Re:InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notifi...
by haswell on Sunday July 09, 2023 @09:06PM
(#36660810)
> After that we make best efforts but if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss
“Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets”.
The lack of a robust customer contact strategy is not a good reason to shift the burden/blame onto the customer here. If collecting an email is supposed to be sufficient notice to deprecate an entire region, it’s hard to imagine that anyone thought this through.
“Had to do it for the business” is the reason to give internal stakeholders. Mentioning this in the context of customers losing data seems like a pretty questionable direction to take this. One would hope there were good reasons.
Ultimately those reasons don’t really matter if you just lost data because Joe used his personal address when provisioning the DB before going on paternity leave or leaving the company or getting laid off and the vendor hosting that DB didn’t think about this possibility.
At a bare minimum, the scream test mentioned elsewhere is necessary here.
In a past life, a customer impacting change of this magnitude required a year’s lead time and an extensive customer communication plan and backup plan, followed by a “soft” shutoff, and eventually the plug could be pulled. This involved sales folks reaching out to customers when all else failed, and the ability to restore customers quickly if necessary.
Enterprise customers reasonably expect this. As a person who has been on both sides of this equation (PM and buyer), I’d strongly recommend reassessing the current strategy on this and what you are considering acceptable.
“Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets”.
The lack of a robust customer contact strategy is not a good reason to shift the burden/blame onto the customer here. If collecting an email is supposed to be sufficient notice to deprecate an entire region, it’s hard to imagine that anyone thought this through.
“Had to do it for the business” is the reason to give internal stakeholders. Mentioning this in the context of customers losing data seems like a pretty questionable direction to take this. One would hope there were good reasons.
Ultimately those reasons don’t really matter if you just lost data because Joe used his personal address when provisioning the DB before going on paternity leave or leaving the company or getting laid off and the vendor hosting that DB didn’t think about this possibility.
At a bare minimum, the scream test mentioned elsewhere is necessary here.
In a past life, a customer impacting change of this magnitude required a year’s lead time and an extensive customer communication plan and backup plan, followed by a “soft” shutoff, and eventually the plug could be pulled. This involved sales folks reaching out to customers when all else failed, and the ability to restore customers quickly if necessary.
Enterprise customers reasonably expect this. As a person who has been on both sides of this equation (PM and buyer), I’d strongly recommend reassessing the current strategy on this and what you are considering acceptable.