Support
in Bloom
April 27 - May 8
Grow your support career in 2 weeks
Take a break from helping customers to help yourself: 4 bite-sized challenges designed to hone your skills, clean up your workflows, and advance your goals. Plus, we’ll send you a nifty little desk plant when you finish all 4. 🌱
How it works
Sign up
Join via email and we'll send each challenge directly to your inbox. You’ll also be able to follow along on LinkedIn if that’s more your thing.
Complete Challenges
Four challenges drop over 2 weeks (every Monday and Wednesday). Each takes 10–20 minutes and is designed to be genuinely useful — not fluffy.
Earn your plant
Complete all four and we’ll send you a literal money tree. Yes, that’s its real name. No, it doesn’t grow actual money. But think of how great it’ll look on your desk!
The Challenges
4 short prompts over 2 weeks
1. Plant the Seed 🌱
Focus: Career Goals
Monday, April 27
View the challenge2. Water the Roots 💧
Focus: Learning
Wednesday, April 29
View the challenge3. Reach for the Sun ☀️
Focus: Visibility
Monday, May 4
View the challenge4. Bloom 🌸
Focus: Reflection
Wednesday, May 6
View the challenge
Finish all 4
Get a plant
Complete every challenge and drop your emoji on each post — we'll send you a real, live plant to celebrate. Because you did the work, and that deserves something that grows.
Guess what? It’s a money tree! Rewards will ship after the challenge closes on May 8. We'll follow up with instructions to claim yours.
Plant the Seed
First challenge 🌱
Write one career goal as a specific sentence — what you want, by when, and one step you're taking this week.
Try this format:
"I want to [specific outcome] by [timeframe], and this week I will [one concrete step]."
Write it down somewhere you'll actually see it. Not buried in a notes app. Somewhere visible. Done? Drop a 🌱 on the LinkedIn post to log your completion and get one step closer to your plant.
"Get promoted" and "get better at my job" are not always clear career goals — they’re more like vibes. The reason most support pros stay vague is mainly because it can be hard to map where support careers actually go, so it's tricky to pick a destination with any confidence.
Support careers can actually branch in a few different directions that are worth knowing about before you set your goal:
The individual contributor/specialist track — deepening technical expertise, becoming the go-to person for a specific area (tooling, quality, documentation, a product line), often moving toward senior or lead roles without managing people
The management track — team lead, manager, director; requires building different skills earlier than most people expect, particularly around feedback and cross-functional communication
The adjacent role track — moving into operations, customer success, product, development, content, training, or enablement; support experience is genuinely valuable and more portable than people realize
Knowing which direction you're pointed changes what skills you should be building right now. A goal that makes sense for someone heading toward management looks pretty different from one that makes sense for someone who wants to go deep on support operations.
(Not sure where you want to be in 5 years? No worries, we got you! Take a look at these career crafting questions and consider your strengths and interests. While not an “official” part of the challenge, taking a deeper look at these things may shed some light on the right path for you.)
Water the Roots
Second challenge 💧
Spend 15 minutes on something that makes you better at your job. Then write down the one thing you'll actually use.
Some good places to start:
Read an article about support, CX, or a skill you want to build.
Watch a short talk or video from a practitioner you respect.
Explore a tool or workflow you've been meaning to look into.
(Need a starting point? Check out this post)
Done? Drop a 💧 on the LinkedIn post to log your completion and get one step closer to your plant.
Learning time is usually the first thing to go when things get busy, and in support, things are pretty much always busy. It's not that professional development feels unimportant, it's that the queue is immediate and a good article will still be there tomorrow. Except tomorrow has a queue too.
The write-it-down step is there because there's a real difference between reading something and actually absorbing it. One concrete takeaway — even a small one — is what turns 15 minutes of content into something you'll still remember next week.
