Looks like I have to play bad cop here. I appreciate the openness, but as a potential customer... not so much. Because while sentences like this are kind of inspiring:
Instead, let’s give ourselves permission to fail.
...
And you know what? It’s okay if we’re not. If Keen busts, we’ll all find new grand adventures.
As a (no longer) potential customer, they clash harshly with this one:
In last week’s outage, we had our first major data loss in over 12 months.
Because you know what? When I trust you with my money and my company's data, I don't want those precious assets to be with someone who's been given permission to fail. I really do want it to be someone who tells the troops this: "Let’s double-down, work through the weekend, push through the issues, get ‘er done, rally!"
The issue to me is public declarations vs private thoughts.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with waking up covered in flop sweat, wondering if you're destroyed your business and the job situations of people you genuinely like and appreciate.
However, I've found that a good part of leadership is, in fact, shutting the hell up when "routine" bad things are happening because too much openness can stress out employees. By "routine" I mean pretty much anything other than the certain death of the company, at which time they deserve reasonably early notice).
Hi Tom. I was anticipating a response like this and I'm glad you shared your perspective. One of the reasons this piece was difficult to share is that the last thing that I want my customers thinking about is failure.
Let me clarify one thing (and perhaps I should do this in the blog post as well?). Our team cares incredibly deeply about our commitments to our customers and their data. I 100% agree with you that we can _and should_ double-down and work through the weekend when that's what it takes to maintain that commitment.
The thing is, we already do that, and our team was already doing it at the time I wrote this message. People at Keen take their responsibilities to our customers and to each other very seriously. That's why we haven't had another loss since then, now almost 12 months later. When I wrote this message, the problem wasn't that people weren't working hard enough. It was that we were stressed out and burnout was becoming a risk. In this situation, reminding people to take a deep breath and get some perspective seemed to be really helpful.
There definitely is a time and a place to rally and to push through, and we have plenty of experience with that too :)
Love the evenhanded answer, Michelle. And I can't tell you how similar I used to be in that regard. I believed stoutly in a sort of open source management approach and promised myself when I was a youth I would do precisely as you are doing. Over the years I have found it to be suboptimal. Thousands of years' worth of management theory turn out to be a useful precedent. But--and I mean this sincerely--I hope it works for you. Would be a better world, I think, if your way worked best.
My instinct is that this post being on the front of HN, along with the tenor of the comments, is evidence of it working. I'd wager that her post is serving as an incredibly effective piece of content marketing. HN is the perfectly audience for Keen's product, and getting on the front of HN for a full day is a big win both for reaching customers and new recruits. Certainly some people will have your reaction, but another significant percentage will have a positive reaction, as demonstrated in the comments.
Actually the management theory pretty much agrees with Michelle on this one.
The old-school Taylorist-style management theory that you're probably thinking of has been thoroughly debunked now. It doesn't lead to good outcomes.
Leadership theory is much more nuanced now, there's a recognition that the best leadership style to use in any given situation is very much based on context and team membership.
Management need to deal with the situation as it is, because that builds trust that management are actually dealing with the situation.
I feel like you are getting distracted by the sound bite. This post is not about telling employees that it's okay for them to do mediocre work - it's about having a healthy perspective about their jobs and not getting emotionally entangled with failures. Rationally, this should always lead to better outcomes, aggregated over a large number of employees and personality types. Working on one of these double-down-rally type companies myself, I can say that all you would have to show for it after sufficient time is burnout and mental exhaustion. You seldom feel like you are doing your best work when you're in crunch mode all the time.
As to expecting companies to keep private thoughts to themselves, and maintaining a different public front - are you really better off paying money to a company where the staff could riot and quit at the wrong time, as opposed to one where they ask you to manage expectations more realistically?
But this does inform why leadership and PR so rarely attempt to reach out to the public with honesty and frankness. Without critical reading, a lot of people simply "take it the wrong way", and the wrong kind of misapprehension can do significant damage to their public image.
If it's business, it's business. There's a contract, with clauses agreed to by both parties on what happens if one party fails to live up to its end of the agreement. "Permission to fail", then, means "Permission to activate those clauses dispassionately, potentially terminate the relationship, and move on with life"; in short, professional distance. That is business.
If you can't afford to lose it, make backups. If you are going to throw chairs if you lose it, get therapy. If you demand five nines and a hand-holding number you can call over Christmas, pay for it, and don't be surprised when five nines isn't some magic security blanket.
In short, you get as much "Rally" as you pay for, and if you think you can buy someone else's emotions you're going to be taken for a lot of rides by a lot of people who are better stage performers than developers.
What you're describing sounds good, but it is not realistic, sustainable or healthy. The way to improve and grow is to fail early and often, and learn from it. If you create a company culture where failure is not tolerated, people will burn themselves out trying to prevent failure, and when it does happen, they will deny responsibility, break the rules, and sometimes even break the law in order to cover it up.
This is almost certainly what happened in the Volkswagen scandal, for example. Someone (probably a large group of someones) fucked up and shipped a car that didn't pass emissions tests, so they covered up their mistake rather than admit it.
In your example, what could happen is that they have an outage and your data is lost anyway, but they just don't even tell you--maybe you find out after complaining, or from the media.
The issue to me is public declarations vs private thoughts.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with waking up covered in flop sweat, wondering if you're destroyed your business and the job situations of people you genuinely like and appreciate.
However, I've found that a good part of leadership is, in fact, shutting the hell up when "routine" bad things are happening because too much openness can stress out employees. By "routine" I mean pretty much anything other than the certain death of the company, at which time they deserve reasonably early notice).