Author: Amani Farooque, Program Development Manager
Date: November 2020
Wonder what's behind the avatar for some of those people you see constantly on the Hitchhikers Community? My name is Amani Farooque and I work as a Program Development Manager at Yext, managing the Hitchhiker Platform and focusing on enhancing developer and administrator experience. Read more to learn more about me and get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what maintaining the program entails!
Yext has been my home for the past three years! I started on our Technical Engagement team implementing custom Pages and ETL implementations for our Enterprise clients. In my next role I was able to launch some of our first Answers beta implementations to develop the implementation and post-launch methodology you can learn through the Hitchhikers program. As one of the initial members of the Hitchhikers program team, I worked to develop the program from the ground up to where we are today! Below, read some of my favorite parts of working on the Program team.
One of our top priorities is to make sure our community has access to all of the new product features and understands how best to use them. We work very closely with our Product Management and Engineering teams to anticipate new features and updates that we will need to make to our Hitchhiker module content to ensure everything is fresh. We also work with them to publicize these new exciting features to our community — check out the Product/Library Release category in the community & subscribe to get our updates!
Every Tuesday at 11AM ET, we host office hours for the Hitchhikers community to help troubleshoot any issues they're having as they build Yext experiences for their customers. Hitchhikers will post their questions on the community (see an example here) for us to review during the session. Ahead of office hours, we'll coordinate on our team who can walk through a live example or explain the concept. Join one of our upcoming office hours and learn more here!
One cool feature of the platform that we've introduced recently is the ability to submit your experience for review from our team. Available to Pathfinder ranks or higher, you'll see this badge on your home screen to request feedback from us!
Our team will review the experience according to our build best practices and any information you provide about your client's KPIs. I usually review a few of these weekly, in particular for some of our Answers Free Trial customers!
Last, but not least, I help train and onboard new Hitchhikers into the program, so that they can implement Yext products with all of our best practices in mind. After Hitchhikers go through the digital training (through one of our Curriculums), we will often give them demo assignments to practice a client kickoff, an Answers build demo, and an intent page template before they start taking on real clients.
Can't wait to meet all of you emerging Hitchhikers through the community or our various events!