How is churn at your company? How has COVID affected your churn rate?

If you’re like most of the companies and leaders I’ve been talking to *everyone* is feeling it. The only question is how much:

• The great companies struck oil when COVID hit. Those that help companies transition to remote, support the fight vs. COVID, or do video conferencing are thriving. They’re not reading this post anyways.
• The good companies are fortunate to be in healthy markets and they’re approaching 70-80% of their original sales targets. Churn is up a bit, but not life-threatening.
• The struggling companies are in markets where some of their customers were crushed, while others continued along. They’ve seen a spike in churn, deals take longer to close, and pipelines are significantly reduced.
• The dying companies are in markets that have been crippled by COVID/lockdown. Good luck selling software to sports leagues, travel, in-person entertainment, and hotel industries.

Unfortunately, if your entire customer base evaporated, because the industry no longer exists, there are no churn tactics that will save you. You either hold your breath, hoping to survive until recovery and reopening of the industry you serve, or you have to pivot your business in some major way.

For the rest of us in the middle feeling the sting of churn, and still with chips in the game, today’s post is to show you some of my favorite tactics I’ve learned over the last decade working on SaaS businesses. While there are no silver bullets, there are quite a few things you can do that together add up to make a difference.

5 Ways to Reduce Churn Better than an Exit Survey

A common behavior I see in SaaS products is to have a multiple choice survey when they cancel. This helps you quantify what was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

But does that tell the full story? No, it does not.

A lesson in the hidden truth of churn

When I ran product at KISSmetrics back in 2013, over a few months our churn started spiking, from the healthy, 3-5% range to suddenly approaching and exceeding 10%.

This was obviously alarming, so we put our attention on trying to figure out why.

The first place we looked was at our cancellation survey that popped up when you clicked to cancel inside our product’s account settings.

An example of a churn survey

Unfortunately, this information didn’t really tell us much. In fact, the data we had was pretty evenly distributed across a number of the many options we presented.

It helped us narrow down the causes, but it didn’t come close to giving us the full picture.

Unfortunately, people cancel long after the initial warning signs occur. Often, the survey answer you get is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back, or a quick rationalize after they’ve already decided to quit.

It wasn’t until I applied the below tactics that we found the real, root cause. I’ve also used these same lessons since to help my own startups and those of some of my friends and mentees significantly reduce churn.

1) Check with your Customer Support / Success Team (or help out!)

I am always amazed by the number of SaaS product managers and founders that don’t interact with their customer support teams or help out with support tickets.

As this great Tweetstorm from Podia founder, Spencer Fry, reminds us, it’s a HUGE part of retention and customer happiness.

Customer Success interactions and support tickets are a GOLD MINE for product teams. It can answer essential questions like:

• Friction: Where are people getting stuck and confused in the product?
• Bugs: What bugs keep happening and bothering customers most?
• Requests: What are customers asking for either explicitly at the start of a support ticket, or during an ongoing conversation?

These are great any time, but especially if you’re fighting churn, you can work together to determine:

• What support tickets were recently sent by customers who churned this week?
• What tickets did they seem to push most urgently about or have a high degree of frustration regarding?
• Did they make the same requests repeatedly? What were they?

This kind of information helps you see where there may have been points of frustration in the past that contributed to them leaving. If you really frustrated me, your support team is likely to take the brunt of that, too.

Their friendliness may win me over and resolve the problem, but if that issue made me look bad to my boss, made a report late, or caused me to start a work-around that makes me less dependent on your software…the clock is now ticking on churning from your product.

2) Do a set of Jobs to Be Done Interviews

Many people have learned about jobs to be done over the last few years. Whether you love the milk shake example from the Clayton Christensen’s talk above, or the proverbial “I want to hang a picture, not put a 3/4 inch hole in the wall” story, you realize that people hire products to accomplish something, not for “features.”

What many fewer people know is you can use this same process to fight churn.

If you’re not familiar with Jobs to Be Done start here.

Jobs to be done is packed with insights for product teams

The big insight of jobs to be done isn’t just what I’m hiring your product to help me do. It’s also the above timeline to help you understand their journey from “passively looking” to “deciding” to “finished.”

There’s a tremendous amount you can learn as a product manager or founder doing these interviews with new customers (paid you for the first time in the last 45 days).

