Jananas

The Daily Knitter is a website that drives traffic by offering a free daily knitting pattern. They also have a repository of free patterns, plus some exclusive patterns and articles. They drive traffic to their site by offering free patterns and earn revenue from advertising based on that traffic. My personal experience is that they are doing that at the expense of the designers.

Back in September my Basic Ear Flap Hat Pattern was picked up as one of their free patterns of the day. I was pretty excited because it meant a) traffic to my site, b) more exposure for the knitting pattern, and c) more people knitting my hat. Free patterns of the day are on the site for the last two weeks (backwards from today), however I kept getting traffic for about four months. All of a sudden in January it just stopped. Nadda, nothing.

I sent their editor a first email in January asking (nicely I might add) if the pattern could be listed on their repository of free patterns. No response and it wasn’t added. Apparently it was good enough for their free pattern of the day, but not good enough to be listed. At this point I’m a little annoyed, but hey there could be a million and one reasons why the editor didn’t respond back. So I sent another email early in February and again, no response and the pattern wasn’t added. Now, I’m really irritated – six weeks is reasonable time frame to expect a response.

This is a shitty way to treat the pattern designers. In my case, I wasn’t even asked if I was okay with them listing my pattern as the free pattern of the day. At the time I was glad for the increase in traffic but once that traffic died away but the benefit to their business continued, I was peeved because they continued to profit from using my pattern.

Here’s how I interpret their business model – they use daily free patterns to entice people to come to their site daily, driving their stats and generating ad revenue. Every new free pattern helps drive their business – so while I received a finite increase in traffic, the benefit to them from using my pattern continues long after any benefits to me (the designer) stopped.

Behind that, though, are the people writing the free patterns that the Daily Knitter is the goodwill of the designers whose patterns they use to drive traffic. In an era where reputation and trust are important, why would you risk that over something so minor?

Really, is it that difficult to add all patterns listed as ‘free patterns of the day’ on your ‘free patterns’ pages as well? Is it that difficult to respond to an email from a person whose design you’ve used (and therefore profited from)? I would think that it would be in your best interest to maintain a good relationship with your designers so that they’d be more willing to contribute to your site in the future (and thus increase the value your provide).

Daily Knitter, I think that you’ve behaved poorly and I certainly won’t be recommending that anyone use you.

Edit (March 10th) - the pattern has been added back to their listings. I’m not 100% if it was just that they finally read through their emails and there was simple a system error that I was caught in or if they came across this acted. Regardless, the email I finally got back was pleasant and friendly and the pattern has been added back. WIN!

If you know me, then you know this about me – I do not suffer fools gladly. More than anything else, its that I don’t like incompetence.

Last year I was editor of the Rotman Yearbook. I did a pretty bang up good job and because yearbooks are one of those things that often aren’t given a lot of recognition, I’m going to officially and publicly pat myself on the back. I did a lot, I learned a lot, I put out a good book, and I did it at a profit.

Here’s the problem. The person who took over for me is incompetent. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. This isn’t just me saying this. The situation was so bad (as in they’re two months away from the end of the school year, have missed two deadlines already, and are on track to miss delivery entirely) that the student council called me and asked me to step in and help. To summarize – the current editor messed up so badly that they’re having to pay money to fix his mistakes. In most jobs that would get you fired.

I have of frustration dealing with the current ‘editor’. I’ve been told how much ‘easier’ this person’s job is now that I’m on board to do layouts. Major problem with this statement? I’ve spent as much time tracking down photos and pertinent information for them as I have on layouts. In fact, this person is essentially a glorified admin assistant tracking down the photos that I’ve asked for (and that they should have already had!). I don’t like having the amount of work I’m doing devalued or belittled. Especially when they aren’t even able to provide the information that I do need, thus increasingly my workload dramatically.

For example, we have a section for photos of the first year study groups. Right now I have most of them, however they arrived in folders labelled ‘section 2′ and then something like IMG_7XXX.jpg. The problem with this is that I need to put names (and the correct names otherwise heads will roll) to faces, but I do not know these students and further have no access to school websites to even get access to this information. Thankfully I was able to go through other channels to get a copy of student photos and names, but now I have to go through the photos and essentially match them back to people which dramatically increases the time it will take to get something that should be simple done. Needless to say, I’m not please that a very simple instruction has been ignored completely and that my time is being wasted when I’m doing someone a favour (I guess it just means that the work will cost them more).

