Support Engineering
How Granola redesigned support workflows using Decimal to handle issues at scale
Support engineers start with the findings instead of manually searching logs, databases, and code to troubleshoot what happened.
Sanjeet Hajarnis
Granola is an AI notepad that helps you get the doing done by taking your raw meeting notes and making them awesome. It's also one of the fastest growing AI companies, having hit unicorn status less than 2 years after launching.
Such rapid growth means a hefty support inbox, where Granola's small but mighty support team handles a growing number of issues every week. Decimal investigates each ticket first and suggests a response so the team is no longer starting each issue from scratch. This Decimal-powered process allows the team to handle 2x the volume with a small, nimble team.
The challenge
Granola has become a staple across some of the world's most innovative companies: from enterprises like Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack and Asana to fast-growing startups like Cursor, Lovable, and Mistral AI.
These companies are turning to Granola not only to capture their notes, but also to capture their context. Conversation transcripts are the richest source of context for what's happening across your company, and when paired with powerful AI models, they can unlock workflows that wouldn't have been possible before.
The CX team was still small, and the work behind each ticket was rarely simple. Many issues required understanding exactly what happened inside the product before responding to the customer.
Support engineers often had to troubleshoot issues manually by:
searching logs in CloudWatch
exploring the codebase via Cursor
pulling together customer-specific context
discussing in Slack
The information existed, but it lived across different systems. Every ticket required stitching the information together before the team could resolve the issue.
Before Decimal, we had built a Cursor command that would take a Plain ticket, pull the relevant CloudWatch logs for that user, and try to generate a hypothesis about what might be going wrong. Sometimes it was spot on, sometimes it was completely made up, so someone still had to go through the logs and validate it.
Vicky Firth, Head of CX
Redesigning support
The instinct might have been to immediately add more CX headcount to deal with the increased ticket volume. But instead of going directly to scale, Granola redesigned how issues are triaged and resolved by leveraging Decimal directly into their existing support workflow in Plain.
Now when a ticket is created, Decimal processes it automatically in the background. It analyzes the code, logs, and documentation related to the issue to produce an investigation report and next steps directly inside the ticket.
Instead of searching across systems to troubleshoot the issue, the support team reviews the findings within their workflow and focuses on responding to the customer.
There’s been a real step change since Decimal started pulling CloudWatch logs directly. It saves us a huge amount of time investigating what actually happened.
Sam Tucker, Founding CX Engineer
How support works now
Today, every ticket follows a consistent workflow.
When a customer submits an issue:
The ticket arrives in Plain
Decimal automatically analyzes CloudWatch logs, traces relevant code paths, and leverages custom APIs and tools to fetch user context necessary for troubleshooting.
Checks Incident.io to determine if the issue is related to an ongoing or past incident.
Once the root cause is identified, an investigation report and response with next steps is drafted directly on the ticket as a private note - with minimal disruption to the existing workflow
The support engineer reviews the findings and responds back to the user.
Decimal also closes the loop between product behavior and documentation. When an issue gets resolved using information that isn’t documented, it generates a pull request to update the documentation.
Over time, this ensures the documentation improves alongside the product.
Example: resolving a missing transcript
A common issue reported by customers is a missing meeting transcript.
Several things could cause this:
the transcription service failed
the user’s device had microphone issues
the meeting provider did not deliver audio correctly
the user didn’t click to join the meeting
Before Decimal, support engineers had to manually trace logs and system behavior to determine the cause.
Now Decimal performs that investigation automatically by:
leveraging custom APIs to obtain user context
narrowing down to the most relevant logs in CloudWatch
analyzing the code around transcription and failure modes
It identifies where the failure occurred, explains the cause, and drafts a response for the support engineer to review, significantly reducing the time to resolution.
The result
The impact was immediate.
2x ticket volume: The support team now handles twice the number of issues without adding headcount.
Investigations completed automatically: Support engineers start with the findings instead of manually searching logs, databases, and code to troubleshoot what happened.
Fewer tickets reaching the team: Decimal resolves 70% of the common questions through chat before they become tickets.
Documentation improves continuously: Decimal generates pull requests to update the documentation and fill in knowledge gaps.
Decimal often goes the extra mile with explanations and context that we simply wouldn’t have time to include ourselves. And we’re continuing to build on that.
Vicky Firth, Head of CX