This can inform your marketing, copywriting, onboarding, and positioning throughout.

It can also help you with churn.

Flip the script. Create a churn timeline.

Just like there is a timeline for buying, there’s a timeline for your customer deciding to cancel.

Mapping it to the above timeline, here’s how it looked when I did this for a KISSmetrics customer all those years ago:

• First thought: Over lunch, a director of marketing tried to run a report to check a number. It took about 10 minutes for it to complete. It was annoying, but they brushed it off.
• Actively looking: A month or so later, the marketer tried to run a report when they first got into the office in the morning. Again the report hung. They left the browser open hoping it would finish later. It was still not complete when they left work that day.
• Deciding: Unable to get a report they needed, and complaining in the middle of the office, a coworker suggested they try another system that had always worked for them. The marketer listened and started trying another product to see if they could get the numbers they needed.
• Consuming: The alternative product offered them a strong discount, which then made canceling a no-brainer. Meanwhile, our cancel survey for this user cited price, which was only part of the picture.

As it turned out, in this interview, and many others like it, the key cause for our churn was performance related. It’s little surprise that around that time Mixpanel started running brutal adwords against us:

Understanding the timeline of your user’s journey to canceling can make all the difference in preventing churn. Jobs to be done is the single best way I know to do it.

You can learn how to do these in my in depth post on jobs to be done interviews here.

3) Dig into your product analytics

Great product managers know that to truly understand your product requires both qualitative and quantitative data. You need to understand the stories of your customers (qualitative data) and you need to understand the size and scope of things happening (quantitative data).

This of course applies to understanding churn as much as anything else. Look at your churned customers’ product usage and ask questions like:

How effective is your analytics setup? Please take 2 minutes to fill out this quick survey and I’ll share the results with participants.

We made this addition to our help doc on how to cancel when COVID hit

4) Make COVID specific offers

These are unusual times and budgets are tough. Even the most loyal of customers have to cut products that are not life-or-death essential for them when they’re also having to cut staff.

The best thing you can do then is to think long term. Ask yourself how you can create win-win opportunities and build a long term relationship with your customers.

If you help them out in a tough time, they’ll be there for you for the long haul. Never underestimate the loyalty of a customer you went above and beyond for.

So how do you do that? Well, if you’re a product manager, you’ll likely need to get other departments and leadership involved to make any of these calls, but here’s a few for starters that many companies have already implemented:

• A few months free: Especially if you’re a business that does “land + expand,” the last thing you want to do is lose your “land.” Give your struggling customers a brief reprieve, especially if they are high value or high potential.
• Discounts for Case Studies: Case studies and testimonials give your company more credibility in a market. Use our present circumstances to ask more companies and customers for testimonials and case studies in exchange for flexibility on pricing and terms.
• Pause accounts: Rather than immediately deleting data when people cancel, agree to pause their access and to check in at a pre-determined future date to reactivate them.

Whatever you offer, make sure you listen to your customers; they may have questions or concerns about some of your offers, which can help you either provide something different and better they prefer, or clarify your offers to avoid objections.

Remember: it’s easier to get an existing customer to spend more money in the future than it is to acquire a brand new customer. Anything you can do creatively to create win-win scenarios and keep your existing customers around is going to pay dividends for you and your company.

5) Think about Olsen’s Hierarchy of Product Needs

Dan Olsen is one of the original Silicon Valley Product Leaders. He was VP of Product at Facebook predecessor Friendster, and has since become a long time advisor and consultant on all things product management.

One of the great concepts I’ve heard him speak about is translating Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs  (see picture above) into a version for software products:

Much like Maslow’s hierarchy, Olsen’s hierarchy starts at the bottom and subsequent steps in the pyramid only matter if the ones below are taken care of.

Applying this to churn you can imagine:

• Uptime: If your product is down (or a key API from a 3rd party), your customers cannot use your product and will churn because they can’t accomplish what they set out to.
• Page Load Time: If your product is too slow, you’ll frustrate your customer as I learned the hard way at KISSmetrics.
• Absence of Bugs: When things don’t work as expected, or inconsistently, again you’ll frustrate your customers, which makes them reduce how often they use your product, or stop using it altogether.
• Features: Are your customers able to accomplish what they set out to do with your product? Whether they don’t know how, need advanced functionality, want a complimentary feature to justify the budget for you, or require a specific integration, listen carefully to them.
• Usability: If people struggle to find the things they need to do in your product, or don’t understand how to use it, they won’t stick around long term.

