Support & Customer Engineering · 300-level
Support & Customer Engineering
A senior-level deep dive into running support as engineering: systematic troubleshooting, incident and outage communication, deflection economics, metrics that resist gaming, and turning recurring tickets into permanent fixes, tools, and proactive prevention.
SUP-3013 creditselectiveno prerequisites
What's inside
Sections & lessons
01
The support mindset & tiers
- What T1, T2, and T3 actually ownconcept35 min
- Ownership: driving a ticket to done, not just to the next queueconcept35 min
- Empathy at scale: the reported problem is rarely the real oneconcept35 min
- The support-to-engineering pipeline: turning tickets into product signalconcept35 min
02
Systematic troubleshooting
- Hypothesis-driven debugging: from symptom to testable guessconcept40 min
- Bisection: halving the search space instead of scanning itconcept40 min
- Avoiding rabbit holes: timeboxing and knowing when to change approachconcept35 min
- A guided troubleshooting walkthrough: intermittent checkout failuresdemo45 min
03
Reading logs & reproducing bugs
- Reading logs: levels, structure, and what to grep forconcept40 min
- Correlation IDs and distributed traces: following one request across servicesconcept45 min
- Building a minimal reproduction: the most valuable artifact in supportdemo45 min
- Environment parity: why 'works on my machine' wastes daysconcept35 min
04
Communication under pressure
- The anatomy of a status update the customer can act onconcept35 min
- Setting expectations and saying 'I don't know yet' with authorityconcept35 min
- De-escalation: turning an angry ticket aroundconcept35 min
05
Escalation & incident comms
- Severity, thresholds, and how to escalate an incidentconcept40 min
- Incident roles and the single source of truthconcept35 min
- Customer comms during an outage: the status page as a promiseconcept35 min
- The blameless postmortem: learning from an incident without blamedemo45 min
06
Knowledge management & deflection
- Writing KB articles people actually find and useconcept35 min
- Self-service and the economics of deflectionconcept40 min
- Canned responses and macros that don't feel cannedconcept35 min
07
Support metrics & SLAs
- The core support metrics: response time, resolution time, and CSATconcept35 min
- SLAs: what they promise and how to handle a breachconcept35 min
- Backlog health: reading the queue as a flow systemconcept40 min
- Gaming the metric: Goodhart's law and how to resist itconcept35 min
08
Customer/support engineering & automation
- From ticket to fix: the support engineering disciplineconcept40 min
- Building a self-serve diagnostic from a ticket pattern: a walkthroughdemo45 min
- Proactive support: reaching the customer before the ticketconcept35 min
- Synthesis: the support engineer's operating systemreflection40 min
This module ends in a gate you can fail.
That's what makes passing it mean something. Take the DSAT, get placed, and start earning.