Atolio Blog
May 16, 2023

How Atolio uses Atolio

Mark Matta
Mark Matta
Co-founder at Atolio
dogfood Produced by DALL•E with prompt `futuristic dog eating pixels on a screen`

tl;dr The title says it all 🙂

One of the benefits of building a workplace search product is being able to dogfood it yourself – regardless of whether you’re an engineer or client facing member of the team. In my last post, I wrote about how I thought about the problem space from the vantage point of building out the sales team at PagerDuty and hopefully through this post, it starts to become clearer how that gets solved in the context of how we use our own product here at Atolio.

On average, each of us use Atolio 20-30 times a day.

First for some context. At Atolio, we use a number of tools to organize and get work done:

  • Zulip: it’s like Slack but we use it to group conversations around topics so it’s easy for folks to follow along when you’re working across different timezones
  • GitHub: this is where all of our code lives + how we collaborate on changes to our codebase
  • Linear: we manage all of our product tickets here
  • Google Drive: Google Docs/Slides/Sheets + storing PDF’s and other files
  • Gmail + Gcal: email + calendar
  • Slack: for all of our client support efforts - we setup a Slack Connect channel for each client
  • Notion: all of our notes from client calls go in here for everyone to find
  • The Guide: our own internal docs site built on Hugo and managed via Git; named after THGTG
  • Salesforce: our CRM

As you can see, this means we have useful information about topics and clients spread across an array of applications. This is where Atolio comes in! Some of the common use cases we use Atolio for are found below:

📗 Prepping for client calls (in this case with one of our favorites)

dogfood-1 Screenshot from our Dogfood deployment

In our case, we coalesce conversations in Slack with them, notes in Notion, tickets we’ve opened up on behalf of them and internal chats…more or less giving us a complete 360 view of what the current world looks like around them and the people closest to it (in our case, Bartek and I)

🔁 Trying to make sense of the re-occurance of a specific mention of something in client notes

dogfood-2 Screenshot from our Dogfood deployment

Sometimes someone brings something up like in this case, a BambooHR connector for enriching user profiles in our system, and we want to track back where it was mentioned so we can follow up with them to let them know that we’re working on it.

🎟️ Catching up on PR’s/tickets

dogfood-3 Screenshot from our Dogfood deployment

We talked about the auto-join feature for auto-joining public slack channels with one of our Slack connector configurations and when I look for it in Atolio, I can get a full picture around the PR’s, Tickets and Conversations we’ve had about it internally so I can keep some of our early clients in the loop on the progress.

👥 Who’s working on X

dogfood-4 Screenshot from our Dogfood deployment

We’re a small team but it’s still helpful to make sense of who I should go and talk to about a specific client request, in this case earlier in the year with our need for an Azure AD connector to do user identity resolution off of. Now I can quickly point my requests to Bartek and Eric knowing they were most involved with the work that went into it.

We have a number of clients using Atolio in similar ways today. In particular, they enable their growing teams of engineers/developers/product managers self service the knowledge they need to be effective in their work. In a future post, we’ll share more of those use cases.

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