If you’ve been doing the early tactics I’ve written today of interviewing customers, talking to customer success, and looking at your product analytics, you should start to see some patterns in where on the hierarchy your company’s biggest problems are.

Then, in addition to mapping and grouping your problems, look to the hierarchy as a guide to the priority of the fixes and improvements you will make.

If your product is bug-filled, slow, or has significant uptime issues, then no amount of usability improvements or feature additions will matter. It starts with a strong foundation.

BONUS: More lead bullets for churn

The 5 recommendations above are how to address big churn issues and make a real dent in the problem long term.

While you dig into the hard work of applying the above tactics, here are some quick hacks that can help you and your company with smaller needle movements on your churn rate:

• Set up Good Dunning Resolution: Expired credit cards and failed charges are the bane of any SaaS business. Pro-actively reach out ahead of time when customer credit cards are expiring, and when a charge fails. Stripe has features you can turn on to automatically help with this.
• Show Product Momentum: Especially for early stage companies, sending regular product updates help customers feel like you’re continuing to get better, even if you don’t always fix or add what they specifically want.
• Apologize for Big Mistakes: Your customers know if you messed up. Hiding from it only hurts your credibility, so if you have a major outage or downtime, be transparent about it. You may be surprised how customers may even offer to help! Learn how to send a great product crisis email here.
• Push for Annual deals: Fun fact – If you pay up front for 12 months, you can’t churn for 12 months ;) Make it a win-win for you and your customers by offering a discount versus paying monthly.
• Improve Support Response Time: One of the best ways especially early stage startups can stand out is with amazing support. Providing chat support was one of the secrets to Podia‘s high NPS score for a reason.
• Add a Slipping Away Message: One of the first great innovations Intercom did was to allow you to easily trigger a message after N days to try to recover lost customers. Try setting one up after 25 days of inactivity and tell them about your 3 most popular features.

Each of these tactics alone will not solve your underlying churn issues, but they will help reduce the number bit by bit. Also, as you learn more about your customer base and their motivations, you’ll see smarter ways to apply your insights to engage them and fight churn.

What are your favorite tactics to fight churn? Leave a comment to share what you’ve learned with others.

How are you doing with your analytics? Please take this quick survey and I’ll share the results with participants: https://forms.gle/MkNXA2DVKJuZQQev6

If you launch a feature and you don’t tell anyone, did you really launch it?

Okay, maybe the “tree falls in a forest” analogy isn’t perfect, but you probably get the point: you need to tell your customers when you make improvements.

But how do you do it in a way that customers will care?

I’ve seen dozens of ways for people to do product updates over the years, including these common ones:

• Popping up in app to tell them (think Intercom-style, or a product tour)
• Posting on your company blog
• Emailing to everyone who has an account
• Passing it to sales or account management to tell customers
• Updating a change log that lists all updates over time
• Praying they stumble upon the changes

Of all of those, my favorite is the semi-regular email to customers.

I like it for a few reasons:

1. Flexible medium: I can write and include images and gifs to clearly show what’s new.
2. Non-interruptive:  Unlike pop ups in app, they can read this when they have time, instead of dismissing it when they’re in the middle of something in your product.
3. Reminder we exist: People get busy. You are not the center of their universe. An email about product improvements can get people back into your product they haven’t logged into in a while because they see you in their inbox.

For the past nearly 10 years, I’ve been sending product updates at the SaaS companies I’ve worked at and founded. Because of the structure I follow, I’ve seen it help build stronger relationships with customers, reduce churn, and help everyone feel more product momentum.

Today, I’ll show you my process so you can experience those benefits with your customers, too.

How to Write Product Updates that Delight Customers & Reduce Churn

First and foremost, credit where credit is due. There is an AWESOME Tweetstorm from Steven Sinofsky on this subject you should go read now:

Okay, so now that you read his 20 tweets, you understand why this is important, and the pitfalls to avoid. Now, let’s talk about how to actually write one.

