Values

Values are useful. thirty years as an engineering manager has been in big companies, trying to get people to do things, and I've used values one of the quickest ways to do that. It gets peoples attention; it can bring an unruly or noncommital peer to heel.

Example At A Big Company -- Google

An Example -- Groups.IO

I'm writing to recommend a good vendor, Groups.IO. They are a mailing list company. If you have a group of people that you want to to keep in touch with, they can provide basic mailing list features. The free tier is pretty reasonable, up to 100 subscribers and only basic features. Then if you need bigger lists, or fancy features, they'll upsell a premium offer.

Why not just Google Groups? I basically believe their claim that Google Groups has gone long in the tooth. It works but it's been a long time since it's gotten improvements. '

For me the main driver was that it wasn't Google. The need to create a Google ID is a pretty big barrier for some people, either for philosophical or technical reasons. Amongst the group of people I was hoping to reach, a not-small number has some trouble with their Google account before, and having to sort that out was a big barrier.

There are two things in particular that cause me to write a special post.

1. Do One Thing Well

They offer this basic mailing list service and do it really well. Their service is fast, featureful, robust. Because it's the most important thing the company does, they take it seriously and it shows.

Now they do have a bunch of higher-value things like calendars and shared databases. I confess I didn't try those, and I don't begrudge them for expanding up the stack. But you don't have to use those, and the upsell isn't too pesky.

2. The Premium Trial is Well Behaved

This is really the unique thing that motivated this post. I wasn't sure that I needed the premium service, so I signed up for a free trial. The thing that was a pleasant surprise was when the trial period ended, it fell back to the standard. The email I got from them is included below, with the key sentence highlighted in yellow.

When was the last time you saw a service do this at then end of the free trial? I can't remember one. It's great.

What's so great about this is that it sends strong signal that this company puts the user first. I can imagine the pitch from the person at the company responsible for