I read a perfect parallel: real networks employees knew their product was shit. But making it not shit would wreck the company: As employees, we weren’t pr

I read a perfect parallel: real networks employees knew their product was shit. But making it not shit would wreck the company: As employees, we weren’t proud of our business tactics, and we griped about them frequently. The topic came up at company meetings, round table conversations with executives, and through a lot of water cooler conversation over email, during lunch, and across the foosball table. One day my manager showed me a horrible graph. It was pretty simple: the graph was steady, then it dropped straight down, then after a short period, the line shot straight back up and stayed level again: “That’s what happens when we do the right thing”, he said while pointing at the drop, “and that’s how much money we lose. We tried it just to see how bad it was for our bottom line. And this is what the data tells us.” “Wow,” I said, taken aback. My employer clearly had two options: “do the right thing” or “be profitable”. That was the position they had maneuvered themselves into through a series of bad management decisions. My manager then said, “More than half the company would have to lose their job in order for us to stop these tactics ... so are you volunteering to be one of them?” https://medium.com/launching-ux-launchpad/the-graph-that-changed-me-385ff833f9c8 https://medium.com/launching-ux-launchpad/the-graph-that-cha...