Cover Letter Writer

Kindling's framing of support as a product problem is the reason I'm writing rather than skimming past this posting. That's exactly how I've had to think about it for the last three years, managing a team of 5 at a fintech, where I spent three months tagging every ticket to find out what was actually driving our first-reply times, then rebuilt triage around it. Median first-reply time went from 9 hours to under 1 hour. I also built the escalation process my team still runs on, and I coach by sitting down with real tickets rather than handing people a script, which is the only way I've found to actually change how someone diagnoses a problem. Moving from a team of 5 to 8, and into a role where escalation and coaching are named responsibilities rather than things I built on the side, is exactly the kind of step I'm looking for.

The line in your posting about treating support as a product problem is what made me stop and actually write this letter instead of sending a generic one. That's been the core of how I've managed my team for the past three years, and it's clearly the same instinct behind how Kindling wants this role run. I currently lead a support team of 5 at a fintech company. When I took over, our median first-reply time was 9 hours, which was hurting us in ways that were hard to quantify until I spent three months tagging every single ticket that came through: by issue type, by complexity, by which stage things were getting stuck. That data showed our triage process was routing simple, high-volume issues through the same queue as genuinely hard ones, so I rebuilt it from scratch around actual ticket patterns rather than guesswork. Median first-reply time dropped to under an hour. The escalation process I built at the same time is still the one my team uses today. I designed it so that escalations get faster the moment a ticket needs a human decision rather than sitting in a queue waiting for someone to notice it's stuck, which matters a lot in fintech where a delayed answer can mean real financial consequences for a customer. I'd want to understand how escalation currently works at Kindling before assuming anything translates directly, but the underlying approach, watching where tickets actually get stuck and redesigning around that rather than layering more rules on top, is the same either way. On coaching: I don't hand people scripts. I sit down with agents and go through real tickets together, the ones that went well and the ones that didn't, because that's where people actually learn to think about a problem rather than just follow a decision tree. Scaling that approach from a team of 5 to 8 is a real jump, and it's part of what makes this role interesting to me rather than just a bigger version of what I'm doing now. The part of your posting about working closely with product on recurring issues is the piece I'd want to talk through most. Ticket tagging only matters if it turns into something product can act on, and that loop, support surfacing patterns and product actually closing them, is where I think the real leverage is in a role like this.