Meet Accelo's Museum Piece: Hugh Cowling

Hugh Cowling started working at Accelo when Snapchat was still called Picaboo, and food was prepared to be eaten, not photographed. It was the year 2008.

As Accelo’s longest standing employee, we thought we’d ask Hugh about his experience so far working at our Wollongong office in Australia.

So, without any further ado, meet Hugh...

Q1. What is your role at Accelo and how has it changed over time?

My role has evolved over the past 9 years from Client Support & Training to managing the Quality Assurance Team with a focus on user-acceptance testing.

Q2. How did you land this job and what were your first impressions?

I have no shame in admitting that my mum was integral in me landing this job. She’d heard Geoff McQueen [our CEO] was doing good things for IT in Wollongong and knew I was a bit tired of the ‘hustle and bustle’ of Sydney.

A few people told me I was joining 'a startup,' which I thought was a silly thing to say. Surely a startup is a company that’s only been around for a few months, right?

But at the time, Geoff’s first web design/dev agency had been running for years and had a team of about 20 people. As it turned out, I was joining a special team focused on building his new company, Accelo, and looking back, it was a classic software startup with many mis-adventures searching for product-market fit.

Q3. What’s the best thing about working at Accelo in Wollongong?

Almost all of our developers, designers, and system engineers are based here in one open-plan office. We’re quirky, nerdy, casually dressed, and don’t take ourselves too seriously. When you’re testing new features or handling support issues it’s great being able to consult directly with those working in the code.

Q4. And the worst thing?

Not being in San Francisco! While we have most of the product team at hand, our other amazing teams like sales, marketing, support, implementation, and more, are SF based - so we here in Australia envy the nightlife, restaurants, sporting events, and the amazing tech startup scene that we only know exist via our Slack chat rooms.

Q5. How do you use Accelo day-to-day?

I spend some time in the Request Inbox of Accelo. We’ve set-up request types to help track inquiries about support, sales, our mobile app, feedback on beta features, and more. It’s great because you can easily see who’s actively working on a client request and then convert any sizeable requests into a support ticket (or a sale!) as required.

We also utilize the Retainers module to manage pre-paid support contracts for some customers. When working with these customers it is easy to relocate the emails (captured automatically by Accelo) to be under the retainer so all replies (and the time spent) is tracked against the retainer allowance.

Q6. If you were a client, what feature would you use the most and why?

Triggers. I already use them for all sorts of reminders and alerts. Lately, I've had some tickets I was managing slip through the cracks, but our team has configured Triggers to detect Tickets that have gone unattended for a few days, or Tickets that are missing an important detail - like a link to a JIRA issue - and so Accelo has been emailing me essential reminders.

Q7. Besides Accelo, what other apps couldn't you live without? 

Slack! This is so important for communicating within our entire organization. We have lots of channels (or ‘rooms’) but each has a specific purpose and audience, so you can really stay informed - as well as get a message out - without it getting too noisy or distracting.

I also spend a fair bit of time in JIRA. While we could use Accelo in-house to manage all of our software development, we know that JIRA is a more natural fit, especially with the other Atlassian tools for managing code (BitBucket) which JIRA works so well with. However, Accelo can sync Issues/Tickets with JIRA to make our support and development teams work more seamlessly :)