Notes from running, and writing, an operating system for business.
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We threw out two bots so the third would stop interrupting people
Customers started hanging up on us. Not because anything was broken, exactly. Because the voice bot kept interrupting them. Someone would start asking for help, pause for half a second to gather a…
She asked for a green button and lost her whole homepage
The third time she typed make the hero section green, the entire homepage rearranged itself. The big top banner did turn green, fair enough. But the menu reshuffled. A whole section of glowing…
We stopped paying a specialist to answer the easy questions
One afternoon we flipped the order of how our chat gets answered, three times in a single sitting, and by evening the whole thing was running backwards from how everyone tells you to build it. Where…
Our company had three personalities and none of them got along
A customer told us, gently, that our team seemed to disagree with itself. That was a generous way to put it, because there was no team. There was a small group of us and a strange little problem. The…
Our assistant had one thought, and it would not let go of it
For a couple of days, our coding assistant answered every single prompt with the same complaint. Ask it to fix something, and it would fret about a small, meaningless stumble it had hit in passing.…
Our assistant went silent because it had read too much
One day our in-house assistant simply went quiet. Not crashed. Not erroring. Just silent. Someone would type a question and get back nothing at all. Behind the scenes everything looked healthy: the…
We added one heartbeat and deleted dozens of copies of it
It started with a heartbeat that came back wrong. We have a little watchman whose only job is to walk around and tap each part of the system on the shoulder and wait for a thumbs-up. For a few days,…
Click the flag, nothing happens, and a refresh fixes it
Someone clicked the little Latvian flag in the corner of our site, and nothing happened. The menu closed. The address in the bar changed. The tiny globe icon flipped its label. And every visible word…
Our backup quietly did all the work and nobody noticed
We opened a routine log one afternoon to chase down something completely unrelated, and there it was, repeating thousands of times, calm as anything. Every single time someone had chatted with our…
We hired a genius, then a doorman started doing his job
Imagine you run a busy restaurant and you have hired the most talented, expensive chef in the city. People come to the door all day. Half of them are not hungry. They just want to know if you are…
Our helper tried to do everything at once and froze solid
Picture an eager new hire on their very first morning. You ask them to tidy the storeroom. Instead of doing one shelf, then the next, they decide to pick up every single box at the same time, all at…
The day we promised twenty rooms in a house with three
One quiet morning, the replies just stopped. Somebody sent a message to our bot, and nothing came back. The machine looked alive. It hummed, it logged, it acted like it was thinking. Then, right in…
Two records for one job, and a dashboard that couldn't sit still
A reviewer pinged us with a perfectly reasonable question: why is the same piece of work showing as both moving along and completely stuck, on his screen, within the same half-minute? We looked. The…
The signal arrived instantly. Our reply took a quarter of an hour.
Someone was sitting close enough to the screen to touch it. The all-clear flashed green. Now they were waiting for our little assistant to chime in and confirm the work had gone through. Nothing.…
We wrote the instructions in the wrong place. Nobody read them.
One afternoon we stood up a small crew of digital specialists to work alongside us. One to organize, one to write, one to dig up answers. Each had its own brain, its own job. We wrote them a…
Being polite about a zero invoice broke a customer's books
Picture a bookkeeper in Riga, early in the morning, coffee going cold, trying to close out a month and unable to make it balance. Two receipts that should have been there were simply gone. Both were…
We put all our domains on one page and caught three lies
We built a little page that listed all the web addresses we look after, just to stop our staff bouncing between four different consoles and a shared spreadsheet every time someone asked the simple…
A job that belongs to everyone gets done by no one
Picture a board of job tickets on a Monday morning. One column, labelled New, with forty-one cards stacked in it like unopened mail. Three of those cards were nine days old. One of the three was a…
A Latvian invoice with one stubborn English word on it
A client opened an invoice that was meant to be fully in Latvian, and there, sitting on it like a typo in a love letter, was a single small word in English. The status label. Right next to it, the…
We taught the whole product Latvian and search went deaf
We taught the whole product to speak Latvian one afternoon. Every window title, every button, every little label that a person actually reads, all of it, suddenly fluent. It looked wonderful. Then, a…
The week every change was just called "save"
Picture a quiet afternoon. An invoice prints. It looks almost right, which is the worst kind of wrong, because it took a second glance to notice the customer's car registration sitting in the wrong…
A tireless little helper that worked all week and did nothing
One morning we opened the back-office board and found a little helper that had been the most diligent employee in the building. Over several days it had woken up, asked one question, and gone back to…
She logged in fine, then met a stranger's car instead of her own
One quiet afternoon, a ticket came in from a garage. A customer, we will call her Anna, had signed into the portal to check on her car. The sign-in went perfectly. The portal even greeted her by…
The bug nobody owned because it lived in the gap between rooms
Late one afternoon, early on, one of us hit a blank page where the product should have been. The search box was complaining about a missing connection to the thing that arranges your screen. The fix…
The whole team kept losing forty minutes to a single quiet lie
Early on, every new person who joined us lost the same forty minutes to the same ghost. They would follow our own written instructions to the letter, type in exactly the address we told them to use,…
We polished a login screen that nobody could even reach yet
Picture two people, early on, hunched over a glowing screen at an hour when sensible people are asleep. The product was a few hours old. There was no way to sign in, because there was nothing to sign…