“Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it.
The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%.
Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %, so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change.
So I was promptly explained that we didn’t care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.
[…] by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.”
– @Javi | Goblin.Band
“oh, WordPress.com development is mostly open source, so if I’m too speciffic, anyone could go to github and find the single PR where that change was shipped, etc.
I don’t want to put anyone under the spotlight, specially engineers who were just doing what they were told to do.
Also, it’s just one example of many, the only thing interesting about that particular example is that I complained about it and I got told about the ‘free user value’ calculation.
But well, on broad strokes, it was about making it harder to tell which features were paid and which ones were free during onboarding.
So a lot of people who wanted to create an account to host a free blog, found themselves being redirected to the shopping cart and asked to pay for things they have selected thinking they were free.”
– @Javi | Goblin.Band
| #Wordpress #OpenSource