Hi everyone,
I typically leave our communication here to Yooper as she's much better at this than I am, but in light of today's events with the release, I really want to discuss with everyone directly.
Firstly, I want to explain what today's release contained as we haven't made that clear. For several months we've been preparing a set of features that we think enables professional breweries, clubs, and friends to collaborate more effectively. That includes things like recipe versioning so you can keep track of what's changed, to groups that can work on recipes/brews together, device notifications/alerts, etc. I absolutely understand these features aren't for everyone, but there are certainly groups and organizations that are excited for these.
Obviously that was a massive undertaking and we've been iterating on it for a long time. When preparing a large set of changes like that, other things tend to creep in as you work on different areas of a product. For instance, as we made changes to support group ownership of recipes, we noticed that our table layouts were really inconsistent across the site, so we moved to a more modern and consistent layout. And of course as we added new features like the ones I mentioned, we had to shuffle things around to make them fit.
So we end up with a release that contains a TON of things, from new features, to bug fixes, to UI changes etc. We tested a bunch internally and then opened it up to beta testing. We got some great feedback from our trusty group of beta testers, fixed some things in response to that, and released it last night.
We were really excited to see everyone's feedback today, but it turns out we made a few mistakes.
The biggest is that we didn't communicate effectively with you all on what we were doing. We thought that by running this by our beta testers that was a good representation of all of Brewer's Friend, but that's not a substitute for broad communication. And on top of that, we certainly could have beta tested for a longer period of time. We need to be better at keeping everyone in the loop.
Secondly, and we've been doing this too much lately, we changed things too much to the point of confusion in what you're used to doing on the site. New features are great, but we can't keep changing existing things to support them in confusing ways.
Thanks to all of your feedback today, we've received those messages loud and clear (and I know many of you have been saying these things for a long time, so my apologies it took us so long to hear it).
Now here's what we're doing to fix this and hopefully win back your trust:
1. We're working round the clock to fix any and all bugs, suggestions, etc. you're submitting. We've fixed many of them today and we'll continue to do so until things are perfect.
2. We're going to reduce the frequency of changes to existing features, flows, and tools. We'll still be building new things, but we'll keep them independent from what exists now so people that are interested may use them, but we don't interrupt those who aren't.
3. Going forward we'll shift much of effort from building new features to perfecting what exists and resolving all bugs.
4. We'll work on our communication of releases, including what exactly is changing, both before and after release.
I know many of you have expressed that you've hit your limit with changes like this, and I truly understand that. I sincerely apologize for this experience and any lost time you've spent trying to figure things out. I fully understand if we've lost your trust completely, but hopefully this at least explains what's been happening a bit more.
Thanks for reading this far and as always, thanks for being a part of the Brewer's Friend community. Please continue to reach out to us via the forum and support and we'll do our best to address any and all concerns.
Cheers,
Josh
I typically leave our communication here to Yooper as she's much better at this than I am, but in light of today's events with the release, I really want to discuss with everyone directly.
Firstly, I want to explain what today's release contained as we haven't made that clear. For several months we've been preparing a set of features that we think enables professional breweries, clubs, and friends to collaborate more effectively. That includes things like recipe versioning so you can keep track of what's changed, to groups that can work on recipes/brews together, device notifications/alerts, etc. I absolutely understand these features aren't for everyone, but there are certainly groups and organizations that are excited for these.
Obviously that was a massive undertaking and we've been iterating on it for a long time. When preparing a large set of changes like that, other things tend to creep in as you work on different areas of a product. For instance, as we made changes to support group ownership of recipes, we noticed that our table layouts were really inconsistent across the site, so we moved to a more modern and consistent layout. And of course as we added new features like the ones I mentioned, we had to shuffle things around to make them fit.
So we end up with a release that contains a TON of things, from new features, to bug fixes, to UI changes etc. We tested a bunch internally and then opened it up to beta testing. We got some great feedback from our trusty group of beta testers, fixed some things in response to that, and released it last night.
We were really excited to see everyone's feedback today, but it turns out we made a few mistakes.
The biggest is that we didn't communicate effectively with you all on what we were doing. We thought that by running this by our beta testers that was a good representation of all of Brewer's Friend, but that's not a substitute for broad communication. And on top of that, we certainly could have beta tested for a longer period of time. We need to be better at keeping everyone in the loop.
Secondly, and we've been doing this too much lately, we changed things too much to the point of confusion in what you're used to doing on the site. New features are great, but we can't keep changing existing things to support them in confusing ways.
Thanks to all of your feedback today, we've received those messages loud and clear (and I know many of you have been saying these things for a long time, so my apologies it took us so long to hear it).
Now here's what we're doing to fix this and hopefully win back your trust:
1. We're working round the clock to fix any and all bugs, suggestions, etc. you're submitting. We've fixed many of them today and we'll continue to do so until things are perfect.
2. We're going to reduce the frequency of changes to existing features, flows, and tools. We'll still be building new things, but we'll keep them independent from what exists now so people that are interested may use them, but we don't interrupt those who aren't.
3. Going forward we'll shift much of effort from building new features to perfecting what exists and resolving all bugs.
4. We'll work on our communication of releases, including what exactly is changing, both before and after release.
I know many of you have expressed that you've hit your limit with changes like this, and I truly understand that. I sincerely apologize for this experience and any lost time you've spent trying to figure things out. I fully understand if we've lost your trust completely, but hopefully this at least explains what's been happening a bit more.
Thanks for reading this far and as always, thanks for being a part of the Brewer's Friend community. Please continue to reach out to us via the forum and support and we'll do our best to address any and all concerns.
Cheers,
Josh