Hey, what's up? This is Maggie. P. I'm here at Drift. Welcome to the second episode of Build,

a new channel within the seeking wisdom universe where we're going to go deep on all things building software.

So as we heard about last time, I'm here at Drift to examine everything I know about building and learn from some incredible mentors. And since Seeking Wisdom is all about accelerating learning, I'm going to share everything and learn with you along the way. But before we get into more episodes on new ways to work, today I thought I would start at the very bottom, the failure. By failure, I don't mean test that you shipped at failed. You know, that's the whole point of a test. What I mean are true product failures. Releases that you worked on that for whatever reason just completely missed the marks. So I listened to DG's podcast the other day and still his idea of polling Twitter for a quick response.

I also pinged a bunch of product people I knew to try and get a quick list together on some

of our more obvious product failures.

And my goal with this was to see if I could quickly identify a common thread and figure out a better

way to spot failures in advance.

And it was fascinating was that it turns out that pretty much every example had the

exact same thing in common, losing sight of the customer.

So to get to the examples, I'm going to call it some of the good ones I got on Twitter.

We had a product that missed a key segment of users that ended up hating the feature so much

that it had to be rolled back despite loud commitments from the team

that they wouldn't do it. Another where they released a feature customers said that they needed,

but since all the customers had already built workarounds, no one adopted it. And a really good one

where we had a sixth month interactive video platform API and SDK that no one used but the

internal dev team. Shout out to Craig, our very own VP of

product adrift for that gem. And I had one that even ended up working in that we hit our metric.

But when I did some post-launch user feedback, I learned that the only reason why anyone interacted

with their feature was not because of all the work that we put into the context and the framing

and persuasion, but really just because we made

a button orange and users noticed it. You know, and this list just keeps going. So after listening to

all these stories, one thing became super clear. We all opened ourselves up to failure when we started

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