Before we decidewhat we support and how,let's focus onwhat is actually delivered.
To the customer, and to support.
Scope and ownership come after, not before.
A standard customer journey at Threekit
At each stage, the customer's needs are refined and data is collected.
After months of upstream work, Support inherits what ships, almost always undocumented.
Every AI project is built differently
Hardcoded
No GoTo tenant, logic in code (RAG finders): Therma-Tru, TaylorMade, Sloan.
GoTo tenant + code
A tenant for data, the rest built by hand: Andersen, Certor, Lovesac, A-Dec.
Full stack
Tenant + backend API + front end + email + external services: Aventa, Brizo, Waudena, Cintas, Takara.
36 AI projects (including demos) in the tracker, ~70 repos across threekit and threekit-labs.
No two built the same, and the data lives somewhere different each time: Porter, Cloudflare, or GCP Cloud Run; Postmark or not.
Nobody could tell us what had been delivered
We received no documentation, and no one could say exactly what had shipped. We only drew this diagram now, after go-live. It turned out to be four separate experiences on one shared backend, behind an admin portal that is just a page of links, some pointing to things the customer can't even access.
What happens when "delivered" is not defined
| Case theme | Count | What it tells us |
|---|---|---|
| Manual data / product sync | 7 | Run by one engineer, by hand, with no documented script, so Support can't do them |
| Access / environments | 4 | The customer doesn't know what they can access |
| Product bugs | 4 | One mobile-quiz bug logged twice |
| "How do I edit my content?" | 2 | The customer doesn't know what they received |
The symptoms, told by the customer
"...why our Workwear & FAS experiences were built with a dev environment, but our Hospitality experience was not. Also, is sharing screenshots locally going to be the only way to QA Hospitality moving forward."
"I am reaching out to request a sync for the Threekit Workwear experience. Let me know if you need any additional information."
"...Roger's access in the admin portal is completely broken, and we need to make sure he gets full access back... We also have 4 partners to grant view-only access to the FAS Analytics Dashboard."
"Our team realizes we need to be prepared for updated content and layouts as analytics become more prevalent with these quizzes. Across all three experiences, what do editing capabilities look like on my end? For example, can I edit the copy and layout of the Hospitality homepage with the access I have now? Can I change the imagery of the parent sections on the FAS results page? And the quiz questions, if we want them tweaked, do I have those capabilities with my current setup? If not, what does the process look like for edits that are not content related?"
We cannot support what we cannot see or locate
- No debugging, maintaining, or handing a product to the customer when it is undocumented and we don't know where its data and code live.
- Access is not granted with the project. Cintas repo transfers have been requested for weeks, still pending.
- Several AI projects live in threekit-labs, an org support cannot access at all.
- And we cannot help a customer who doesn't understand their own tool and has no way to take ownership of it.
We were told it would be simple
We were told Takara was simple. The diagram says otherwise. This diagram allows us to do what we could not do with Cintas: discuss internally what should be supported by who, sit with the customer, walk the diagram, mark the blocks we own 100% (any issue there comes straight to us), and offer the ones they could run themselves, like the UI, if they have a web team.
Fix the foundation first