ALT Our support team has a policy: answer tickets within 4 hours. They hit 97% SLA. Impressive. Here's what I found: 40% of "tickets" are actually Slack DMs that never got logged. Customer asks in DM. Agent answers in DM. Problem solved. No ticket created. No record exists. Same customer asks again next week. Different agent. Same question. Different answer. Because the first answer lived in a DM that's now buried. We have 97% SLA on the tickets we know about. We have no idea how many conversations disappear into the void.

ALT A customer called today. "I've been billed $299 for 8 months. My contract says $199." I checked their account. In our billing system: $299. In the CRM: $199. In the signed contract PDF: $199. In the finance spreadsheet: $299. In the customer's email confirmation: $199. I asked finance. "We updated pricing in January. The system auto-upgraded existing customers." I asked sales. "We promised existing customers keep their rate." I asked the customer. "I have an email from your sales rep saying my rate is locked." We've been overcharging them by $100/month for 8 months. That's $800. Plus the time to fix it. Plus the trust we lost. Nobody documented which customers were grandfathered. So we grandfathered nobody.

ALT We have incredibly detailed meeting notes. I know because I write them. Last week a decision from March came up. Someone disagreed with it. I pulled up the notes. Found the meeting. 14 bullet points. Clear decision. Their response: "I don't remember that. Who was even there?" The notes exist. The alignment doesn't.

ALT Marketing just launched a campaign. "Revolutionary AI-powered scheduling!" The feature was deprioritized 4 months ago. Engineering never started it. The landing page went live. The demo video was from the prototype phase. The "sign up for early access" form collected 2,000 emails. For a feature that doesn't exist. Product found out from a customer tweet. Engineering found out from the angry all-hands thread. Marketing's response: "Nobody told us it was cancelled." The cancellation was in a Notion comment. On a page last viewed 7 months ago.

ALT We started migrating databases 8 months ago. Last update I can find: "Migration 65% complete. On track for December." That was from a Slack message in November. I asked engineering: "Is the migration done?" Engineer 1: "I think so?" Engineer 2: "We're still running both systems." Engineer 3: "I wasn't on that project." I checked the old database. Still receiving writes. I checked the new database. Also receiving writes. Some services write to old. Some to new. Some write to both. Some write to neither and error out. We've been in a partial migration for 8 months. Nobody knows what's migrated. Nobody knows what's left. Nobody knows which database is the source of truth. The project status is Schrödinger's migration.

ALT Quarterly access review was due last week. I signed it off. Everyone else signed it off. Compliance requirement met. Today I discovered an ex-employee still has admin access to our production AWS account. He left 4 months ago. His email was deactivated. His Slack was deactivated. His AWS access? Still active. The access review said "all terminated employees access revoked." It was checked. By me. I checked because it was checked last quarter. And the quarter before. And the quarter before that. We've been certifying fiction for a year. Because the review process is "look at a spreadsheet and check boxes." Not "actually verify access." The checkbox is green. The security is red.

ALT Customer called today. "Your website says $49/month. Your sales rep quoted me $129. Your onboarding email mentioned $79. Which is it?" I checked. Website: $49 (from 2023, never updated after price increase) Sales deck: $129 (current, used since January) Onboarding email: $79 (from a template created by a former CSM) Enterprise page: "Contact sales" (nobody monitors that form) I had to put them on hold for 10 minutes while I figured out which number was real. The real number? $129. But we lost the deal because they think we're either scamming them or incompetent. They're not wrong about the second part.

ALT I found our "Master Passwords" document today. Shared Google Doc. Created 2019. Last edited 2021. Contains: → Stripe dashboard: password from 2020 (we rotated in 2022, new one not documented) → AWS root: shows the OLD account we migrated FROM → SendGrid: correct password, labeled "temporary - rotate after migration" The migration was 18 months ago. I asked 4 people for the current Stripe password. Got 3 different answers. One person said "it's in 1Password." We don't have 1Password. Our entire payment infrastructure is secured by memory and hope.

ALT My new hire just asked me where the API docs are. I pointed him to Notion. He found 7 pages. 3 contradict each other. 2 are from 2022. 1 is just a link to a Slack thread that expired. The 7th page says "ask Brandon." Brandon quit in January. It's his third day and he already thinks we're incompetent.

ALT Client call today: "Where's the custom reporting module?" Our team: "That wasn't in scope." Client: "Your sales rep promised it." I checked the contract. No reporting module. I checked the email thread. The rep said "we can probably add that." I checked the meeting notes. The rep said "let me check with the team." I checked the team's memory. Nobody remembers the conversation. The client has a verbal promise, an ambiguous email, and a signed contract that says nothing about reporting. We're now building a $15K module for free because "the rep promised it." The rep doesn't remember promising it. There's no record. But the client remembers perfectly.

