A few years ago, we had a hypothesis that IntelliJ IDEA should have different requirements in organizations, which we can’t see without direct communication with somebody from them. That’s how I started such conversations with JetBrains’ customers. And now we have a Customer Success department.

In this talk, I’ll tell you how we did that, the challenges we’ve faced, and how it’s different from non DevTooling world. We’ll start with our history, with some specific examples. Then I’ll share what is essential for people doing Customer Success for Tooling and how to find counterparts on the Customer side, usually Development Experience engineers and leads.

Like Developer Productivity, we have the problem of calculating the success of Success engineers, a bonus topic which will be covered during the talk.