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I know this will cost me mucho karma, but what I hear: self promoting excellent technology, best practice ops blog posts, a/b testing, poster child for product

I know this will cost me mucho karma, but what I hear: self promoting excellent technology, best practice ops blog posts, a/b testing, poster child for product management [1] and then after years of excellence a sudden product failure (reviews, China, ...), CEO kicked out for failing and slashing staff in several rounds. To me this looks like focusing on the wrong things. I wonder that the CEO discussed with the CTO and VP Product over the years. We'll see if I have to replace Nokia with Etsy in my "Focus" conference talks. [1] Etsy is a database webfrontend not SpaceX Edit: John Allspaw, famous for blameless postmortems, Linkedin profile says his CTO gig at Etsy ended May 2017.

apapli 9y ago
Spot on.
allover 9y ago
You think the tech leads that lead their best practice ops & a/b test teams should have been somehow doing something to counter amazon.com/handmade or should have been telling Product not to bother with the non-core products the article mentions? I don't see how the 2 are related, 'focusing on the wrong things' seems like a huge oversimplification. Your post reads like schadenfreude. 'They thought they were so smart with their best practice ops ...".
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  "You think the tech leads ..." Yes. "schadenfreude" No. It's just a pattern we can see over and over again. I've worked for some companies that showed that pattern and consulted some which sat in that trap. And it looks like focusing on tech excellence - and I assume they are excellent - didn't help Etsy with growing their revenue. Is Etsy a tech company? Or are they a retail-oriented market place? Did they focus too much on technical/product excellence? Many companies I have seen have a wrong selfimage. Did they solve the wrong problems? These are the questions I'm interested in.
  - allover 9y ago
    Who are 'they'? What member of the company do you imagine is deciding to do 'good ops' over 'revenue'? You are acting like the whole company is just an amorphous blob that chooses to siphon 'focus' into buckets. That is just not how companies work. It simply makes no sense to infer anything negative about the company due to them having a good ops image.

apapli 9y ago

Spot on.

allover 9y ago

You think the tech leads that lead their best practice ops & a/b test teams should have been somehow doing something to counter amazon.com/handmade or should have been telling Product not to bother with the non-core products the article mentions? I don't see how the 2 are related, 'focusing on the wrong things' seems like a huge oversimplification. Your post reads like schadenfreude. 'They thought they were so smart with their best practice ops ...".

_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
"You think the tech leads ..." Yes. "schadenfreude" No. It's just a pattern we can see over and over again. I've worked for some companies that showed that pattern and consulted some which sat in that trap. And it looks like focusing on tech excellence - and I assume they are excellent - didn't help Etsy with growing their revenue. Is Etsy a tech company? Or are they a retail-oriented market place? Did they focus too much on technical/product excellence? Many companies I have seen have a wrong selfimage. Did they solve the wrong problems? These are the questions I'm interested in.
- allover 9y ago
  Who are 'they'? What member of the company do you imagine is deciding to do 'good ops' over 'revenue'? You are acting like the whole company is just an amorphous blob that chooses to siphon 'focus' into buckets. That is just not how companies work. It simply makes no sense to infer anything negative about the company due to them having a good ops image.