How Vercel Listens to Developers at Scale
Learn how teams across Vercel use Octolens to capture user feedback, detect incidents early, and build a thriving developer community.
Vercel powers high-performance applications and is the home of Next.js. Trusted by everyone from solo builders to the Fortune 500, Vercel makes it easy to build, preview, and ship the best products.
Company info (October 2025):
Size: ~650 employees
Funding: $563M raised
Headquarters: San Francisco
For this story, we spoke with Brian Emerick, Technical Program Manager at Vercel, who helped roll out Octolens across over 20 teams. We also interviewed Rhys Sullivan, Software Engineer on the Domains team, and Anthony Shew, who leads Turborepo community efforts. Both have embedded Octolens into their daily workflows.
Vercel’s products are beloved by builders, which also means they are talked about everywhere: Reddit, X, Hacker News, GitHub, community forums, and more. It’s thousands of mentions every day.
Before Octolens, keeping up was difficult. Brian Emerick, Technical Program Manager, explains:
“We wanted our Product Managers (PMs) plugged into social conversations. But for many, especially those coming from engineering, it wasn’t a natural muscle. They aren’t the ones to spend hours a week on X or Reddit, filtering through noise.”
Community engagement and staying close to users is core to Vercel’s DNA. At the forefront, Guillermo Rauch, Founder and CEO, is very active and responsive on socials and wanted that mindset for the whole company.
X and Reddit in particular shape discourse fast. Vercel wanted every team to hear what the community was saying, not just leadership or the most online engineers.
Critical feedback and issues risked being missed. A Reddit bug report or valuable feedback on X could go unseen until it snowballed.
Coverage was uneven. Some teams stayed close to chatter, others had no visibility.
Manual searching was slow. Team members without a social media habit couldn’t realistically keep up.
When Guillermo discovered Octolens on X, Vercel piloted it on a few keywords. Adoption spread quickly. Today, over 20 Vercel teams - including Domains, Turborepo, CI/CD, Pricing, and more - each have a dedicated “firehose” Slack channel powered by Octolens.
Now, relevant mentions stream in automatically, filtered by AI and Boolean logic to cut out noise.
The Domains team has their dedicated firehose and if any feedback or issue comes in, they can jump on it right away.
Rhys Sullivan, who works on Domains, recalls:
“A user was accidentally charged for a domain and posted about it on Reddit. I saw it within minutes, replied, fixed their account, and let them know it was handled. That quick response mattered and the fix went out to all users.”
Without Octolens, this would have been missed, or Rhys would have spent hours manually searching X in a week.
“I don’t want to spend my workday scrolling X. Octolens pipes the important stuff into Slack so I can focus on building and still stay on top of what developers are saying.”
Similarly, for Anthony Shew, who works on Turborepo and CI/CD, Octolens has become an early-warning system.
“Sometimes a tweet is the first signal of an incident. Octolens lets me ring the bell, respond to users, and keep them updated in real time.”
Anthony even tags posts to track issues over time. When fixes ship, he circles back to the original reporters to let them know it’s resolved.
That responsiveness builds trust over time and keeps developers engaged.
It’s not all about bug detection and solving problems. It’s also about picking up on the positive responses and getting that valuable user feedback back to the team. Rhys from the Domains team shares:
“We love seeing those positive mentions come through that we would have otherwise missed. It’s great for morale to see community love, not just bug reports.”
Anthony even found an entire lecture series on Turborepo that the team had no idea about:
“Octolens flagged an entire college lecture about Turborepo. I would have never known someone was teaching Turborepo in class. Discovering things like that is incredible.”
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The blend of faster bug detection, real-time incident response, and positive morale boosts is why engineers at Vercel embrace Octolens as part of their daily toolkit.
An overview of how Vercel is using Octolens in their daily workflow:
Firehoses by product – Each major product area gets its own Slack channel fed by Octolens.
Filter out noise – On top of Octolens’s AI noise detection, teams add negative keywords and excluded authors to keep streams relevant.
Triage in real time – Engineers and PMs check alerts throughout the day, responding or escalating.
Incorporate feedback & celebrate wins – Feedback is listened to when making decisions for the roadmap and positive mentions are highlighted for team morale.
Trend analysis – Weekly summaries and combining other feedback sources with social mentions help zoom out and see patterns beyond day-to-day posts.
Brian highlighted Octolens’ impact on PM efficiency:
“Before Octolens, PMs could spend hours just searching across platforms. Now they spend that time consuming and acting on filtered feedback. It’s twice as efficient.”
Beyond efficiency, Vercel treats community sentiment as one of three equal inputs to roadmap planning:
Direct customer interviews
Data analytics
Community conversations surfaced by Octolens
Brian explained:
“At Vercel, community sentiment is as important as enterprise feedback or usage data. If Reddit or X tells us we’re misaligned, that’s enough for us to make a move.”
Octolens makes that signal reliable and actionable, turning scattered posts into a continuous feedback loop.
Across over 20 teams at Vercel, the impact adds up:
Faster response to incidents including security-related issues.
Real-time visibility across all product areas, not just leadership.
Efficiency gains for PMs who now act instead of search (estimated 50% time savings).
Morale boost for engineers from seeing candid community love.
Unexpected discoveries like college lectures shaping strategy.
Anthony quantified it:
“I answer about 5 posts a day that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Over time, that really adds up, it keeps us close to developers and shapes how we build.”
Octolens monitors your brand in real time. Receive AI-vetted alerts for keyword mentions and growth opportunities so you can act fast and stay ahead of your competition. Start for free or book a demo to see how Octolens can help you stay on top of the conversations that matter.