Community Breakfast October - Managing Change - Notes

Hosted by UserVoice

Attendees

Claire Chang

Clayton Bryan

Evan Hamilton

Giannii Calvert

Jeremy Hicks

Sarah Manley

Tom Dawkins

Random

 * Double-edged sword of time related to change. Too much time = room for lots of complaints. Too little time = people complaining that the change was painfully abrupt.
 * Especially hard when things are a business change, not a positive UX change.
 * Too easy to think that you're your own target market. You're not merely by the fact that you know what happens at the company (see Made To Stick's "Curse of Knowledge").

Dealing with angry people

 * UserVoice equalizes voices through votes so the vocal minority doesn't win. Is there a way to do this with accepting change? A poll perhaps?
 * Giving an incredibly in-depth explanation of a change can help stop negative feedback; either people get tired and don't finish reading the post or they know everything there is to know and can't complain about your lack of transparency.
 * Being totally honest about other options ("Here are some other platforms we like, here's how to move your content to them") lets people trust you and stop thinking of you as "the man"
 * Silencing people or deleting content (unless they're/it's extremely offensive) makes people feel like you're hiding something.
 * You should try to meet people halfway (or all the way) where possible, but some things are decided and you should tell people "the bus is leaving - get on or off"

Prepping Internally

 * You have to have a number of customers you're prepared to lose with any change, and a way to measure that.
 * Communicate with your product team: what are we actually willing to potentially change based on feedback? If nothing, don't ask for feedback. People can tell you're lying.
 * Deal with the (very real) employee side of change long before you expose your customers to it - dealing with two crisis's isn't doable.
 * Consider setting up a special communications team for a big change, like Wikia did

Quitting?

 * Can you/should you quit if things are really bad and your community isn't being respected by the company?
 * Do you have the savings to quit?
 * Not worth making a big deal when quitting - makes it hard to get other jobs, and the community will be fine. They'll leave if they're really being abused.
 * Good measuring point: does the company treat you as a bridge to the customers or a wall between the customers and them?