“Woah, shit's broke.”
That was the subject line.
The body was not much more polished: “I cant take my classes!!!!?!?!?!”
I had joined TRX to lead the digital side of the business. The official title was General Manager and Chief Digital Officer. The immediate problem was that I had opened the product as a customer and could not take a class.
The screen gave me the standard apology in a big red-bordered box: something went wrong. If I was the application owner, I should check the logs. There was no useful customer recovery path and no mystery about whether the class had loaded.
Fair enough. I was one of the application owners now.
I sent the note directly into the product alert system. Two minutes later I sent another one with the subject “stuff is still broke help.” The entire message was: “bugs the scare jess.”
It was not a carefully written incident report. It did get the point across.
I had already tested the TRX product as part of the interview process, when the product test became a real workout. Now the test was different. I was no longer deciding whether I liked the experience. I was responsible for helping make it work.
There would be longer conversations about subscriptions, programming, ecommerce, retention, and how digital fit with a company known for physical training equipment. None of those conversations mattered much if somebody clicked into a class and got an error.
So I opened the product, broke the flow, sent the alert, and tried it again.
Still broke. Help.