Marketplace Release Notes: September 13, 2011

[Toysoldier Thor]

 

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Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

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For this to even be feasible, user input needs to be guided but not hindered in good parental fashion.

In your case, tone means everything. If you want respect, you've got to have a respectful tone and even tempered feedback once you do get those ears, otherwise it's a bust.

I know it's great sport to criticize the Lab and their blunders, but at some point that needs to give way to dialog that works, in a company that knows how to optimize and use it. So there needs to be a clear dividing line of where one stops and the other begins.

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(before I start... I pre apologize to Sassy for posting thoughts greater than 3 lines... IM me inworld... I will voice my thoughts to you or send you a Audio Post)

So Dart, I agree with all of your posting (of which I only show the end part I wanna respond to) earlier today.  But lets talk about the last point you made in your post.

I will give you that the angry frustrated posting from ppl like me are of a tone that makes it difficult or undesirable for a LL Team to actually consider the concept of a Product Manager role working intimately with a Merchant Council to finally give the LL Commerce Team effective and desired direction & oversight on any MP and inworld ecommerce development.  Any future LL Commerce Team might be downright scared of the level of anger and vile unconstructive tones that come from the Merchant community within the forums and I can understand their fear.

BUT.... lets look at how it might be that it has always been the LL Commerce Team actions themselves that has created the actual Merchant monsters like me that they are constantly fearful to interact with.  And how they have always had the power to tame these monsters and convert us into their allie if they only wanted to.  But they dont.

So lets use the example of how Brooke & her team dealt with the Direct Delivery initiative that this week we are getting our first painful samples of what SOME of us Merchants were legit fearful of all this time. 

We already know the complete strategy the Brooke has taken on how to develop a DD concept to their understanding of the Merchant problems and the communications, development, testing, and deployment.

But, lets turn back the clock to early 2011 and lets play another scenario that Brooke could have considered - not only to develop the best solution Merchants wanted but also to tame the Merchant Monsters (like me) during the evolution of this DD deployment.

1)  Brooke could have very early on identified and made it a priority for her team to reach out and engage with her team's most vocal merchant monsters with meaningful open engaging dialog.  Why? By converting these most vocal critiques, not only would the LL team to actually potentially learn of opportunities & risks ahead of them but more importantly, Brooke could have turned a focal critic into a potentially vocal allie.  And if a well known critic actually begins publically promoting and defending Brooke's directions and plans, you tell me how much power that has?

2)  Brooke could have encouraged and expanded on the concept of a Merchant Steering Team with a mix of large commecial and small hobby members to engage with.  She had this idea but it failed in her execution of it and she palmed critic merchants like me for this team which again could have address #1 benefits too.  With open published logs of all conversations - there was some value in this merchant team IF Brooke would have taken inputs from this team seriously (i.e. help set priority on what the team should work on now vs not).

3)  DD might be an awesome possible solution in theory but in light of the current LL development team limitations, maturity of development/deployment, and the MP underlying technological complexity, Brooke should have taken on several small but critical wins by fixing the long list of missing/broken MP features that were in xstreet.  This would have grown a healthy GOOD relationship with her Merchants (instead of her coming into the job and starting but kicking all of us in the gut with damaging / confusing marturity filters).  DD could have been tackled when it was more viable to tackle.

4)  If DD was a must then Brooke should have engaged OPENLY a requirements gathering with Merchants.  She should have visibly and openly want to engage with Merchs like me that brought up serious concerns of the DD plans.

5)  If DD was the #1 initiative, Brooke should have made it a priority to openly communicate its progress frequently.  Why? To stop growing fearful rumours that would naturally spawn in an environment of BLACK-OP secret development. Fearful rumours then spawns fear, frustration, and anger from her customers.  Openly keeping all up to date via frequent blogs would have shut this down.

6)  Related to #5, Brooke's team would constantly engage with Merchants to ask their thoughts on the progress to ensure any missed risks or ideas are captured and addressed.

7)  Brooke would have made it a point to ensure the Merchant Beta Team was not gagged.  In the spirit of transparent open communications, she wouldd let the Beta team forum communicate with the general merchant community.  Why?  To use them as an army to promote DD and remove fears.  To let the Beta users collect potentially missed use cases to test or functions that might have been missed.  Brooke could have used the beta users as a larger team of communicators.

8)  Well before ANY DD RELATED CHANGES, Brookes team would post a blog to very clearly explain what the change would be, any potential risks, and a change date with a minimum 1 week advanced noticed. (this is one thing Brooke promised and totally ignored).

9)  To demonstrate to the Mechant community that her team would jump on ANY problems that may arise - they would be at the ready to address them even if it was overnight effort.

I could go on but Dart, you tell me this.  If Brooke took on some of the steps / strategies listed above, how much angry frustrated critical toned postings from ppl like me would have been squelched?  And who had the power to squelch these critics of her and her team?  And who had the ability to turn her "enemies" into strong allies but refused to?

Toy

http://ToyTalks.weebly.com

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Points taken, just for the record, can't respond to all of that in a single chunk, but I do digest it, and will sleep on some of those.

Your last point, that you would be a supporter if properly communicated with, and felt that their actions were responsible ... the funny thing is, I really didn't use to believe that there would be an end in sight to vehement complaints no matter how well the Lab did.

I've since come to think that isn't true, and yes agree that while the Lab culture of "challenge us to do better" is a noble one, that it's all in the doing.

Less being challenged by a critical user base and more getting the job done of writing good software based on user feedback, not Lab goals. The feedback is here from people who live and breathe it every day, and that input speaks louder than stats and metrics.

Rather see that whole challenge phase and mentality on both sides be done away with, it's flawed from the start. Is that fair?

