We released a much anticipated feature to our users, and it was going through our roll out process. This means only a group of users got the update, then next month it would go out to more, and so on.
So the initial users were excited to use it, and other users were eager to hear their opinion. As part of the release, there were other changes that went out, and some users were encountering issues with Feature A which had some bug fixes and improvements, and this was unrelated to our Feature B which went out in the same release version. Since both features involved some processing in the background, some users were falsely attributing a problem with Feature A to a problem with Feature B.
They took to Facebook to complain, and even suggested some workarounds that were complete nonsense. It’s basically a placebo effect of making a change and the crash goes away so you falsely conclude it helped when it was mere coincidence.
We are told that we must never respond to users on social media. All posts have to go through official channels that Marketing and Support use.
A developer raised the issue with a group of managers and a liaison from Marketing.
“Are we doing anything to combat this line of thinking that Feature B is causing crashes? This is one of those really fun Facebook threads that has popped up because our company has remained silent on the cause of an issue with Feature A, and the users have clutched at straws to come up with ideas for a fix and pooled them all in one place. One of their suggestions is quite harmful to us because it involves clearing the cache which then requests a large download to our servers. We now have a fix for the main crash they are reporting, so we should make it clear a fix is coming, there is no workaround, and it has no relevance to Feature B.
Concerned developer
I agree that as we’re quite clear on what the cause is (and isn’t) it feels like we should explicitly clarify this and address the incorrect speculation.
Product Owner
As I’m sure you can expect, we have been very close to this for the past four weeks and are working with relevant senior people to agree what messaging we can send out to the market.
Marketing Manager
“close to this for the past four weeks”! Yet have stayed pretty much silent the entire time. Then that resulted in Feature B getting a bad reputation which puts people off using it, and it’s generally damaging to the company that we responded so slowly to address what the users consider a big issue with our software. Marketing have been really bad in recent years, and is a reason why we have lost market share because the opinion from our users has declined.
Stranger Coding Tings 