Customer Support built a company-wide announcement tool

“Nobody outside the team uses it.”— Chen, Customer Support

Reason:

Officially because the existing report is a PDF of a screenshot of Headcount.xlsm. Built during an offsite instead of the thing they were asked to build.

Built by:

Chen, a product owner

Build time:

5 evenings

Built with:

Google Apps Script

Database:

Redis, but used permanently

Authentication:

the threat model is "why would anyone attack us?"

Deployment:

deployed straight to production on a Friday, no staging

Responsible:

Sofia, whose laptop contains the only working environment

Documentation:

a Loom video whose owner account has been deleted

Security situation:

MFA exists for the admin account, which everybody shares

Future disaster:

It will email customer data to a market you do not operate in.

Age: 170 days · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · last meaningful change 170 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 342 users, 30% chance of becoming business critical, alive 8x longer than intended.