Field notes / September 2019 · Family Link · Reliability
I asked Google to stop shipping
Growth was outrunning reliability, and I was about to argue that a growth org should stop shipping. I wasn’t sure I was right.
Live question
When does continuing to ship become the irresponsible choice?
By 2019, Family Link is growing about five times over, year on year, and I'm about to argue that we should stop.
Not slow down. Stop shipping features for three quarters and spend them making the product dependable instead. I believe the case; saying it is harder. The roadmap has sponsors, and every feature I'd pause has someone who fought for it. Reliability work also sounds responsible and shows up as nothing: no launch, no demo, no headline. The easy read on me in that room is the person slowing everyone down.
What I keep coming back to is simpler than the politics.
Parents don't experience our architecture. They experience one product.
When bedtime locking fails, Family Link failed. When location doesn't reassure at the moment a parent opens it, Family Link failed. And the failures don't announce themselves as one problem. A setup flow breaks here, a policy applies inconsistently there, a parent relies on something that doesn't work; support sees it, the store reviews show it, the engineers feel it, but the signals stay scattered enough that we can still treat them as separate. We were running blind, and we learned about the worst of it too late.
So before I argue for anything, I do the unglamorous part: I turn the scattered complaints into one failure map the org can't argue with. Then I take the proposal into the leadership reviews, and it is uncomfortable to say out loud — pause new features and make reliability the roadmap. Not as a value everyone nods at. As a real operating change: name the top journeys, set targets, put someone on duty, instrument the failures we currently learn about from angry reviews, write postmortems that change behavior, and hold the launch bar until the product earns forward motion again.
I don't know yet whether I'm right. If I am, the product comes out stronger and parents stop doubting it. If I'm wrong, I've spent three quarters and a lot of goodwill on operational neatness, and I've been the one who told a growing team to slow down. The risk is real.
But I think the parents are telling us the truth before our roadmap is.