Comments on: How Sharing Feature Release Dates Turned Us Into Liars

By: Chris Scott

Chris Scott — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 14:47:40 +0000

Yeah, been there, done that. Took 2 or 3 release cycles of blowing right past announced release dates (sometimes by weeks) to finally learn to stop promising dates and just stick with “we’re working on it right now and hope to have an update out soon. Keep an eye on your inbox, we’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready”.

By: Brian Dsouza

Brian Dsouza — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 03:26:34 +0000

Unless you have pretty much reached software delivery nirvana, a date is never realistic. That said, dates are important to people because not everyone ( actually practically no one) lives in the real world where they are honest with themselves. So whereas it would be awesome to follow your advise, its going to be quite hard in practice.

But the issue may lie elsewhere and it may not be so much around the publicized release date as much as how we promise stuff.

We tend to specify a distinct solution rather than promising to deliver business value.Instead of promising a client that we will build 2 new screens with 10 specific fields to address a productivity issue, we can promise to increase productivity offering potential high level solutions. Then we identify all the various ways to do that, prioritize into must haves and nice-to-haves and deliver what is achievable within that time frame as long as it honors our promise to our client. It does not have to be all the possible things we could have done (bells and whistles) but the minimum that is achievable in the available time frame to honor our promise. If more gets done that’s great. From a Customer’s perspective we have addressed their need.

A client of mine tried this approach and found her customer’s so much easier to deal with while allowing her team to pick what was the simplest ( and achievable) solution that met the need in the time frame.

By: Laura Fredericks

Laura Fredericks — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 04:43:22 +0000

Great post, as usual, Alex. This one hits really close to home, as it has been a huge problem on our team. It hasn’t just resulted in customers losing their trust in us, but team members struggling with trust as well. Sometimes it’s hard for the customer-facing side to understand the delays in development, and miscommunications start to spread throughout the team. On the one side you have the customer team saying, “Why isn’t it ready? You told us one week!” and then the dev team saying, “I told you one week, and you told the whole world!”. I was struggling to find a solution that would work for us, but I think we’re going to have to move to your approach. Thanks again for helping us navigate those tough choices!

By: Ben Castleberry

Ben Castleberry — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 00:18:49 +0000

Alex,

I have spent the last 3 hours reading your blog posts, well done! You seem to be a pretty effective growth hacker in your own right. Where do you go for inspiration? Do you follow certain bloggers (andrew Chen), visit websites,or is it all just coming from your amazing mind?

I would love to know of some of your favorite places to get hacking ideas!

Keep it up!
Ben

By: Guest

Guest — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 11:00:31 +0000

He, yesterday I was replying to one support email about feature X and in my response I deleted and wrote again part about expected publish date, for 5 times. I was so unsure if I should give this information. Final decision was to write a later date than the date we expect feature to be finished, but I was still unsure if I should do that.

Later, I received email from Alex with a link to this blog post – right on time for my future responses ;).

Once again, great insights. Thanks Alex!

By: BrianGee

BrianGee — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 19:20:27 +0000

Oh man, every time you write a post, we made that exact mistake the week before. I know it’s not the case, but sometimes it seems like you’ve got a mole in my office 😉

We JUST posted our product roadmap for the next three months, and two weeks in I can already see that we’re going to be late on a couple of things because there is one feature that’s taking much longer to implement than we thought, and I’m about to go on a much needed vacation (because I am burned out and useless right now).

Hopefully you’ll start writing posts a week BEFORE we do stupid things in the future. Thanks for your post though Alex. Awesome as always.

By: Greg Bardwell

Greg Bardwell — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 17:05:47 +0000

The title alone made me cringe. We all do it or want to … to keep customers or prospects happy. Always these same results for sure.

By: Scott Welch

Scott Welch — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 16:08:07 +0000

This is great advice for just about who managed or oversees a product.

In addition, this post is probably my favorite so far. The fact that you were willing admit your mistake publicly, where current and future customers could read it, is really well, awesome. So many companies go into PR/damage control, rather simply say, “Yeah, we screwed up. We lied; we said one thing and did another. I can’t say we won’t fail and lie again, but we’re going change the way we work so we don’t make THIS mistake again.”

This post says a lot about Groove and how you want to relate to your customers. Kudos to you!

By: Chad at Txt2Give

Chad at Txt2Give — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 15:14:08 +0000

We too have done this in the past here at Txt2Give (http://txt2give.it). Luckily, I had very understanding customers. Instead of specific deadlines, we now use more vague dates like “soon” or “in the coming months”. I think it’s a nice tradeoff that still communicates a rough estimate, but doesn’t hold your feet to the fire.

By: Christian Newman

Christian Newman — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 15:04:36 +0000

Count me in on this mistake. It’s painful. Even though nobody’s called me out, it’s hurting me because I know it goes against my values. I’m doing something about it right now and can’t wait to lift this weight off my shoulders!

By: Justin Anderson

Justin Anderson — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 15:00:11 +0000

You guys did the same with us… There are still many dashboard bugs and we were offered to participate in the fancy new dashboard beta back in January. We declined, choosing to go with the devil we know versus minimally-tested code we don’t.

Fast forward to today, still having some issues with refreshing ticket totals and missing tickets, get offered the beta from a different help desk person. It’s almost done and we have great fancy charts! No thanks – it’s been 6 months already, who knows how much longer this version will be and what new bugs we’ll find.

I’d much prefer a ticket system that works well to eye candy. :/