Nick Mehta (LiveOps, Accel) tells the true story of how LiveOps nearly went under and what he didn't realize.
Wake Up and Smell the Crisis
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Wake Up and Smell the Crisis
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Wake Up and Smell the Crisis
#2Great post. Love the point about switching personas to deal with crisis situations. How do you know when to switch though? Sounds like it'll be exhausting to sustain a switch over a long period of time.
Re: Wake Up and Smell the Crisis
#3very insightful article about how to deal with crisis.
Re: Wake Up and Smell the Crisis
#4Super interesting, and quite applicable to any crisis in a company.
Re: Wake Up and Smell the Crisis
#5very insightful article about how to deal with crisis.
I'd be interested in knowing what the tweaks to the billing process were. It's a great and terrifying story.
Re: Wake Up and Smell the Crisis
#6Great post. Love the point about switching personas to deal with crisis situations. How do you know when to switch though? Sounds like it'll be exhausting to sustain a switch over a long period of time.
That's a good question and thanks for reading it (I was the author). I don't have a magic formula but I have concluded that when I decide to switch, the switch needs to be binary not gradual. I do agree you can't sustain it for long periods of time - I have another blog post in my head on that one related to other crises :)
Re: Wake Up and Smell the Crisis
#7very insightful article about how to deal with crisis.
I'd be interested in knowing what the tweaks to the billing process were. It's a great and terrifying story.
Thanks (I'm the author). At a high level, the tweak was a big change but I didn't realize it. We used to pre-bill a customer for the next period (e.g., quarter) based upon the previous period's usage. So if you go from 10 users to 20, then in the next period, we'd pre-bill for 20. This obviously is great in that it captures maximize cash flow upfront but it's tricky in that you need to use usage that you're getting right now to calculate future bills. In addition, the variety of our billing plans and legacy customers made this more complicated. Truth be told, I don't think I even fully understood the complexity (my finance and engineering team could give the full story).
Re: Wake Up and Smell the Crisis
#8As soon as I saw "Zuora" I knew this would be a disaster...
Re: Wake Up and Smell the Crisis
#9As soon as I saw "Zuora" I knew this would be a disaster...
Why do you say that?
Re: Wake Up and Smell the Crisis
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be interested in knowing what the tweaks to the billing process were. It's a great and terrifying story.
Thanks (I'm the author). At a high level, the tweak was a big change but I didn't realize it. We used to pre-bill a customer for the next period (e.g., quarter) based upon the previous period's usage. So if you go from 10 users to 20, then in the next period, we'd pre-bill for 20. This obviously is great in that it captures maximize cash flow upfront but it's tricky in that you need to use usage that you're getting r…
Thanks for being so open about this. I've worked from the IT side with a lot of different accounting folks, and I can't imagine any of them sitting in on meetings in which changes of this sort were discussed without pitching a fit. I've tried and failed to get much smaller changes approved. (E.g., a change to G/L journaling configuration in our customer billing application that would have made absolutely no change to output but would have made supporting new products MUCH easier.) I would have thought that a business large enough to have a controller (and an ex-controller!) would have someone defending the billing process. I guess you became that person...