A few assumptions:

• You talk to customers: If you talk to customers, all of this is easy to do. If you don’t, not only is this very hard to do, but you are a disgrace to product managers everywhere. Worst of all, your designers and engineers are rolling their eyes at you. Jump here on my blog to reform your ways if you need to start doing so.
• You’re data informed: Quantitative numbers are not everything, but they’re very important. They help you understand how many people are affected by a problem, the total addressable audience for a feature, and measure the impact of a change. Having these numbers is key for both internal buy in and explaining things to your customers.
• You have buy-in: The bigger your company, the more stakeholders you need to manage. It’s good to get things done, and it’s also good to keep people in the loop who also interact with customers or care about this. Use your best judgment on who may want to see what you’re doing. If you get resistance, try to get support for an experiment of doing them.

If you’ve done those 3 things, you’re ready to apply these tactics to make an awesome product / feature update.

1) Start with a “Thank You”

Every product update I take the time to write out a list of thank yous to customers that took time to report bugs, share feedback, answer questions, or do customer development interviews.

This costs you *nothing*, but can mean a lot.

First, you’re letting people know you were really listening. It reminds them that their input matters and the time they took out of their day to email you, hop on a call, or beta test a feature was worth it.

It also creates a reinforcing loop:

• You thank someone for feedback.
• Others see that you thanked people for feedback and it gets them thinking about giving feedback.
• Coworkers see their colleague’s name and talk about it, think about using the product more, and consider giving feedback as well.
• Next month, the list grows, and you have more people to thank.

Immediately after I give thank you shout outs, I also then remind people just how easy it is to give us feedback, so I teach more customers what to do:

Remember: You want a product people LOVE or HATE.

Silence is your enemy.

Make more people care by letting them know you’re listening. The feedback and problems they share help you build a better product, and improve adoption throughout a company or network.

2) Tell your story

Every product has a mission and vision. As a product manager, you need to understand and lead that vision. It should impact everything you do, including what you write in your product updates.

The best way to manage expectations with customers is to guide them on the journey of your product.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Where is our product heading? What is the big picture?
• Why are we heading in that direction?
• How does our direction help our customers be more awesome?
• What won’t we be doing? Why not those things?

As you explain each update and change, you should keep those questions in mind. Make sure what you tell people aligns with that goal.

For example, with Lighthouse, our focus is on making managers great. We know they’re busy, so things like speed and performance in our product is as important as a new, shiny feature. We need to work reliably for them.

That meant that when we had a product outage due to Mandrill failing, we decide to switch providers to Postmark. Here’s how we framed that:

Obviously, this is a very simple version of a story. For new, big features, there’s *a lot* more I would speak to explaining how we think it fits their workflow, why it matters, and how it fits into everything they do.

3) Explain your reasoning

While telling your story is important, it’s also helpful to have a rational side to it. What was the motivation for this decision?

If you’re doing product management right, you already wrote a product spec or product thesis that explains to your internal team why you’re choosing to work on this feature next. You should translate that same quantitative and qualitative data to a version that makes sense to share with your customers.

As Sinofsky points out, if you don’t give people a reason, they’ll make one up. So plan to give them a good one.

A feature can be commonly requested, but you don’t build it because it doesn’t fit your vision and mission. A feature can also be less commonly requested, but only because people can’t use your product until you build an integration they would need.

Either way, you would want to explain your decision. Tell people why you chose this of all the things you could do.

Maybe you have a Slack integration, and with all the hype and press around Microsoft Teams, you realize it makes sense to allow MS Teams users to do what you already allow in Slack.

Or maybe your company is moving up market and that means building some permissioning, and security is now more important. Your SMB customers may not be as excited, but if you can help paint the picture that, “one day your business may grow and you’ll want to use these, too” can give them a better feeling about it.  Explaining the upmarket move can then also signal to your handful of current, big customers that you are investing more in what matters to them.

If you just say, “We built some new security features” with a list of bullets, you give your customers no idea why.  Do better than that.

4) Paint a picture of the future

Your product update is a snapshot in time. It’s one step in an endless journey towards (or keeping) product-market fit.

As important as it is to explain what you built and launched this time, you also should paint a picture for the future. Help people understand and anticipate what is coming.

