Two weeks ago I asked for some feedback on what we might be able to do here to improve the quality of service surrounding our partnership and our products. We’ve gone through every single message, with stuff still pouring in, and I just wanted to a) thank you for it and b) let you know what we’re doing with it.

First, some of the stuff was very hard to read. When you take pride in what you do you don’t like to see that your hard work has an adverse impact on someone else. But thats why I asked and thats why we’re trying to improve the lines of communication, documentation, support, etc.

Second, most of it was very creative. We tend to be pretty fast on addressing the problems that are brought up to us and require an intelligent person to fix (intelligent != CPA; I can’t  do jack about the billing issues but I hear they are moving very fast to get it all in order) but to be honest we just don’t have the resources to make some of the far reaching problems disappear overnight. So we came to a bit of a compromise, we will not take under any new projects or work on the new feature sets until the current pain points are addressed. It was not an easy decision to make but we can only build so many stories on top of this sand castle.

Third, we got some great ideas on communication and documentation that we’re going to make happen very quickly. Truth is, we’ve been working on some of them behind the scenes but it takes a long time to actually produce consumable stuff thats easy to maintain. So we’re making a sort of a compromise here too – we’re going to adopt some of these systems sooner than later.

As in, we’ll do them within the next two weeks, not the next two months.

We’re going to have to sacrifice some of the ambition in the short term to make this enterprise work for everyone profitably in the long term. Unfortunately, that means we’re going to have to mimick something that almost everyone that has ever worked in this industry hates – Microsoft 1.0. We’ll just have a hell of a shorter time cycle under which we will do it and for those of you that will stick with us I hope you understand how critical your feedback will be after we introduce everything that we will be introducing over the next two weeks. This is not going to get ugly, but at least everyone here will be working on the exact same thing for the next two weeks and then rapidly scaling it up into what we wanted to bring out to begin with. Make sense?

As for my team…  I’m making a visit to Dallas next Friday. I expect to see a 1.0 / draft / high school science fair mockup of everything that has so far been discussed. We are working on this and nothing else so in the short term find a way to get whatever you’ve got launched along with a plan for the next steps with updates on a weekly basis. If it can’t be done this year (done as in people are using it, not done as in I’m done but I’m waiting for someone else crap) then scale it down and push it out. 

Two weeks. Dozen bullet points. I expect to be holding a sharpie two weeks from today crossing off the major complaints. Otherwise I am sending over Erick GlengarryRoss Simpson on a mission of mercy and we can always use more room for servers. We can do this.

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