As you may be aware, last month we launched our fully re-factored site after many months of effort on the part of the team. Not only did this re-launch mean a 100% new code-base, it also meant 100% new hardware at our hosting provider. Our goal was a faster, more stable site, and a code base that allows us to add new features and enhance existing ones quickly and easily. Our community is already benefiting from this: along with the improvements introduced last month, the site’s performance and site stability are greatly improved; in the 30 days since launch our site uptime has been 99.9%!
As good as it felt to launch, the process was not without pain. Wait a sec – what am I saying? What I meant was, as good as it felt to launch the process was intensely painful for the entire team. Many long days, some heated disagreements, more than a few all-nighters, way too many bugs at launch, many customers impacted (and frustrated), and a huge spike in customer service requests served to drain the team, reduce our capacity, and destroy our productivity for weeks. We have emerged from this process older, wiser, more tired than ever, but having learned some truly valuable lessons.
We took some time last week to meet as a team and spent the better part of a day doing our own “post-mortem” on the process. Our goal was to come away with some lessons learned and to use these to inform our internal process and to improve our performance going forward. In 2010 we will be introducing some major new features and we hope to better execute these “mini-launches” and lessen their impact on the team and the community. One of the thoughts that occurred to me as we reflected on our own mistakes and developed our own learnings, was that other businesses and organizations might benefit if we shared our own process.
Within a few days after launch, we put a meeting on the calendar for the entire team: Lessons Learned. We decided that this meeting would not take place for a few weeks, because we knew that problems were still arising in those first weeks and we wanted to be able to discuss ALL of the issues and all of the consequences which were revealed. This was important, because it wasn’t immediately evident where some of the issues lay and we knew that, given enough time, they would be uncovered.