Even worse, is that the current editor officially has their PMP designation. Yes, they are an official project manager. I have no idea how they’ve fucked up this badly – they’ve obviously not done any research to define business requirements or deliverables, build a project plan with deadlines (and a work breakdown structure going backwards from a hard and final delivery date), define risks, or even think for that matter. I guess they might think that as a project manager their role is to direct from higher ground, without having to get their hands dirty. Well, fuck that! In fact, they even went as far as to blame some of the volunteers for the confusion that photos existed in. I quickly pointed out that as the manager it was their responsibility to provide direction (which requires understanding what’s needed and why). To which I got the phone equivalent of a blank stare.

You can’t be a good project manager if you don’t understand what you’re dealing with. And trust me, this person doesn’t. Example – they asked if I was doing layouts on my desktop… Which is difficult given that we do it all in an online system, you know cloud computing and the interwebs, and all that good stuff. Really folks, it isn’t that hard to pay some modicum of attention to the world around you. To put this in perspective, I was able to teach myself how to use their online system in about 20 minutes – it isn’t that hard if you read the faq’s and have any knowledge of enterprise software (and I’m not even a designer!).

It kills me that I recently applied for a job and was turned down because I didn’t have my PMP designation. And yet here’s a great example of how little value designations really have. Someone with their PMP has fucked up a project so badly that someone without their designation has had to be called in to fix it. Give me common sense any day of the week.

This post probably would have stayed in my head had I not received a voicemail yesterday asking me for a “status update” on how I’m doing. Oh my, what a good little project manager you are! Here’s the deal, when I’m being paid to fix your mistakes and do 95% of your job and have to go around you in order to get most of that actually done, don’t call me asking for “status updates”. Fuck off and let me do your job.

So yes, I do not suffer fools gladly. I do not appreciate having my time wasted. If I could, I would shout it out to potential employers to not hire this person that’s how incompetent they are.

I believe in building for the long term. In business, this means planning for 10, 25, or even 50 years into the future. Except that I work in an era where corporate focus is on short term gains. From shareholders, investment bankers, and a market focused on making a quick buck to executives and middle managers whose bonuses are based on revenue gains or costs cut today, the entire industry is saying ‘now, now, now’.

There are short term gains to be made. Those shouldn’t be ignored. But when they are the sole focus of a business, new products are rushed to market and short cuts are taken. In the back end, operational issues pile up and band aids are applied liberally to make things work (for now).

Each week cut from a testing plan, each product launched before its ready, each band aid applied means more work in the future. It means that five years down the road testing plans will be twice as long. Why? Because each band aid is a separate set of testing conditions. The more you apply, the more conditions you’ll have to test. The more opportunity there is for things to go wrong.

That’s just taking the basic systems into account. You can just as easily layer on a human factor. As staff turns over, the history and knowledge about each band aid (its reason for being implemented, how it worked, what it impacted) is more than likely lost – if only because they were applied in such a hurry that they weren’t properly documented. It was crunch time, there was pressure from above to get the fix in today, now, five minutes ago! Your operations department probably no sooner had this particular solution in place and there the next middle manager was breathing down their necks about why this other issue hadn’t been fixed.

The staff who put a fix into place might remember what they were thinking when they did it. Staff who came onboard later likely has no idea. And if they do, its because they put the time and effort into figuring it out – time and effort that could have been spent accomplishing something for the future instead of research past mistakes in order to be able to fix them.

Over time, this problem gains momentum and gets bigger. Until one day its big enough that it begins to hinder your ability to grow or to make revenue or to get to market.

So what do you do differently? Take a step back and think about how a decision today will show up in the system five or ten years from now. You take an extra week testing it out. You pay more attention to business requirements so that you don’t need (as many) band aids. And you know what? You listen to your operations staff. Give them time (and the space) to spend fixing the system every day so that its maintained.

I have a story about a company who had more product managers (the people coming up with the ideas and campaigns and work) than they did operations staff (the people actually implementing the work, testing it, and responsible for the overall state of the system). That isn’t feasible in the long term. And if you’re not around in the long term, then you aren’t really much of a business are you.

While I was in Thailand I adopted a dog. I had to pay for his crate and flight home and Paypal was the only timely option to pay for it. So I made an abnormally large payment, especially when compared to my normal eBay or etsy purchases, and my account was essentially blocked due to suspected fraud. Not unexpected on my part. They even sent me an email to notify me, which I was thankful for.

