Month: Nov 2022

Elon and Twitter

The recent Elon Musk $44 billion takeover with Twitter is causing quite a drama isn’t it? One of those classic takeovers where somehow you are allowed to essentially purchase with money you don’t have and slap the debt on the company you just bought. It really sounds like Twitter was managing their finances in a fairly reasonable fashion, and now their situation seems perilous.

One of the first things was to cut the staff dramatically (~50%). That struck me as an odd thing to do. I understand companies can slowly expand over time, and if they actually thought about it – they could probably trim a few staff positions here and there. But mass-scale redundancies? it’s not gonna work is it? At any company, surely 90% of the people there are required for the business to function.

The problem that many managers don’t think about when making redundancies is that:

  • You are taking away the culture that got the company where it is today.
  • You are removing people’s friends.
  • You are taking away job security as current staff feel that they may be next to go.

The thing is, he also said that remote staff now need to come into the office, so the remaining staff are going to be very disgruntled. This means more people will leave voluntarily. Now he will have paid loads of people to leave, and now need to pay money to start hiring again. It doesn’t really save money, and if it does; it is small figures really; Elon needs to recover billions – not a million.

According to games journalist Jason Schreier, redundancies were made in mistake, and others were made before managers realised their roles were necessary for the business to function.

After cost-cutting, the next thing on Elon’s list was to try to increase monetisation. He decided that the blue verified checkmark was worth $8 a month.

One of my colleagues did mention it, and said he didn’t realise why people were so obsessed with a tiny image, but I explained it helps prevent impersonation. It’s easy to spread misinformation, make slanderous claims, or run scams when you can just change your picture and name and pretend to be another person or another company.

It was no surprise when it happened, you had plenty of people demonstrating this as soon as possible. You had Nintendo of America showing Mario “flipping the bird”, people impersonating Elon Musk, former presidents reminiscing about killing innocents… you name it.

Loads of examples if you view the thread on Twitter

and therefore, it was no surprise to see the feature currently suspended…

Twitter has suspended the launch of Twitter Blue and is actively trying to stop people from subscribing “to help address impersonation issues,” per an internal note.

Zoë Schiffer

Corey House recently tweeted about “Chesterton’s Fence”, and I was keeping my eye out for an excuse to put it in a blog. So here goes.

“Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. How applies to software: Before deleting code, figure out why it was added.

Other examples:

– Don’t delete a test before you know why it was added.

– Don’t delete a file until you’ve proven it’s unnecessary.

– Don’t make fun of a developer’s old code unless you understand the context in which it was written.”

Corey House
My own Twitter examples:
  • don’t takeover a company without having a solid plan of what to do with it.
  • don’t sack staff without knowing what role they do
  • don’t change the verification feature when you haven’t understood why it was added

Top 5 Software Redesign Mistakes By Software Companies

I was watching Jayme Edwards’ (aka Healthy Software Developer) “Top 5 Software Redesign MISTAKES By Software Companies!” video, and thought he made some really great points.

Despite this being about software, I think a lot of this applies to Nintendo’s failure of the Wii U (hardware). I’ll first list my notes from the video (I did actually write some notes, then realised he had a great summary in the video’s description) then apply it to the Wii U in the last section.

#5 – Focusing On Current Customers 

“It’s tempting to focus on what current customers of the product have wanted at the expense of New customers. If the goal of a redesign is growth, it makes sense to do market research and look at the product with an open mind. Do new customers have completely different needs than current customers do? You don’t grow if you just convert the same customers over.”

#4 – Trying To Include All Features Of Prior Version 

“Many companies spend too much budget and time trying to design a product that does everything the prior product did. A redesign is the perfect point in a product’s life cycle to look at it with a fresh set of eyes before making a reinvestment. Throwing off the shackles of the existing product’s feature set might be exactly what your team needs to envision a dramatically more compelling, simpler, and better product for the market.” 

#3 – Budgeting Too Little For Marketing 

“As a digital software product becomes more established, many teams focus too much on the engineering side of the product. Is it possible that you might be better off budgeting a larger percentage of the investment in the redesign towards marketing? If you’re not doing Facebook advertising, Google Adwords, or Instagram posting to reach today’s audience you could be missing out on an extremely effective way to reach customers that you used to via a different source.” 

Companies can often try to piggyback off the previous product’s prior success. They may also have competition so need to advertise to strengthen the brand.

#2 – Failing To Consider A Rebrand 

“Though the benefit of an existing brand name and marketing message can be an advantage, depending on the age of your product and the needs of new customers, it may make sense to rebrand. This allows a team psychologically to detach from the prior product more wholly and look at the new version through a completely different lens. Might this be a strategy your company could use to bring life back to a product that’s no longer as compelling and exciting for the market as it once was?”

If you keep the name, you get brand recognition and don’t risk alienating current customers.

However, if you want to move into a new market, you may need a new name to grab their attention, or adapt to a changing market.

#1 – Failure To Establish Measurable Outcomes 

“The biggest and most common of the software redesign mistakes I see made is unfortunately the failure to truly establish easily measurable outcomes for success. As a project gets underway, unless design decisions were made to accomplish easily measurable goals, it’s easy for the team and management to lose sight of the purpose and simply look at the redesign as a “project” to be completed. It’s a huge opportunity to reach some exciting goals for everyone, and it provides cause for celebration to all those who were involved as they discover what the market wants!”

Get early feedback on the core product. Before you double-down on investing in the better experience, we need to make sure that everyone across the business has measuring goals so you know that you have reached your growth goal.

Wii U

Focusing On Current Customers – The Wii was a massive success in terms of sales numbers, but I think for most people, they only played a few games and then lost interest. This made the customer base an interesting one. Hardcore Nintendo fans are the ones that bought loads of games, but the casual audience is why so many consoles were sold. For the Wii U, Nintendo wasn’t really sure who it was for. It could play the old games but also had this tablet (“GamePad”) controller. The Wii’s appeal was the motion control remote and minimal buttons; which meant it was easily understood and had mass appeal.

Trying To Include All Features Of Prior Version – By supporting all the Wii controllers as well as the Wii U Gamepad and Controller, it was a bit of a mess with all the options. When playing Wii Fit U, some games like the climbing required a balance board and 2 Motion Plus supported remotes, then after you finish, you pick up the Gamepad to navigate the menus. Then you might go to Boxing, which wanted a Motion Plus remote and a Nunchuk. Way too fiddly and added to the confusion of what you even needed when purchasing the games.

Budgeting Too Little For Marketing/Failing To Consider A Rebrand  – They focussed too much on piggybacking on the massive success of the Wii brand, but people then thought it was just an add-on to the Wii. There was minimal amount of advertising so they definitely failed to not only get the message across, but many people just didn’t even know it existed. I even saw Billboard adverts for games such as Assassin’s Creed 3 which had the Xbox, Playstation and PC logos, but no Wii U. No idea if Nintendo had to pay to slap their logo on there; but it can’t help when even 3rd Party companies weren’t making it known the console existed.

Failure To Establish Measurable Outcomes – Don’t think I can comment on this one, but people thought the Wii U was rushed out for Christmas without much of a plan. Many games got delayed so there was barely anything to play in the first 6 months, and the operating system was so slow, even the “day one update” took several hours to download. It was like they just saw it as a “project to be completed” and didn’t think about how players would react to a lack of games, and a long wait to even get them to load (it took several months for Nintendo to fix the slow operating system).