The key here is to strike a balance. You do *not* want to publish your whole roadmap; it can change too much, and you want to give yourself some flexibility.

At the same time, if people know how you’re thinking and what you’re working towards, they can help you in a variety of ways:

• Volunteer to give feedback: If they know you’re building things they’d like, they’re more likely to reach out.
• Good customers stay: Most people hate switching products. If they feel like you’re heading in the right direction, they’ll give you time to fix problems and get there.
• Tell their friends/colleagues: When a product “just gets me”, you’re much more likely to rave to friends about it. By telling your story for features and where you’re heading, it builds excitement and anticipation for your best fit customers.

Strike the right balance on what you share

Giving just the right amount of detail on the future is definitely a learned skill. However, as a starting point, I like to do the following:

• Talk about things under construction: If you’re already committed to and building something it’s pretty safe to hint at it by showing a small snippet, or explaining what it will do.
• Focus on themes: Rather than listing the 27 things you hope to do (and could change), tell them thematically about your goal or vision. This could be like saying we’re going to “allow you to do key activities on your phone you told us are important when on the go” instead of listing mobile app features.

5) Seek feedback and input

You should never send something product related that is “no reply”, and this is especially the case for product updates. If people have something to say about what you built, make it as easy as possible for them to share their thoughts.

You can then use this to also recruit people for future customer development based on the upcoming features you’re going to launch, or to get people to take a survey.

The more you show you’re listening and acting in their interest, the more engaged your customer base becomes.

Creating a virtuous feedback cycle

When I joined KISSmetrics, they were getting about 10 pieces of customer feedback a week from our feedback box in the product. Unfortunately, no one on the team was replying to those for a variety of reasons.

Through being more customer driven, replying to those messages, and sending notes like I’m outlining today, we were able to boost that to getting over 50 pieces of feedback (5X) a week while the customer base grew about 2.5X. This helped us catch and fix bugs faster, and more easily get insights from our customers.

The easier you make it to give feedback, and the more you respond and act on what you receive, the more feedback you’ll get from customers.

Before long, you’ll find it’s really easy to find and recruit customers for new feature feedback and customer development.

Adapt this to fit your business and audience.

With my startup, Lighthouse, we sell to managers. They’re generally in an office and live in email. This makes an email update great.

Once a month is a good cadence for us to send an update out as it’s a couple sprints, and usually enough to fill up a good update.  It also is a frequency that resonates with our audience as they do a lot of their projects in monthly increments.

Your business may be different, so consider changes to what I’ve outlined here like:

• Message on another platform: Can you tell them in Slack, via a small text, or somewhere else they’re most likely to check?
• Tweak the frequency: Update your customers as often as you think fits your update cadence and your customers want them. More, shorter updates, or fewer, longer may make sense.
• Use another format: If you’re a video platform, then video updates probably are better. If your business includes a really popular podcast, maybe a quick audio clip.
• Show your personality: This is a huge opportunity to build your brand, so put some of your company’s personality into it. If your company is nerdy, be nerdy, if it’s playful or irreverent, be irreverent, and if you’re really formal, then your update should be, too.
• Involve the right people: Who has the strongest relationship with your customers? They should be in the loop on this. For example, if you have account managers it may be best to have them get the word out, at which point you could draft something they can copy/paste and adapt.

The best way to get to the right format and approach for your customer is to listen and iterate. Get the right people involved in your company and start trying things.

As you build the habit of doing this, you’ll see more of what works and doesn’t so you can work towards getting messages like this from your customers:

How do you update your customers about changes and improvements to your product? Share your favorite tactic in the comments so everyone can learn.

So you have a crisis. Your product went down. Your site or reports froze.

Emails weren’t sent…or maybe they did…100 times instead of once.

Whatever it is, your product didn’t do the job your customers hired it for.

When disaster strikes, you have two choices: Hide from it, or face it down.

Hiding will cost you.

How you react will directly affect your customer churn or renewal rates, what your customers will do (do they tweet about it? Do the offer to help?), and the morale of your team.

That’s why, if you’re the product manager, and there’s an issue with the product you’re in charge of, you need to take the lead to help communicate with your customers about it.

You can’t often do much to help engineering do their jobs, so helping with communication internally and externally can be really valuable to reduce distractions for them and show you’re doing your part.

