Do you have a story to tell? April 27th is National Tell a Story day

Thankfully, no one has given me the ability to cause outages, but I love these types of stories. I've noticed a shift online about highly public outages–sure, some jokes about blaming the interns, but also others sharing their mishaps in solidarity. 

Back in my marketing days... two months after I got hired full time from my internship... 

My biggest, most visible whoopsie was sending the previous product release email to all 180,000 people in the marketing database... instead of the new release update to the relevant customers. AND on that same morning, sent an email in German with a typo to investors and analysts.

Unfortunately, the product release was an operational email, so it did not include an unsubscribe link. We got flooded with (understandably) upset replies, and the CEO was furious about both. (Swiss startup that immediately regretted hiring marketers in San Francisco.) 

In my defense, I was woken up by the CEO and CMO calling me repeatedly at 6am on a holiday to send this out because my colleague went MIA. 

We all learned some lessons that week!

Setting up better systems: This was a "bus factor" situation, where I was scrambling in a tool I didn't know, with a workflow that did not make any logical sense, and following the docs is how I pressed the "wrong" buttons.

Testing: We didn't have a good testing procedure, so we didn't catch this in advance.

Email hygiene: There are laws about unsubscribe links, and email templates needed to have those as standard. I take those links seriously, and it was clear many others do too. 

Urgency: This was not an emergency. The only consequence of delaying the send by a day would have been... missing the CEO's arbitrarily set deadline. The rush caused a bigger mess to clean up.

Boundaries: I didn't set them, and was just hired full time from my internship, so I didn't think I could push back. That set a precedent, and later I wound up working late at night on Christmas Eve doing a banal task with that CEO. 

I'm still close friends with the employee who went MIA, and a decade later, I still tease him about this.