I’ve often wondered why some the senior development team for vBulletin suddenly left without any advance warning. In one short month, Kier Darby, Mike Sullivan, and Scott Macvicar all left Internet Brands. In that one month, it represented a significant loss of talent, senior management, and senior development of vBulletin. These three represent the brains of vBulletin. They represent the integrity of vBulletin. They represent the key development and leadership of a industry icon. They understood customer’s requirements. They understood the customer. Last but not least, this trio understood vBulletin.
These questions have been racing in my mind. Why did they leave? What possible reasons could they have left? Was it because Internet Brands (Nasdaq: INET) acquired them? Was it because of management? Was it because they no longer liked working at Jelsoft and Internet Brands? Was it because they became merely a cog in this giant machine? Or maybe rather than job enlargement and enrichment, they experienced job reduction and dissatisfaction?
Finally, that silence has been broken. It appears what we’ve suspected all along happened. I hoped this wasn’t the case, however, my own nightmare, suspicions, and fears have been confirmed.
Internet Brands meddled where they should not have. They’ve roasted, and killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It is the classic management case study in which employees leave because of management, not because of the company.
Due to poor oversight on management’s part, it’s now lead to a disaster of a product. Software bugs are at an all time high. Customer dissatisfaction is on the rise. The investment to acquire Jelsoft was made to boast Internet Brand’s portfolio. Now it’s clear that with poor oversight on management’s part, they’ve created a significant number of issues that they were not originally facing. It’s looking more and more like it was a poor investment. Thousands of hours are being thrown into manpower. Resources are being allocated towards trying to correct what was originally not broken.
Looking at this entire debacle as an external auditor, I would put in an audit report with senior management and investors that due to current management’s mishandling of this situation, and the lack of oversight on management’s part, this poses a risk to the company. This is risk that needs to be addressed and managed promptly. Controls that should be in place to manage these risks are completely inadequate, if not non-existent.
If you don’t believe me, read Scott’s recent blog entry for why he left. Assuming he doesn’t mind a reposting, here it is:
This post is part one of a few to be published over the next coming days about my current funemployment, the best place to start is the leaving from my previous employer.
I’ve a small script that I run locally to show me how many days it’s been since I left Jelsoft Enterprises (171 at posting), the reason for which I’ve more or less kept very quiet about. A tweet did recently appear in an article on The Register, oops!
A significant amount of time has passed and I’m now comfortable commenting on this without sounding terribly bitter about the whole thing.
In the summer of 2007, Internet Brands (carsdirect.com) purchased Jelsoft the company behind vBulletin. Nothing changed internally and the engineering team had very little direct contact with our now parent company, this remained for around a year. Jump forward to summer 2008 and a few members of the team were summoned to LA to give a presentation about the future of vBulletin 4.0 and the big re-write that was planned. Most of the progress since finishing 3.8 had been design plans and research. We had looked over the old product for current features and design issues, analysed customer feedback on missing features and checked the bug tracker for common issues. The end result was that the 4.0 re-write was cancelled.
A new project / general manager was installed based out of LA (development was in England) and scrum was the shiny new model that would allow us to refactor the current release of vBulletin (3.8) and have a new version chock full of features in a meager six months. I’m not going to comment too much on why there were problems, but lets just say that it didn’t quite work out that way and we’re now at 14 months and the beta process is just underway.
With creative control of the project moved to LA and out of the hands of the team that had been overseeing it for the past six years it was hard not to feel like a simple code monkey. I was no longer passionate about the product and had been that way for months. This accompanied by the change in direction of the product and priorities of the company resulted in my resignation in May just before php|tek. My final day at Jelsoft was June 19th 2009.
Since the other UK-based senior developers and I left the code quality has dropped somewhat, there are over 1000 open bugs filed, on a normal day this time last year it would be around 10. Internet Brands have also increased prices, changed the licensing model and shelved the project tools product. A lot has changed in a short period of time and I’m not sure if it was for the best.
