Netlify functions are an incredibly powerful and flexible feature. The PM came to me with this straightforward request: Learn about how people are using functions, and what can be improved. A secondary goal was to start to identify use cases for functions that we could use to promote the feature: functions are so flexible that they can be used for many things. I also wanted to learn about any challenges people had when learning to use functions, and what concerns they had about using them in the future. These would tell us about technical and cultural/attitudinal obstacles to new users.

I conducted in-depth interviews with users on a paid tier who recently deployed a function. The main findings were that functions unlocked developers’ abilities, but that they were intimidating and labor intensive to learn. Developers also said that they only randomly discovered the feature through googling a problem they were having. Developers did not always understand how they work, so they were concerned about security and unintentionally exposing sensitive information.

The PM took these findings and made several product decisions. First, the fact that people found the feature through googling and not through the UI suggested that we could make functions more visible in the UI. The PM shipped an update that would include a call to action to try functions in the UI after the user deployed a site. They also included a code snippet that the user could copy and paste in their terminal to get started, without needing to switch context by going to the documentation.

The result was that functions usage spiked, and the PM attributed this usage growth to this research. In addition, the concern about security was used to inspire a content marketing and docs campaign specifically educating users about best practices for using functions securely. The docs team also refreshed the docs for getting started with functions in general, to make them more accessible to frontend developers with no prior experience.