Career
My 30-60-90 Day Plan as a Support Engineer
A structured approach to ramping up in a new support engineering role: focusing on understanding systems, resolving issues effectively, delivering measurable impact and being an active member of the team
First 30 Days: Understand the System
Goal: Build context, learn the product, and understand how the system behaves in production.
Focus areas:
- Product architecture (APIs, services, dependencies)
- Common support issues and workflows
- Internal tools (ticketing, logs, monitoring)
- Documentation and runbooks
Actions:
- Shadow support tickets and customer interactions
- Reproduce common issues in a test sandbox environment
- Review logs and understand system behaviour
- Build a personal knowledge base of recurring issues and resolution processes - this is key!
Outcome:
- Able to triage and understand incoming issues
- Familiar with system architecture and tooling
- Comfortable navigating logs and debugging basics
Days 30–60: Contribute and Resolve
Goal: Take ownership of issues and begin contributing independently.
Focus areas:
- Debugging across layers (DNS, TLS, HTTP, application)
- Customer communication and issue ownership
- Incident handling and escalation paths
Actions:
- Handle tickets independently
- Investigate and resolve moderately complex issues
- Improve documentation and internal runbooks
- Identify patterns in recurring problems
Outcome:
- Resolving issues with minimal support
- Communicating clearly with customers and engineers
- Contributing to team knowledge and processes
Days 60–90: Improve and Scale
Goal: Move beyond reactive support and improve systems and processes.
Focus areas:
- Root cause analysis and prevention
- Process improvements and automation
- Observability and monitoring gaps
Actions:
- Lead investigation of complex incidents
- Write postmortems and identify systemic issues
- Propose improvements to workflows or tooling
- Build small tools or scripts to reduce repetitive work
Outcome:
- Trusted to handle high-severity incidents
- Driving improvements in support workflows
- Contributing to system reliability and efficiency
Principles
- Understand before acting: gather context before jumping to solutions
- Own the problem: follow issues through to resolution
- Communicate clearly: especially under pressure
- Think in systems: not just symptoms
- Write: writing solutions and ideas is vital to share knowledge.
I focus on understanding systems end-to-end, debugging issues at their root cause, and communicating clearly.
Why This Matters
Support engineering is not just about resolving tickets: it’s about understanding systems in production, reducing friction for customers, and improving reliability over time.
Bottom line is the customer!