Playing with the Live.com Refresh this morning (which is pretty cool, by the way–I love how it refreshes automatically and I love the pop-ups, now only if I could resize them), I thought of something: Refresh? Whatever happened to the days of making a fix and immediately propping bits? Yesterday one of our test leads had his five year anniversary. He told a story of remembering when he first started on the team, and they were in some release or other and some guy woke up at 3AM for a hotfix, built a private on his machine, and propped it out to Production. "What build are we running in Live Site?" "Oh, private build off of my machine on Sat.. :)" Imagine that!
So at what point does a service go from free-form to having processes in place. Most processes are in place for a reason, so that, for instance, some dev doesn’t go and take down the entire service, taking millions of users offline (there goes the four nines in availability). But the danger is in instituting processes for the sake of more processes.
I don’t know much about Live.com, and I don’t think that they’re anywhere near that stage, but I came across Sanaz‘s Getting Real entry:
… and just reflect on:
– am i staying true to my principles that i was so hardcore about during start.com days
– more importantly which ones are impossible in the live.com world and whyone thing i would say is:
during start.com it was all about: experiment, iterate and improve a concept and make customers happy by listening to them. and who did everything: a few ppl, end-to-end for design, pm, dev, test, planning, marketing – everyone basically wore all the hats.live.com: it’s different. there are many more stakeholders, some justifiably so and some maybe not. so many stakeholders that it’s hard to keep track. some are stakeholders and some think they are. the biggest challenge is making sure the right ppl are involved – the more ppl the longer it takes to just get shit done. and that is hard – very hard, but absolutely crucial. it’s the balance of how do i keep the project going, while keeping everyone happy. and keeping everyone, or at least most folks 🙂 , happy is crucial if you actually want to succeed in the corporate world… it’s almost like start.com had one set of customers: our users, live.com has two, the internal teams/stakeholders and our users 🙂 so my rule of thumb is, if the teams/stakeholders can help us build a better product for our customers then that’s great! if not, let’s not waste eachother’s time.
If there’s some bug fix or feature that we know is going to make customers (be it users or Ops), why can’t we roll it out asap? Why can’t we prioritize on what customers want? And what happened to Start.com’s "cool feature? let’s push it out!" mentality?
After living in the States for 5 years I still don’t get Fahrenheit.
red hot place 