A week or so ago Planetscale made a bunch of changes to both their product offering and the staff at the company. Specifically they got rid of their "free forever" hobby tier and laid off a portion of their workforce that included some high profile folks. These changes were announced to the public by the company in the form of a blog post titled Planetscale Forever.
In the wake of this announcement there was a lot of negative sentiment from people stemming both from the loss of a product category that they were using and seeing people they liked and respected losing their jobs. In some cases this sentiment was rebutted by people making good arguments from a business perspective of why this is a necssicarly move for the company and -- to some degree -- dismissing the folks that weren't happy with the company's decision.
Seeing these exchanges got me thinking about an underappreciated part of communicating negative news. Specifically that delivering negative news -- no matter how justified -- often comes down to how that news is delivered and not really what the news is itself. In this scenario the biggest mistake that Planetscale made was not taking the action itself but brushing over the leadership's responsibility and failure that lead to the situation to begin with.
When you position a product offering as the "free forever" hobby tier you are saying a lot of implicit things to your customers. Not the least of which is the work that the word forever is doing in that statement. Customers expect it to be around forever...or close enough to it. When this goes away there is a violation of trust that happens between the company and the customer that leaves a really bad taste in the customer's mouth. This is compounded by the fact that the obviously bad decisions that the company's leadership made that lead to either the creation of that tier in the first place or the situation that merits the removal of that tier went completely unacknowledged in their post. This is where the how of delivering news like this really comes into play.
If the post that announced these changes had included a clear explanation of the why behind coming to this decision and an acknowledgement of responsibility of the leadership's role in ending up here the public reception would have been very different. Everyone is human. Everyone makes mistakes and misjudges situations. Almost never is anyone harshly punished for acknowledging making a mistake and taking steps to fix that mistake. If the statement had included something along the lines of
In the wake of this announcement there was a lot of negative sentiment from people stemming both from the loss of a product category that they were using and seeing people they liked and respected losing their jobs. In some cases this sentiment was rebutted by people making good arguments from a business perspective of why this is a necssicarly move for the company and -- to some degree -- dismissing the folks that weren't happy with the company's decision.
Seeing these exchanges got me thinking about an underappreciated part of communicating negative news. Specifically that delivering negative news -- no matter how justified -- often comes down to how that news is delivered and not really what the news is itself. In this scenario the biggest mistake that Planetscale made was not taking the action itself but brushing over the leadership's responsibility and failure that lead to the situation to begin with.
When you position a product offering as the "free forever" hobby tier you are saying a lot of implicit things to your customers. Not the least of which is the work that the word forever is doing in that statement. Customers expect it to be around forever...or close enough to it. When this goes away there is a violation of trust that happens between the company and the customer that leaves a really bad taste in the customer's mouth. This is compounded by the fact that the obviously bad decisions that the company's leadership made that lead to either the creation of that tier in the first place or the situation that merits the removal of that tier went completely unacknowledged in their post. This is where the how of delivering news like this really comes into play.
If the post that announced these changes had included a clear explanation of the why behind coming to this decision and an acknowledgement of responsibility of the leadership's role in ending up here the public reception would have been very different. Everyone is human. Everyone makes mistakes and misjudges situations. Almost never is anyone harshly punished for acknowledging making a mistake and taking steps to fix that mistake. If the statement had included something along the lines of
Unfortunately we will be removing our free hobby tier after x date. When we created that tier we had intended for it to stick around for the life of the product but <insert business reason here> has shown us that this is not possible. We misjudged the viability of this product tier and the decision to remove it was a difficult one. We know you put your trust in us with your projects using this tier and we're sorry that we have violated that trust. We have to make this decision to be able to continue to operate going forward and we hope that we can earn back the trust that we have lost in the future.
the public reception to this would have been disappointment yes but a lot more understanding and honestly probably gained fans in the process.
A positive example of this is how Stripe handled announcing laying off employees. The details of the layoffs in the Stripe email is not the important part, the explanation of why is. In the post from the CEO Patrick Collison clearly explains the why behind the layoffs and specifically sites the conditions that lead to the expansion and then the changing conditions that subsequently lead to the company having to do layoffs. There is a clear implied responsibility of decision making that is communicated here.
Fundamentally both Planetscale and Stripe's announcements had the same what but they differed vastly in the how leading to different receptions by the public to the news from both companies. Always remember, no matter what news you're delivering, the how is always more important that the what.
Cheers.