| > [German engineers and tech workers a]re not the kind to release half-baked products and patch issues later What the article doesn't point out is that this is deeply ingrained not just among companies but among customers, too, and it's one of the many culture shocks I've seen my colleagues who move between US and EU markets experience. If a European customer (adjusting for geographical variation, Europe is pretty big and diverse) runs into some weird issue and they call tech support, there's a very good chance that you've already lost them. It doesn't matter if tech support was super helpful, remedied things right away, and the customer support experience was top notch. The perception is that if they had tech support to un-break it, someone not only cut corners, but didn't even cut them very well, and now they wasted their time, too. This isn't "just a cultural thing", it's ingrained because of how customers themselves do business, too (which makes it especially difficult to deal with in a B2B setting). The whole chain of commercial relations and norms is structured in such a way that depending on a "move fast and break things" platform is a very, very bad idea. This is one of the most frequent things I had to explain in review meetings, and it went both ways: - People who moved from US to EU markets didn't understand why customers had nothing but good words to say about customer support and then didn't renew contracts citing quality issues - People who moved from EU to US markets going nuts over product release timelines getting aggressively slashed not so much because the feature sheet was too thin but because they thought there was no way to get those features tested enough |