So I login in an attempt to rectify the situation. They ask me to change me password and security question, check and check. Get that finished and they need me to confirm that I’m me. There are several ways that I can do this…

1. I can confirm my location… Except that I’m in another country without access to most of my bills (which have my address) and access to a fax machine/ability to mail info in. I do have some electronic bills, but their system doesn’t accept pdfs and instead only accepts jpgs or gifs. Only my bills are sent as pdfs, so I would have had to take a screen capture or convert the file or something – all things that are a little difficult to do when I’m not at my own computer. And all things that require me, as the customer to go through another step to get them the information. So I’m already a little annoyed. [As an aside, I asked the CSR when I called in tonight why they didn't accept pdfs and their answer was that its because pdfs can contain viruses. Yup, totally possible. But (and to me this is a big But), you are an internet company. You should be able to handle some level of attack by viruses if only because its going to happen at some point. What you shouldn't do is make it difficult for your customers to get you the information that you're asking for. Don't make them wait longer than necessary. Don't make them convert files (many of them may not have the skill set necessary to even do that). Its simple - make it easy for your customers to deal with you.]
2. I can confirm my bank account or credit card number… On the Paypal website my bank account or credit card numbers appear as XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-1234 (credit card example used because its easier for me to remember the number of digits). So I would have assumed that ‘confirming’ this would mean entering the entire number, e.g. 1234-1234-1234-1234. If they match, then voila, I’m me. Nope. What this meant was that I could add another bank account or credit card and undergo the process where Paypal sends a couple of pennies, I confirm the exact amount and then the account has been added to my list. But this takes a few days and I may not want Paypal to have access to even more of my account information. Or I may just not have any other accounts. Regardless, this isn’t “confirming” my information its adding new information, which is not the same thing.
3. I can confirm my telephone number. Now I couldn’t do this while traveling because I didn’t have my phone with me while I was in Asia (for obvious expensive Canadian roaming reasons). However, when I looked into this some more this evening Paypal doesn’t even confirm mobile phone numbers. Really? Lets take a step back and think about who uses your service. I’m going to make some wild assumptions here and guess that it tends to be younger, internet savvy people. Who probably use their mobile exclusively and have ditched their landlines in the last few years (if not way before that). In fact, the only people I know who still have landlines are my parents. And they certainly aren’t buying things on eBay. Again, its simple – make sure that your policies make sense for your customers.

I’d forgotten that I hadn’t dealt with this and then went and bought something on eBay tonight. Something that had to be paid for right away. So I called in and had the block removed from my limited account. And the kicker, their 800 number was US only so I got to pay long distance charges to talk to a person because their system was so badly set up that I couldn’t do something simple on my own.

Its things like this that make me wonder. What use is policy if it makes it difficult for your customers to do what you want? Where does common sense belong in the decision making process? Why isn’t there more of a focus on usability?

These aren’t mistakes that are unique to Paypal. Rather, this experience highlights some of the things that frustrate me so much about most businesses.

This week I received a voicemail from Maytag asking me to call a number (1-800-326-2742) because my fridge was being recalled due to a fire hazard (official recall site). So I go look in my fridge and write down the model and serial number. I call in. I answer a bunch of questions before finding out that the number is only for The Brick (who I didn’t buy from) and the recall is only for top mounted or side by side freezers (I have a bottom mounted). At this point I’m a little annoyed, but figure that I should follow up with Maytag themselves just in case.

I get the Maytag Recall hotline number (1-877-329-3304) and call in. We go through the entire rigamorole of giving personal information, model and serial number, purchase date, etc. all over again. Get to the end and the lady on the other end of the line tells me that my fridge is fine.

I suggest that they should look into the fact that customers who aren’t part of the recall are being notified. The CSR responds that they are likely trying to contact as many customers as possible, essentially so that they can cover everyone who is impacted.

I’m annoyed. I admittedly didn’t do any research into the issue before calling, although I think that its fair to assume that when you’ve been contacted by the manufacturer that you are included in the recall.  I’m still annoyed. I went to sleep last night half worried that my house might burn down. I sounded like an idiot to the two CSRs I spoke with (and yes, this is frustrating – especially when its not your fault!). I wasted a half hour of my time following up on something that wasn’t an issue at all (if I’d had to call later in the day, this would have been real minutes on my cell plan and thus cost me real money).

And all because as a company Maytag isn’t able to manage your data effectively.