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1226 points bishopsmother | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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yamrzou ◴[] No.35046052[source]
I'm not a user of Fly.io. I can't help but notice how remarkable the effect of open communication on potential end users like me. I remember reading about their reliability problems on HN some time ago. That biased my view of the company. After reading this, the open communication and transparency restored my trust in them, and would make them again a potential candidate for future projects. Because now I know that they acknowledge the problem and that they are trying to improve things.
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snapetom ◴[] No.35047533[source]
This is probably therapy, but your message and fly.io's post resonates a lot with what I'm going through. I took a product owner role about 6 months ago, my first, with a company that has turned out to be just a mired mess, and a product universally hated both internally and externally.

Long story short, it's completely over-engineered by a bunch of intellectual engineers with no focus, no discipline, and no oversight. It ended up not delivering on any promises it made, and there were a lot of them.

I was warned left and right before presentations and meetings, "this customer hates your product because of ...." I started off every meeting with saying, "we're rearchitecting the product, this is how we're doing it, this is the tech we are using." Immediately there was a sense of relief from customers, followed by questions like, "why can't <current product> deliver <feature> that was promised?" I'm completely honest with bad decisions that were made and how it impacted the feature. Sure, there is skepticism on what we are doing, and I tell them they should absolutely be skeptical based on our track record. The result has been customers who have hated my product now offering to work with us on development.

I've also been completely forthcoming on configuration, security, resources, and setup issues I am finding, many of them are absolutely freakin' insane. I've flat out told customers it's frankly embarrassing and never let us do something like this in the future. The best feedback on this was, "At least you're telling us something. We usually get silence from this team."

God, this is the most depressing job ever.

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1. ndneighbor ◴[] No.35048313[source]
Part of what I hated about Product Management at my last role was the consistent helplessness I felt when I was on calls with our customers. I could tell our product wasn't meeting their needs but all I could do was try my best to give the engineers context on how best to eventually meet them.

I remember my first few days on the job just being ripped to shreds by our customers who (understandably) were slighted. Don't miss those days at all.

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2. ebiester ◴[] No.35054454[source]
This is why engineers need to be on some customer calls. They can be told not to talk at first or be trained in customer etiquette, but nothing makes a difference like hearing this from the users.