[Darrius Gothly]

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Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

[..] Rather see that whole challenge phase and mentality on both sides be done away with, it's flawed from the start. Is that fair?

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It's fair by me. I've always preferred cooperative partnership arrangements with my suppliers/vendors rather than a challenge/competition environment. I do understand the value of competition as it breeds a certain angst to outperform .. to rise above the bar set by the competitor. But my perception of our relationship with LL is not one of competitor, rather one of vendor and/or supplier.

We are consumers of the products and services they provide, and as such should benefit from improvements in those. Thus it is frustrating to say to them "these are the things that will benefit us in our use of your goods" and have those requests fall on deaf ears. Most assuredly we can often (and always manage to) compensate for the misdirections we are handed, but it just seems so wasteful to be forever compensating instead of grabbing hold of what we really need and riding it to even higher success rates.

[WADE1 Jya]

Well I just want to say a big thank you to Brooke for communicating to us about the issues. It really takes emotions down a notch or two when we are able to have real conversations. The effect for me is very calming anyway.

I just wanted to say I'd prefer the whole grid just shut down for a day (as we used to see every Wednesday) then to see these multi-day upheavals & try to work in a beta-grade environment. I am not paying tier to beta test & I expect things to generally be in working order to run a business on the day to day. Every time Lindens mess things up, it costs me real money. Overall I am happy with SL, but I feel like its an ant farm & maybe Lindens are shaking it too much.

A great idea (which a non-SL-related business partner I work with uses quite successfully for their commercial websites) would be Lindens have their own private marketplace, seperate from the commercial site we residents use. It could be quite cheap: a micromarketplace with just a few Linden bears for sale or something. To the public such area would be invisible, access limited to Linden employees. This closed Linden-only beta environment could have been used to loop yesterdays tests through. Then we would see zero disturbance! Lindens could peacefully work & take all the time they need to ensure things are perfect. When it was working correctly it could have just been updated live to us with no visible issues.

I propose Lindens desperately need to create their own private beta-marketplace environment to rapidly iterate all the good stuff they are working on. Applies to the grid as well, you guys should test all your new stuff privately on seperate Linden-only beta grids (I know these already exist). When core features of Second Life stay in flux, or remain semi-broken for days, you lose people. Might be behind the dropping concurrency of SL we see lately.

[Darrius Gothly]

The amount of "stuff" they have to duplicate is rather large .. however I totally agree. Especially with DD coming out "Real Soon Now", having a duplicate parallel system (including Marketplace and Grid) is the only way to ensure proper testing.

I know they have a test grid, I know they have test Alts, i sincerely hope they have (or will get like right now) a duplicate Marketplace.

Otherwise ......... (paste in Drums of Doom sound clip)

[Josh Susanto]

I'm all for a better kind of dialogue as Dart suggests.

Here are the order of 2 important steps:

1) LL stops bull$hitting "me" (us, including you).

2) I become more polite.

This is the correct order.

Why?

Because, when the reverse order was tried, it did not work.

[Toysoldier Thor]

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Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

Points taken, just for the record, can't respond to all of that in a single chunk, but I do digest it, and will sleep on some of those.

Your last point, that you would be a supporter if properly communicated with, and felt that their actions were responsible ... the funny thing is, I really didn't use to believe that there would be an end in sight to vehement complaints no matter how well the Lab did.

I've since come to think that isn't true, and yes agree that while the Lab culture of "challenge us to do better" is a noble one, that it's all in the doing.

Less being challenged by a critical user base and more getting the job done of writing good software based on user feedback, not Lab goals. The feedback is here from people who live and breathe it every day, and that input speaks louder than stats and metrics.

Rather see that whole challenge phase and mentality on both sides be done away with, it's flawed from the start. Is that fair?

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My response is....  if LL wants a Customer base community and forum discussions and interactions with their team to be a friendly, constructive, and healthy group to interact with, they need to want to interact with us and take us serious.

It takes two to tango Dart and the ball is in LL Commerce's court to show merchants (include the critics) that they really seriously want to work with us and not just follow a communication philosophy of "moses coming down from the mountain" on rare occassions to show some of their newly etched tablets of plans.

If Brooke and company shows they want to seriously interact with Merchants and listen to them and nto just take any communications they capture from us and throw it i nthe trash, then my hand is up to be less critical of them and engage.

Until this miracle moment ever happens, my only effective and proven communications to influence the LL commerce team a little is to openly criticize them for their mistakes that we catch them on.

[Josh Susanto]

(and how many times have I already said this?)

I think what they do is far less a problem than the gap between what they do and what they say they do.

If they want to run an authoritarian company in which users must submit to the pretense of the company's infallibility, I guess that's up to them.

But if they say they want something like the opposite of that, they should at least be willing to go halfway to where they say they already are in that regard.

The best example I've seen so far is the one I posted on the other thread...

Brooke didn't have to tell us that DD code wouldn't be deployed without advanced notice. She could have said "we will deploy DD code like a thief in the night", or she could have said nothing about it at all. 

We might not have liked either of those two approaches, but either would have been less dishonest than what she did say, as evident by the recent deployment of DD code without advanced notice.

Giving the advanced notice as she had indicated (or just not deploying the code at all) would be something closer to ideal, but SLM has long been absolutely no kind of place for idealists, so we might as well just drop such pie-in-the-sky fanatasies of transparent behavior.

My main gripe is, as it has always been, not that LL delivers too little, but that it promises too much in comparison to what is delivered. 

Obviously, I'd prefer to see this gap closed from the service end of the equation, but I'm way past being picky about it at this point.

In order to help LL stay more clearly on message with us, I have a new motto they might want to try:

"Shut up and eat your gruel."