You also then build a culture of facing problems down directly.

My team knows that if anyone finds a bug or problem, the first question will be, “who is affected?” followed by, “can you get me a list of their names and emails?” (More on this shortly).

Today, I’ll share how you can lessen the long term damage, and even earn some good will in a tough situation with your product.

What PMs should do first in a Product Crisis

Ever had a wave of upset customers mad about your product? I’ve been there.

I first learned about dealing with such issues when I was at KISSmetrics. We ran into some serious tech debt / scaling issues that led to angry tweets, lots of support tickets, and even AdWords run against us by our cutthroat competitor, MixPanel:

While there’s nothing you can say or do that will save you if the problem continues, the right message at the right time can buy you time to address it, and relieve a great deal of tension.

Here’s how to approach it:

1) Communicate internally

This is one of those times all those soft skills of being a product manager come into play:

• Your customers are stressed: They can’t use your product as intended for the reason(s) they pay you for it.
• Your product team is stressed: They’re scrambling to understand and resolve the issue.
• Your company is stressed: Everyone from sales to customer success to executives will hear about a big issue. And they often won’t be able to do anything about except add more pressure to the situation.

As a product manager, you need to step up your game and work to communicate with everyone calmly and effectively.

Be a source of calm…

The first thing you need to do is relax. As leader, it’s important to be calm and under control. Understanding the problem and having a plan should give you reason to be confident when communicating internally, then later externally, about the problem.

Don’t understand the problem? Then, that’s priority one.

Ask the basics:

• What happened?
• Who is affected?
• Why did it happen? (If you can get to the root cause)
• Is it ongoing or are things back up and running?
• What is the estimate to a fix?

If you know those basics, you can help your team by starting to communicate with those that need to be in the loop. Those can be people like the sales and customer success teams you interface with, and of course any other key stakeholders.

From there, you can start looking at how to communicate with customers.

2) Use the right level response for the size of the problem, and the size of your company

This advice applies most to small startups and businesses (1-50 employees). As you grow, you’ll likely have a more resilient product, a full marketing team to support you, and set policies to follow.

However, regardless of your company’s size, it’s very beneficial to understand what your plans would be in the event of a crisis. By the time something happens, it’s a lot harder and more stressful to come up with it on the fly.

You also want to scale your response to the size of the problem.

Find out who is affected. Only send a response to them, especially if it’s a small group

I like to send personal emails (or work with account managers/customer reps) for small groups affected. Then, for bigger groups, I’ll ask an engineer for a list of every customer affected with their name and email in CSV. That makes it easy to quickly import that list into your favorite email marketing tool to fire off such a note.

3) Always keep your boss in the loop

Finally, use your best judgment and run any plan like this by your boss.

Whether that’s the CEO, a product leader, or a founder, they’re going to have opinions, thoughts, and concerns as your product crisis unfolds. And if you’re not updating them, they’re going to ask you, or go bug your team for updates.

While we’re focusing today on communicating with your customers, many of these same approaches can also help in managing up with your boss.

As important as it is to update them, it’s also a good idea to get their approval for sending the kind of note we suggest. They can help with a quick proof read of your email before sending, so it fits the desired tone, and make them feel a part of the solution, too.

How to Communicate with Customers During a Product Crisis

When reports started getting slow at KISSmetrics, at first we hid from the issue. We assumed it was just some edge cases, and maybe it would go away. (It didn’t.)

Instead, it got worse.

Finally, we decided we needed to say something, so our VP of Product and Engineering wrote an email we sent to customers.

And then we braced.

We didn’t know how customers would react, and so we hoped for the best and prepared for the worst.

Fortunately, the immediate response was incredibly supportive. Suddenly, the elephant in the room was gone, and we could focus on improving things for customers without fear of how they’d react.

Since then I’ve used the same approach, and learned a few key additions that have helped me with products I’ve worked on and a number of my friends do the same.

Here’s a few keys when you need to write the note:

1) Show empathy

If your product matters, which if people buy it, it must be important to them, then showing you appreciate its importance can help a lot.

Speak to the use cases you know the problem impacts like “your ability to have those numbers for your weekly marketing meeting” or “your ability to properly prepare for your 1 on 1s with your team members.”