ALT We spent 2 hours in a meeting today debating whether to build Feature X. The argument got heated. Engineering wanted it. Product didn't. Sales was confused about what it even was. After 90 minutes, someone said "wait, didn't we decide this in January?" We checked. We did. The decision was documented. Product said no. Engineering agreed. The meeting notes have 14 signatures. The person arguing FOR it today was the person who said NO in January. He had completely forgotten. 2 hours. Of repeating a conversation we already had. With the same people. Reaching the same conclusion. The only difference is 6 months of our lives we'll never get back.

ALT Security audit today. Auditor: "When were your API keys last rotated?" I checked the policy. Quarterly. I checked the reality. Never. The keys were generated when the service was built. 3 years ago. The engineer who created them left 18 months ago. His last day email said "keys are in the shared doc." The shared doc is a Google Sheet called "Secrets." Shared with 12 people. 4 still work here. One of those keys has admin access. We don't know which service uses it. We don't know what would break if we rotated it. So we don't rotate it. And we pretend our security policy is real.

ALT We publish a changelog every 2 weeks. Beautifully formatted. Detailed. Professional. I asked 10 customers if they read it. 9 said no. The 10th said "I didn't know you had one." Last month we shipped a breaking API change. Mentioned it in the changelog. Section 4. Bullet point 12. 47 developers missed it. Their integrations broke. Our support queue exploded. The changelog exists. The communication doesn't. Breaking changes shouldn't be bullet point 12. They should be impossible to miss.

ALT I found a bug in production today. Traced it to a PR from 3 months ago. Code review comment: "This might cause race conditions. See ticket PROJ-2847." I searched Jira. PROJ-2847 doesn't exist. We migrated Jira instances 6 months ago. Old tickets weren't migrated. I searched the new Jira. No reference to race conditions. I searched Slack. Found a thread from the old instance. 12 messages. The engineer who wrote them left. I asked the reviewer. "I don't remember that PR." The code shipped with a known race condition. The warning was documented in a system we no longer use. The people who knew about it are gone. We merged a bomb because the context lived in a dead ticket.

ALT We've collected 1,200 customer feedback items in the last year. Spreadsheet. Beautifully organized. Tagged by category. Prioritized by frequency. I asked product how many made it into the roadmap. "Which spreadsheet?" they asked. I showed them. They'd never seen it. The feedback lives in a Google Sheet created by a former UX researcher. Shared with 3 people. None of them work in product. The #1 requested feature? Requested 89 times. Never discussed in a single product meeting. We have a voice of the customer program. The customer is speaking. Nobody is listening.

ALT We shipped a release yesterday. Release notes went out this morning. "Added user profiles, improved search, fixed 12 bugs." Engineering: "User profiles isn't in this release. It's on the other branch." Product: "Search improvements were rolled back." QA: "We found 8 more bugs after the notes were written." The release notes were written by an intern. She wasn't in the sprint. She based them on the PR titles. Half the PRs were reverted. Some were for next sprint. Our customers read the notes. They asked about user profiles. We had to tell them it doesn't exist. The release notes were aspirational. Not factual.

ALT Engineering started building Feature Y this sprint. No spec. No PRD. No user stories. The request came from a Slack message: "can we add Y?" with a thumbs up from the CEO. 3 weeks in, they demo it. Product says "that's not what I meant." CEO says "I thought it would work differently." Sales says "our prospects need Z, not Y." 4 weeks of work. Wrong feature. Wrong requirements. Wrong everything. The CEO's Slack message is now pinned. It says "can we add Y?" That's the entire product spec. We built a $40K feature from a 5-word message.

ALT I shadowed a sales call today. The rep opened the "latest" pitch deck. Version 4.2, she said. Slide 7 showed pricing from 2023. Slide 12 mentioned a feature we killed in Q2. Slide 15 had our old logo. The client noticed. "Is this current?" he asked. She panicked. Closed the deck. Opened "v4.2_FINAL." Same issues. Then "v4.2_FINAL_v2." Same issues. Then "v4.2_FINAL_v2_ACTUAL." Still had the old logo. She spent 3 minutes shuffling through 7 versions of the same deck while the client watched. We have a brand folder. It has 12 versions of the deck. Nobody knows which one is real.

ALT Client call today: "Can you add dark mode?" Our product manager: "Great idea, let me check the roadmap." Our engineer: "It's been live for a year." Our sales rep: "...it is?" Our marketing site: [screenshot of dark mode toggle] The client found it in 30 seconds. Our own team didn't know we had it. This is what happens when product, engineering, and sales all live in different realities.

ALT Every 2 weeks we have retrospectives. Everyone shares. We take notes. We vote on action items. We assign owners. Then nothing happens. I reviewed the last 6 retros. Same 3 problems appear in every single one: 1. "Communication between teams needs improvement" 2. "Documentation is outdated" 3. "We need better onboarding for new hires" Same problems. Same action items. Same owners. Same nothing. The retrospectives exist. The improvement doesn't. We're just ritualizing our own dysfunction.