I worked for a post series A startup a while back. We’d just been acquired by a big public company and my team was being leaned on to build out a new front end for our ad-serving platform. Throughout the project, we had a project manager (PM) who was brutal to work with. Her daily routine consisted of walking around the office and “checking in” with everyone. For me and the other people in the dev pit, it was a constant barrage of “Hey, just checking in! How’s that user sign-up flow going?” or “What’s up guys?!? When can I checkout those new dashboards?” or “We need to go speed mode on campaign builder — I promised it’d be done by next sprint.”
We all rolled our eyes, but eventually we learned she was just looking for lip service and played along.
Our new parent company was trying to force our ad server to scale in a way that it wasn’t designed for. As the classic software story goes, engineers were pulled in to “fix” the scaling problems, only to get hastily replaced when they couldn’t make the progress that our hilariously uninformed management expected. The consequence of this was poor ad performance and system stability, which mean customers cancelling their ad subscriptions in droves.
Cue our PM. She walked around the corner and stood in front of our team lead, who was staring at his screen trying to ignore her. “Hey, quick ask! Can you remove the cancel button from a user’s ad dashboard and replace it with a link to our contact page?”
He didn’t even make eye contact with her. “Nope.” He stood up and walked away while she watched him in disbelief.
She looked over at me. “I thought he he was supposed to do what I say.” She seemed thoroughly confused.
“Guess not?” I shrugged. She left.
We had a good laugh about it at lunch later that day. She stopped checking in so much after that and never repeated her ask to remove the cancel button.
UX is sacred.
Tech Unfiltered 