Comment by danrocks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danrocks | Hacker News Reader

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I read it and while I appreciate the speaking up, this retro does not look nearly as good as the poster thinks it does.

First, it is written from a perspective of "I/we know better, they didn't listen to us, they're incompetent", as in here:

> We knew back then how many home sellers felt jilted, offended, etc. by this product.

Then he doesn't clarify anything about why sellers would feel this way, what does "many" mean - is it all? A significant majority? 0.3%? Quantifying this would have brought his point across better.

Then there's an assertion that they "should have taken a nuanced approach engaging with local communities" again without any justification as to why they needed to do it, with a mention to failure in new markets vs. success in markets already served by Opendoor without any context or even reason to be there. What does that even mean?

The descent into the "toxic, abusive, etc.", "meritless leaders" name-calling is poor form and takes away from the best paragraph of this, which is where the author starts hinting at some of the real problems - sellers inundated with calls - he wants to discuss.

Obviously the Zillow leadership screwed up on this, but this rant does little to illuminate why and frankly hits at some political ideology disagreement in addition to bad product design.

I came away from this post with a strong sense that I wouldn't want to work with the author.

I felt the same way and find it somewhat ironic that this guy now works at...wait for it...Facebook. You know, the world's most non-toxic, consumer-centric charity.

It's also amusing that he has this in his LinkedIn bio:

> Previously, he led design for Zillow’s newest venture, Zillow Offers—building the team and product vision of an end-to-end experience for buying, selling, financing and managing a home, all within the Zillow ecosystem.

So he takes credit for leading the design for Zillow Offers and building the team and product vision, but then posts a retrospective criticizing it all and disavowing any responsibility in the product's failure? Strange, but perhaps explains why he's a good fit for Facebook.

Yep he's likely trying to put a good face on it and rationalize away the failure. It's human nature especially when career/rep/money is on the line. I'm sure there were problems outside his control but it's highly unlikely this is an accurate and objective account of the project's history

> It's human nature

I think this is only true to an extent. In my own career, I've worked for and hired people who were honest about their roles, taking a reasonable amount of credit where appropriate while also owning the things that didn't go so well.

In tech, there's really no downside to this because the industry is pretty damn forgiving. Failure is expected, and a lot of super successful people had multiple failures under their belt before they succeeded.

It's really, really cringey to have a LinkedIn bio where you basically position yourself as the owner of a product and then elsewhere make it sound like you not only had nothing to do with said product's failure but in fact knew how to make it successful but couldn't because everyone else was flawed in some way.

I have been in the position of leading products in what turned out later to be bad directions. It does not matter if you are “in charge of a product” when management shoves bad ideas down your throat and ultimately derails any attempt to keep the train running smoothly on its tracks. Unfortunately, this is no way to address such a situation. If you have already moved on to greener pastures, consider yourself lucky and let it go.

Exceptional detective work here.

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