While Scott wrote one perspective from behind the scenes, much what he has presented has merit as we have seen the end-results of those decisions. Risks are not being managed.
With any audit findings, I’d leave recommendations. Here are my recommendations.
- Get Kier back. Get Scott back. Get Mike back. Do what it takes to get them back on the team and back in control of this entire mess. They need to be placed at the forefront of this project and development should be placed back in their hands.
- Implement policies to ensure proper communications happen between customers and Internet Brands. Customers can not afford to be uncertain. With uncertainty comes doubt. With doubt comes more second thoughts on purchases. With hesitation and second thoughts on purchases, comes lack of sales.
- Internet Brand’s Human Resources needs to implement policies to ensure employees do not feel their opinions are not welcomed, nor that their jobs are being reduced. Especially in scenarios in which companies are acquired, they need to train management on how to properly incorporate outside corporate cultures with their own. With all the creative controls taken from existing developers, it’s clear that could feel they no longer have control over a product they’ve spent several years working with a labor of love, and care.
- New policies should be created on how creative control should be handled. With such a mature and competitive product vBulletin was, it was clear that this product would complement the Internet Brand’s portfolio. Clearly it should have completely complement and increase the value of Internet Brand’s however due to poor oversight on incorporating vBulletin into Internet Brand’s portfolio and the lack of understanding of vBulletin customers, we’re seeing backlash at all levels, and not just customers.
- Implement a proper open forum regarding customer policies. Clearly this pricing structure is flawed. Clearly this transition has been completely rough and mishandled. It does not favor existing customers. As the classic business saying goes, 90% of all sales comes from 10% of your customer base. Especially from a flagship and industry respected product, vBulletin’s growth was purely from word of mouth advertising. There was hardly any advertising done that significantly increased vBulletin’s market share. Furthermore, allow a period of time in which customers can comment on certain policies. Rather than denying certain policies are being implemented, garner feedback. This way both Internet Brands and customer will be satisfied. Clearly the risks of implementing new policies from senior staff were not acknowledged and ignored. To ignore such risks is unacceptable. These risks needed to be understood, addressed and managed, but clearly it was not. They clearly did not anticipate the backlash from customers.
- Good will. I can not stress enough good will enough. It was good will from the old management team from vBulletin that newer price structures came to be without much protest. It was good will that allowed the older management team to progress things at a pace we knew things would be done well. It’s clear that good will is out the door. Internet Brands needs to issue apologies to all customers. It will be tough to admit to customers, and especially shareholders that they’ve completely mishandled the situation. It will, however, generate, a step towards resolution and hopefully appease customers. Next would be to upgrade all vBulletin 3 customer’s licenses to vBulletin 4 Forum. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, however, it needs to be done. Clearly things were not communicated properly to customers, and now things needs to be corrected.
- New policies and controls are needs to be implemented on how to handle acquired projects. It’s easy to say use a waterfall or prototype approach in development. It’s also easy to say use SCRUM as an approach towards development. However, management needs to look at existing projects and see if it’s remotely possible to implement such a development approach. Clearly this backfired on Internet Brands as they attempted to implement a development method without completely understanding and managing the risks of implementing such a new development model.
- New policies also needs to be implemented to ensure customer requirement’s are met. Thus far, the feedback for the Content Management System (CMS) has been lackluster at best. The CMS has been filled with bugs, disappointment, and poor implementation. If customers requirements are not met, then customers will not use the product. It is simple as that.
Clearly there’s lots to work on. Internet Brands has inadequate controls and policies to handle the growth and risks. Due to lack of controls, it has tarnished a product respected and considered to be an industry standard. There is hope. vBulletin is at an important crossing point. The next set of decisions will ultimately determine whether vBulletin will fall by the wayside, forgotten, or reclaim it’s position as an industry standard. It starts by valuing your senior developers who have been working with a product far longer than you ever have. It starts by working with customers once more in creating an award-winning, industry respected product.
vBulletin could clearly be a significant source of income and profit, but only if Internet Brands starts understanding their customers and starts managing risks.