Social impact and Product reaction to unrelated events: part 1
Tags: product
Published: 2022-04-20 05:45:39

This text is not some ground truth by me or even my firm opinion; rather I’m using this opportunity to reflect on the odds and possibilities.

In my not so long life among IT products I closely encountered two events that affected greatly the products they were not directly related to.

Let’s start with the first one: disasters and state mournings. This story is more about risk management, though the risk there was highly improbable. So, I was working in Yandex Ether — a video broadcasting service that also had its own content production. The service no longer exists now, so I can’t provide any links and you’ll have to simply believe my story.

We had our own exclusive New Year show with jokes, songs and other kinds of simple and light entertainment to accompany celebration. It’s also important to know that my country has 11 time zones, so technically we had 11 overlapping shows starting one after another with 1 hour delay.

All went well until on 31st of December around lunch time we heard the news about a big explosion in one of the eastern cities, right in an apartment building, where people died, some survived but became homeless. A big tragedy. Country-wide news (heated by terrorist act suspicions, you know our era). Talks about state mourning (if announced, all entertainment programs must be cancelled). The risk I, as a manager of this broadcast, had never anticipated and planned for.

So what we had at the moment:
* the show had already started in some regions by the moment we heard the news
* the show’s script appeared to contain a joke about an explosion (OUCH)
* we might have to switch the previously received recording of the presidential address to an updated one

Should we stop the running shows and cancel those that wait for their start hour? Should we continue with the eastern regions and cancel the later ones? What’s with the commitments about the ads in the show? What to do with previously published promos?
What to do with the presidential address? It has to be played exactly at the local midnight, it contains the countdown to midnight, so there’s no delaying or placing it later in the show. Do we erase it completely? Do we play the old version in earlier time zones until we receive an updated one (we weren’t even sure whether an updated version will be recorded and distributed)?
How would you approach this crisis?

Trying to rise up a little above the concrete technical issues of replacing parts of the recording and rescheduling everything, I ask myself the following question: is the product obliged to react to external events or not?

On the one hand, everybody except those who had directly suffered the impact will continue celebrating, and that’s our audience. We have our ad commitments. We have our business to support. And we don’t have much resource to make drastic changes quickly, remember, it’s new year’s night.

On the other hand, that’s social responsibility — to support the victims if only by silence, to respect the mourning, to not wear a mask of fake normalcy.

What would you do?
Well, that’s what we did:
* we played whatever had already started playing and switched to an updated address version as soon as we had it (in time for the most part of the country to see the new one)
* we hacked our own show recording to mute the very seconds with the unfortunate joke, so the audience thought their internet connection flapped and they heard nothing for 2-3 seconds
we got ready to turn everything off the moment the mourning is announced (in fact it wasn’t until after a couple of days)

So the product didn’t change it’s course but slightly adapted the content. Did we have to do more?
Next time I’ll write about a more current tragedy and how products react to that.