At Pendo, we love to drink our own champagne, and we make a point of using our product to advance key business goals. No one is more familiar with this internal motion than Jocelyn Casanova, our very own Pendo admin who works cross-functionally to help teams get the most out of the platform.
To learn more about her work, our Community team sat down with Jocelyn.
Can you share a bit about your career path and how you became a Pendo admin?
I actually got a full-ride scholarship from Pendo to attend a coding bootcamp back in 2019. Their goal was to give someone who had no experience in tech or software skills an opportunity to attend a coding bootcamp, and then start a new career from there. They interviewed a lot of people and I just happened to be the one that they picked.
I graduated on a Friday and then started working in technical support on the following Monday. I started working with customers from the ground up, learning about Pendo as issues came in. Working with customers on their projects gave me a range of different experiences and use cases from every type of industry that was out there.
Over time, I saw a lot of common issues that I thought support could be automated for. So, I created a role called deflection engineering and used Pendo to make guides and deflect those common customer questions that weren’t necessarily about bugs, but about confusion around how to use our product.
Eventually, I moved into product operations, and from there into internal Pendo admin work. I basically started looking at how our own team was using Pendo, and organized things to ensure that it’s easy for all of us to use our own accounts.
What does your day-to-day look like in an admin role, and what do you like most about it?
Day to day, things can vary widely. A lot of the work depends on new or upcoming releases we have planned. I work closely with our product managers and go-to-market (GTM) teams on that front. Often, they will make me the first “customer” for a new product or feature. So for example, I was the first customer for Pendo’s team management. I tested it out with our product operations team to see how it was working, and was able to provide them a lot of feedback to make it even better.
Another part has been managing regular maintenance work to make sure all our Features and our Pages are named the same way, and that all of our product areas make sense to users. If somebody works in sales, marketing, or a customer-facing team, I want to make sure that if they go into Pendo and they’re looking for something in particular—say, a user segment—that they can find it quickly.
One example: I went ahead and created a handful of verified user segments that any team can quickly reference. These include segments for active paying customers, free-only users, and first-time login users. Before doing this, we had Pendo employees from across the org going in and creating ad hoc segments. And don’t get me wrong: We love that. We want people to use our own product. But if you are trying to communicate quickly with customers, sometimes you can’t spare an extra 30 minutes trying to figure out which segment in our software is the right one. You need to have something verified by the Pendo admin. We have that now.
What do you love most about being a Pendo admin?
What I love the most is that I can work with different teams across the company, and get to learn about their projects. As I work with more teams, I can see how they’re using Pendo and what they’re creating. I can better understand their mindsets and see different ways that we’re reaching customers that I may not have even thought about before.
I also love taking lessons from what I see specific teams doing to help Pendo become more efficient as a whole. When I see a particular strategy or tactic working for a team, I’ve been able to share those insights with other teams in similar situations—for example planning a GTM launch. I’m starting to think about how to operationalize and scale sharing these best practices going forward.
Last question for you: What are your go-to resources or tools that help you succeed as a Pendo admin?
Above all else, exploring Pendo itself and not being afraid to test out everything new that’s coming in. Pendo also has an amazing set of support resources for admins—especially the Pendo Admin Certification course and the Pendo Connect Slack channel. There’s a ton of great stuff on offer for admins looking to up their Pendo game—and I’d encourage them to explore it all!
Interested in learning more about how Pendo admins help their teams drive business wins? Join the Pendo Connect Slack channel today.
