A Number That's a Little Low
I count things for a living. That's the job: you take what the engineers built, you use it the way a real person would, and you write down every place where reality and the promise stop matching. My badge says Amara, and under that it says Test.
The app is called Stride. It counts your steps and tells you how you're doing. Launch is Friday. There's a party booked, with a cake.
On Monday I walked to the station and back with my phone in my pocket, the way anybody would, and Stride said 3,140 steps. My old phone, in the other pocket, said 6,280. I assumed I'd made some technical mistake: wrong pocket, wrong setting, something. So I did it again on Tuesday, in the long hallway by the elevators, counting out loud like a child. Four hundred steps. Stride said 198.
It isn't broken in an interesting way. It's broken in the most boring way there is: it counts one step for every two.
I wrote it up. I attached the video. I used the word “risk” three times, because that's the word that gets you a meeting.
The meeting was Wednesday at eight. Six people, three of them on a screen from Berlin.
“How many users would actually notice?” someone asked.
“All of them,” I said. “Eventually.”
“But the impact is what, a number that's a little low?”
That's the sentence I keep hearing. A number that's a little low. Stride isn't a game. Half our test users are over sixty. If a man with a bad heart is told he's walked four thousand steps when he's really walked eight thousand, he doesn't think, ah, the sensor is out by a factor of two. He thinks he's getting worse. Surely somebody in a room of six people can see that.
Nobody was angry with me. That was the strange part. Everyone agreed it was bad. They also had a room booked, a cake ordered, and a press email sitting in a queue, and those things were real in a way my video wasn't.
At the end the head of product asked me what I actually wanted.
“Two weeks,” I said. “Or launch on Friday with the step counter switched off, and keep the cake.”
We launch in two weeks.