview of unpublished changes.
Unlike in traditional engineering roles, it was my responsibility to weigh in on product strategy and debate the best path forward for the product and customers.”
What was the most exciting or interesting aspect of working on Klaviyo Reviews?
One of the most interesting technical challenges was building a live preview experience for brands to customize their on-site widgets within Klaviyo. Our widgets live on brand storefronts, and it’s crucial that they appear polished and integrated with the rest of the brand’s styles.
Building on what our forms editor team learned, I created a sandbox store where brands can view their widget settings within the editor before publishing them to the web. I was able to experiment with the push API to notify the sandbox store of live changes within the editor.
However, we knew that some brands would still require custom CSS to achieve their designed look. I chose to use CSS variables for custom colors and spacing values as well as semantic class names so savvy brands could easily write their own overrides. Building the on-site widgets was a bit like designing a menu for 100 guests where everyone has a special request. I’m thrilled with the product that we created and excited to implement the upcoming features on our roadmap.
How did your engineering team culture support the successful creation of Klaviyo Reviews?
Our engineering team has a culture of high trust and accountability that allows us to operate like a startup within a larger organization. We each owned a swim lane and were accountable for taking business requirements with a UX/UI design and building all of the necessary components to bring the feature to life.
For example, I owned the on-site widget area, which encompassed everything from installing our app within Shopify to displaying each widget on a brand’s website and customizing widget settings and collecting review responses. Another engineer owned the custom questions feature, which associates questions to specific products, captures customer responses and aggregates the responses across products.
When our two areas overlapped, we divided the work between us to ensure we were all successful in creating a best-in-class product. At Klaviyo, we call this radical collaboration. It requires us to be iterative in our work, accountable to our timelines and to trust each other to quickly parallelize our efforts. In the end, teamwork enabled us to be greater than the sum of our parts.