A few things worth knowing about choosing what to learn in support:
What's worth learning depends on where you want to go. If you're heading toward a management track, time spent on feedback frameworks and 1:1 structures is well spent. If you're interested in support ops or tooling, dig into workflow design and automation. If adjacent roles like customer success or product are on your radar, start building context in those areas now. Connecting your learning choices to your direction (see Challenge 1) makes each session count for more.
Fifteen minutes done consistently is worth more than a deep dive done once. If today feels useful, it's worth thinking about where a regular learning block could realistically live in your week — even just one session. It compounds faster than it sounds like it would.
Need a starting point? Check out this post!
Reach for the Sun
Third challenge ☀️
Today we want you to put your knowledge to good use and share one customer insight, trend, or lesson with your team.
This could look like:
A heads up in a weekly meeting about an uptick of tickets surrounding a specific issue and what you’re doing to keep an eye on the situation.
Sharing a customer pain point with your manager during a 1:1, along with how you think it can be fixed.
Giving your dev team a shoutout in Slack because a quick fix they shipped turned an account marked as a “churn risk” back to green.
Done? Drop a ☀️ on the LinkedIn post to log your completion and get one step closer to your plant.
Customer service is often written off as a “cost center” because other folks in the company can’t see its impact on revenue. Luckily, you are in the prime position to change this narrative.
You have invaluable insight into where customers run into snags with your product or service, what your team could work on that would drive adoption, and what customers really think about your brand. You just need to find a way to get that information in front of the right people and have them take note.
There are a lot of ways to do this, but here are some ideas:
Take every opportunity. The work your team is doing in support is often invisible to the rest of the company, which means you need to work a little harder to get people’s attention. Three minutes to present a customer story at an all hands meeting? Take it. The chance to contribute a slide for the quarterly business review? Absolutely. The more people are exposed to the value support brings, the more often they will seek out your input.
Always lead with data. We talked about this in challenge three, but it bears repeating. Product managers, developers, and senior leadership teams are rarely swayed by spidey sense alone. Back up your feelings with data and a customer story. Data shows how a problem is affecting the business and the customer story humanizes the issue. Both are key.
Take a coffee break. Most of what we’ve been talking about in this section is high stakes — board meetings and c-suite presentations — but there are ways to be seen that are smaller and more comfortable too. Try something simple like grabbing coffee (virtual coffee breaks are ok too!) with someone you don’t normally talk to at your company. Learn what they do, tell them about what you do. Sometimes just being on someone’s radar is all you need to elevate the customer voice.
Bloom
Fourth challenge 🌸
Write down one habit, skill, or mindset shift from this challenge that you're committing to going forward.
Two weeks ago you set out to do something small, but meaningful, to grow your career. Think about what we’ve talked about — what’s one thing that clicked for you?
A new habit
A newfound love for data
The importance of coffee dates with friends
Whatever it is, let us know!
Done? Drop a ☀️ on the LinkedIn post to log your completion and get one step closer to your plant.
You made it! 🎉
Thanks for spending time with us over the last couple of weeks. We hope that you found some of the information in this guide helpful, and the challenges themselves useful.
While this event has come to an end, your career growth doesn’t have to. Here are some additional resources that you might find helpful either in your existing role, or in deciding what may come next.
Career Crafting Questions for Support Pros - We mentioned this resource back during the first challenge, but if you didn’t check it out, we recommend it. Spending time thinking about what you’re good at, what you like to do, and what you don’t like to do can be really helpful when making plans for the future.
Leveraging Transferable Skills for a Career Change - Customer success manager, Kristi Ernst-Thompson shares how you can lean on the skills you already have to transition from one role to another.
Building Skills for the Sport of Support - Technical support specialist Chrissy Chavez breaks down five of the most important skills for a support pro and gives tips on how to develop them.
The Supportive Podcast - Mat Patterson’s support-focused podcast is a must-listen. We especially recommend season one, as it covers topics that will be helpful for support pros at any stage of their career. We’re linking to the supportive page on our site, but it’s also available on Spotify, Apple, Overcast, and wherever else you go to get your podcast fix.
