@MatthewFitbit
Do you want to know something? I have remained subscribed to email replies on this thread for one reason only - professional interest. as soon as this change was implemented, as a customer it was the straw that broke the camel's back for me - the final letdown in a series of letdowns that meant I made the decision then and there that I'm on my last Fitbit and I will be moving as soon as this device dies - or possibly sooner, given it's my birthday soon which means I might treat myself to a new device. Anyway.. given I made the decision immediately to move away, I stayed subscribed only out of fascination for how this panned out, because as I said in my first response, thiis is my area. This is what I do for a living. Staying subscribed means I've had probably 500 emails on this subject in the last week or so. Because of course there have been a lot more emails than there are replies on this thread. Because you've been very active in monitoring and zapping any reply you don't like (wonder if this will be one of them?) It was obvious early on that Fitbit was actively monitoring though as there have been at least a couple of post-implementation fixes put in. When this change first went live, we could still see our groups list at the bottom of our main fitbit.com profile page, in the same area as we can now see our friends listed. Hence WendyB's original replies with screenshots apparently showing people how to access their groups. The groups were listed, but when you clicked on them you just got the same generic page not found message. Clearly THIS was a mess-up in the implementation - you'd failed to include in scope the little element of tidy-up that would've had those links to groups removed. So once it was highlighted on this thread, I think it was a few days at most before a fix was released and now those groups aren't showing.
Seems (more positively) you also responded with a better screen than a generic 'you're lost on the trail' (or whatever the 'page not found' message was) - I've seen it mentioned on here but not seen evidence of it myself.
My point is - actively monitoring this thread, and actively taking steps to implement the changes that Fitbit deems necessary.
This is now a case study for me in How Not To Do Digital Delivery. I'm not kidding. We've had it as a daily discussion point at work (I work in financial services, not the fitness tracker industry - but digital delivery is digital delivery). The main thing that blows everyone's minds - and remember, this is a team of people who are delivering a digital product, a team just like the teams in Fitbit who deliver this stuff - is that you've done this with no prior warning and no migration facility. You've just removed access to a whole tranche of data customers had access to one day, and now don't. Wholesale. With no warning. People's connections are permanently lost. You (and by 'you' obviously I mean 'Fitbit' rather than you personally) have willingly chosen to permanently destroy a feature thousands of people were using actively and relying on. It beggars belief, it really does. It wasn't that you broke something by accident through oversight (bad enough, but mistakes happen even in the most controlled environments). It wasn't that you did a planned migration, some communication in advance or similar to mitigate the impact on customers of a change you 'needed' to make. You simply chose the 'big bang' implementation approach with no comms, no change management, nothing. The impact you're seeing on this thread, I'm sure you'll agree, was the inevitable and entirely predictable one. You must have known what would happen. I'd absolutely love to be a fly on the wall in the retrospective. Will everyone be congratulating themselves on a job well done? Monitoring usage statistics to see how many people migrate over to the app groups and how many just fall quietly away? trying to learn and do better in future? Somehow, despite what you say, I doubt the latter one because this isn't the first time Fitbit has taken action like this.
The other discussion point we've had in work is that we feel Fitbit has chosen to destroy something which is core to its offering. How many people, before they got a Fitbit, saw other people get Fitbits and wondered why they're suddenly going steps crazy, getting up every hour to ensure they get their 250 steps, going out for a walk when it's raining because they haven't hit their 10,000 - or haven't beaten 'Person X' in their group against whom they benchmark themselves. And then the person gets a Fitbit themselves and understands - they're like crack. It's not the physical capability of the device, it's the psychological effect that is motivating. Why is the Fitbit more motivating than a conventional old pedometer? Accuracy, and available data is a nice interface. Those are the differences. Pedometers have been around forever, the difference here is partly the accuracy / niceness of device [build quality aside!] but mainly the data you get out of it. A big chunk of that data for a sizeable population of customers was tied up in the groups, the leaderboards, the competitive/ benchmarking element of it.
It's not as if it's some peripheral feature, it's core to the psychological 'stickiness' that has people 'addicted' to their Fitbits and keeps them coming back for more, buying new devices each time, recommending to friends, buying them for gifts, pressuring their companies to set up schemes...
I am freelance so tend to change job roles once a year or so, which means more interviews than most people. I can absolutely 100% guarantee this case study will come up in my next interview of how not to do things.
As a customer I don't think you should have removed the facility at all. As a programme manager, I can understand the combination of strategic goals, cost drivers and technical constraints that might lead you down the path of 'having' to. But you definitely didn't 'have' to do it so badly. Why on earth you didn't just give the admins some warning so they could reestablish a parallel group in the app and at least try and get 'most' people migrated across to the new way of doing things, I'll never know. It's just the kind of short sighted lack of a mitigation strategy to dampen the effects of the degradation of service that was being forced on users, that would make me ashamed to work for such a company. If I was in any way involved in this development it would sure as hell not be something to shout about on my CV!
And on another note, your comms needs drafting better. We're not stupid. When you say you 'can't restore the functionality and 'can't' migrate stuff - it's just nonsense. You can. You just choose not to, for financial reasons. Pick your words more carefully - the response to your latest update makes it clear I'm not the only person who sees this!
The Product Owner I'm currently working with said to me today - if this was mine I'd be all over it. I wonder where the Product Owner is in this situation... hiding behind the battle lines, not engaging, is what it seems.
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