This layoff (and the previous one) isn’t the end of the world. In their journey of finding the right product market fit, Shohoz (and many others) will certainly go through more of this. But it makes it very difficult to hire/retain resources when you call your terminated employees “underperforming and temporary” in a national newspaper interview. That’s just piss-poor leadership. The ‘right’ thing to do is to help them through this difficult transition by providing access to resume/career advice, reaching out to all of your industry colleagues to see if there is any vacancy you can help fill, and calling the incident “unfortunate and inevitable” instead of pissing on people who have served your vision for years. And oh, I hope you realize that it makes you look really bad for hiring 50+ “underperforming” resources in a single vertical if it were really true.
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I was just thinking how the CXO’s believe that Truck Hailing service (which they themselves launched) is “non-core and not synergistic to our consumer verticals” after a year of launch, but also believe that the new Health & Education platforms are synergistic. Ya’ll really think that your ticket audience is going to buy English eBooks for 1250 a year?
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What are you guys thinking? Your core service was/is ticketing where you have a strong foothold and a great lock-in mechanism. Why didn’t you ever productize it and go into more ticket verticals? Why didn’t movie tickets or concert tickets ever become a thing? Why not better transport solutions for the city-buses? Why haven’t you gone to the Jatri/Shuttle market yet? Because that’s literally your only core specialty!
But no, micro-loans for salaried individuals, disguised as fintech, is a core service now? Wut. There are 60+ Banks in the country who think this market isn’t viable.
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Why is there so much secrecy around the layoff count? How can transparency hurt here?
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Last March, I sent a list of 18 new UX Problems with Shohoz’s re-launched UX. I was a big fan of the food service, but it had turned un-usable after the update. They informed me that I should clear the cache and restart the phone. But more importantly, almost none of those issues were fixed (I kept checking for a month). Which is just poor product design & lifecycle management.
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That unnecessary loading icon everywhere is cancer. But more importantly, you guys have a 6 step (very complicated) process for your Health Feature onboarding. Its counter-intuitive and probably the only solution in the market that is so complicated. You guys are trying to solve issues for people who require access to doctors. That’s marginal people who have no idea what they are supposed to do when you ask them to turn your app into a “Protected App” before they have even availed the service. There is a set of words that describes it best – “horrible UX”.
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Bonus: Who thought of naming it “shohoz” instead of “Shohoj”? Because that’s how it is pronounced!
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Reference: https://www.tbsnews.net/economy/shohoz-laying-ride-sharing-food-delivery-teams-316870