Founded in 2011, Jobber helps small home service businesses run their businesses from A to Z — helping to make home service run smoother for both the service provider and their customer — from creating quotes, to scheduling work, to managing invoicing and payments. With $40bn invoiced from 200,000 professionals across 60 countries, Jobber knows that small business can be very big business. Â
Jobber’s enormous success can be at least partially attributed to how valuable the mobile app is to their users and how good a job their mobile team does keeping the app running smoothly. While service providers can access Jobber from their computer, everyone out in the field with their boots on the ground — from an apprentice learning the trade, to the business owner — is putting the Jobber mobile app to use all day long. That means any problems with the app could cause issues for users who are out there working to provide good service to their own customers.
A couple of people can’t do everything. At least not for long.
In Jobber’s early days, a Product Manager would “quarterback” the releases each week. It was their responsibility to connect with each team and find out who had new code going into the next release, gather all the QA steps, and make sure each team had done sufficient testing before manually uploading and releasing to the App Store and Play Store.
But as Jobber grew, updates were shipped so frequently that Customer Success had to keep their ears close to the ground to keep up with all the new features that were going out. To support these efforts, Customer Success got pulled into the release process itself, and one of their representatives would take a pass at the app QA before release. As the company’s rapid growth continued, it wasn’t long before any Success rep helping out became one Success Rep (the then tier 2 rep, Morgan), as the role needed someone who had a real eye for finding bugs, and the means to document them and get the right people fixing them fast.
Morgan’s work on app delivery soon bled over from simply being the point of contact for Customer Success feedback to serving as the point of contact for Product as a whole. She became active in all sprint reviews, QAed for online and app delivery, learned the product inside and out in order to train customer-facing teams, developed FAQs and customer messaging, and kept the internal knowledge base updated.
Quarterbacking weekly releases was a huge drain on the 2 PMs who ran them, so as Morgan’s role evolved, she became the first member of Product Ops and took ownership of the app release process. She was testing, triaging bugs, getting the green light from all teams, and manually uploading builds to the App Store and Play Store, a multi-step process that sounds simple and straightforward enough until you’re dealing with it each and every week.
‍
“So much of the work was manual and everyone had to continually update each other on progress with each release and tag people in as needed. It took a lot of effort to maintain the level of transparency and communication we aim for.”
Morgan Wilson
Product Operations Specialist
Jobber ran weekly release trains, and Morgan — the conductor managing those nonstop trains — needed to be on top of everything to ensure that new updates went out on schedule. This was a lot for one person or team to take on when they also have lots of other tasks to attend to.
“There were always edge cases. If this thing doesn't work, reach out to these people. If this other thing doesn’t work, reach out to these other people. Then, if that thing doesn’t work, reach out to yet another group. With our company growing quickly there were a lot of people who could be involved. Anything manual could begin to feel overwhelming.”
Konstantin Rakitin
Senior Engineer
There were plenty of issues that any growing team would need to tackle with their releases — like a lack of transparency (since the process had naturally belonged to a small number of people), new employees every week that needed to get up to speed, and ever-expanding documentation that had to be referenced for each release. It was clear that tackling the process manually was not an optimal approach.
“Learning on the fly when your cadence needs to be so tight is a stressful process to undertake.”
Morgan Wilson
Product Operations Specialist
A solution was needed that could support the work of Jobber’s mobile team and free up time to let them move more quickly and unburdened.
Automating manual tasks away and providing a single source of truth, accessible to all stakeholders
“The person who captains our process was suddenly not there. That was a big catalyst for finding a scalable way to manage our releases.”
Erica Jeffries
Product Operations Coordinator
The Product Operations team was founded to fix the release process, but had a number of other tasks they needed to cover to help everyone move faster and support the growth of both their teams and their customer base. To make the release part of all this scalable across a large org, they needed something that could sit in the middle of their process — a coordination layer to smooth over all the bumps and give every stakeholder a place to turn to, instead of a single person, to see the big picture and to understand their own part to play in each and every release. Â
In the middle of all this, Morgan went away on parental leave. Though many people contributed to managing the release process in some way, she’d been leading things for so long that her absence became a catalyst for more quickly finding a platform that could pull their entire release process all into one place. That platform was Runway.
Runway could fill in all of the many gaps, large and small, that Morgan had been putting so much time and energy into either doing herself or reminding someone else to do.
Jobber’s release process wasn’t just full of tasks to be completed, it was also full of waiting around for those tasks to be completed. And not just waiting, but checking in on the progress of many different tools and people to see how much longer they’d be waiting. Runway also gave the mobile org a solution to this, providing a single source of truth where all progress could be checked at any time.
“Runway tightened up the timing of how teams submitted their work, interacted with QA, dealt with the bugs, everything. Instead of wondering when they needed to do something, it was all part of Runway’s flow. We didn’t have that before and we were able to build a better process around it.”
Erica Jeffries
Product Operations Coordinator
Seamless releases — no matter how many people or teams are contributing
“It’s wonderful. I can do many things with my week that aren’t just app testing, and herding cats to figure out who’s putting what into the app.”
Morgan Wilson
Product Operations Specialist
Jobber’s releases now require less mental overload to track. More important work — like building features, improving developer experience, and supporting customers — can get all the focus, instead of one person or another having to remember to perform a never-ending list of tasks and risk delaying or breaking the process when a step gets missed.
“There's a lot less busy work during kickoffs. I can review the PR, approve it, and off it goes.”
Konstantin Rakitin
Senior Engineer
Today, at a significantly scaled-up Jobber, any of the different feature teams have the ability to take part in a particular release. This means during any given week, a new set of five to ten people may be involved in the next release and have to be fully up to speed to get their work out the door on time. Thanks to Runway acting as a single source of truth for all their work, they know exactly where they fit into the process, the exact status of the release at all times, and they never need to pester anyone (or be pestered by Morgan and her team!) to ensure all the right steps are being taken to deliver their new updates to customers.
When Morgan returned from parental leave, having Runway in place supported her in making improvements that she’d long wanted to tackle, like reworking how the team approached hotfixes (and cutting their hotfix rate by 1/3rd in 2023!). All that bandwidth and attention that had previously been poured into releases could now be turned elsewhere.
“Runway is just magic. I’m no longer pulling my hair out every week over releases.”
Morgan Wilson
Product Operations Specialist
‍