If you don’t know how your customers use your product, then it’s time to figure it out. Pay attention to what people are quite possibly screaming to support about that they really need, and speak their language.

When people feel heard and understood, they are more likely to be calm and understanding. When you show empathy to them, they’re more likely to show empathy for you.

Put this early in your note to customers.

2) Call yourself every name in the book

This isn’t a joke. You’re showing that you know it’s bad, and you need to do better.

By bravely standing up and admitting a mistake or error happened, you show leadership.

I learned this from Dale Carnegie’s leadership classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People:

“Say about yourself all the derogatory things you know the other person is thinking or wants to say or intends to say – and say them before that person has a chance to say them.

The chances are a hundred to one that a generous, forgiving attitude will be taken and your mistakes will be minimized.”

It may seem counter-intuitive at first, but if you try it, you will be amazed at how well it works.

Caution: You win and lose as a team

Do not throw any team members under the bus. Stick to we’s and group/company wide acceptance of responsibility. Emotions will be running high as your engineering team works hard to fix it, so the last thing you want to do is to pile on more stress or frustration by calling them out.

And even if say a now-fired engineer deleted a database, or someone made a big error, your company still bears the responsibility; your company hired the wrong person, or failed to have effective safeguards to prevent such an incident. Finger pointing gets you nowhere.

Importantly, by calling yourself out, you save your customers from having to. This can prevent many angry tweets, or a large, public outcry.

Best of all, when you do self-deprecate over an issue, as Dale Carnegie teaches, there’s really only one thing left for them to do: be magnanimous and forgive you. “Oh it wasn’t *that* bad. I’ll live.”

3) Talk about what you’re doing about it

This is a great excuse to work with your engineering team to understand the technical side of your product better. When they’re not in full crisis mode, or they take a break, sit down with someone on the team to get a layman’s term explanation of what happened.

From there, you convey however much you and the team are comfortable stating about what happened, and then most importantly, you look to the future on what you’re doing about it.

You see this a lot in the world of engineering products. They’ll actively tweet out about an issue and then even share the post mortem publicly for other engineers to see what they learned.

While that may be overkill or not relevant to your market, explaining what you’re doing to prevent the issue going forward definitely is important.  Doing so builds confidence that this will be an isolated incident, or you can warn them, “We’re making this fix now, and a broader fix will take X weeks, so let us know if you experience issues in the coming days.”

This is the best way to end your note to customers about your product crisis.

Putting it all together.

Here’s an example note I sent to customers in 2017 when we accidentally emailed people 7 prep emails in the morning for each of their 1 on 1s that day. For some people that meant a busy day of 1 on 1s caused them to be sent 50+ emails in just a few minutes.

Now, this isn’t the biggest failure ever, but it was an opportunity to set the standard we own up to mistakes they’ll certainly notice.

And the response was exactly as we hoped:

Our response looked personal, but with a little planning, it was all automated and totally scalable to the size of that issue and others like it.

You can see a similar message here:

The bigger the issue, the more the detail you’d put in the note, and the more you’d be self-deprecating. Use your best judgement and fit the culture of your company for how to specifically frame it.

Update! Buffer has a fantastic example of this with a recent issue:

I also like a couple things extra they did here:

In addition to covering the basics we outlined in this post, there’s a couple extra things that the note does that are worth calling out:

1. It’s from the CTO: Showing this issue was given attention all the way to the top of the organization.
2. They thanked their customers: When someone helps out, it’s always good to thank them for their contribution.
3. Reinforce behavior you want: By continually setting an example and stating how they like their customers to act, it helps reinforce customers should behave that way. This is why it’s better to say, “Thanks for your patience” instead of “Sorry for bugging you.”

Note: This is not a silver bullet.

In the end, this approach will buy you time and earn some good will. It helps you be a part of the solution with your team and sets a good precedent for communicating with your customer transparently about issues.

However, much like in baseball, “3 strikes you’re out.”

If this happens too often, no amount of well crafted apologies will save you.

You have to fix the issue and do better going forward, and then it will be a distant memory in your customers mind, and you can get back to making more awesome stuff.

How has your product team handle crises? Would love to hear your stories of what’s worked in the comments.

>>> Are you passionate about building great products & live in New York City?

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