Startups thrive on big ideas, but they often trip over the small stuff.

So when company leadership told their team to ignore tiny details, things start building toward a predictable mess.

Soon, one Customer Service Manager finds a clever way to force the company to address the problem head-on.

Read on for the full story!

Our software team wouldn’t help, so I forced their hand.

I work for a small startup company, a good company with good leadership.

However, like any startup, we are full of ideas but low on process.

So as the company got more and more customers, the cracks in the system began to show.

As we grew our client base, we needed to give small credits (typically rounding errors less than $10).

At this time, I was the Customer Service Manager.

I had filled out feature change requests in our homegrown system to give our team the ability to process these credits within our system.

These were being left ignored by other teams, which made this Customer Service Manager’s job even harder.

Those had been ignored due to the mountain of other things our internal software team was behind on.

I was told that this wasn’t a pressing concern and that, unless the client requested it, I should use a spreadsheet so they could do them all at once.

I knew if done this way that it would take a good year for us to tackle this; furthermore, our clients would be upset.

Somehow :), all the clients requested every single credit right away.

So this Customer Service Manager had to find a way to force the software team’s hand.

Que in our team putting in a ticket for every single credit request the day of to get processed ASAP.

We only had one billing software guy who could handle it (nice guy BTW).

Due to his title and my knowing the industry, this guy makes 200k+ annually, so daily he would have to process $2–$5 credits manually.

Remember that he and his team had nothing in the system to do this, so when I say manually, this involves him coding each one.

That’s when a resolution was finally reached.

It didn’t take long for a process/button that we could click to credit on our side.

Some of the people I still hired work there (I’ve moved teams since I have been promoted a couple of times), and we were just joking about it earlier this week.

Brings a smile to my face every time I think about it.

Not only due to “Malicious Compliance,” but more importantly, I do like the company, and I figured this was the most effective way of forcing a spotlight on something that needed to change.

This employee knew something needed to change and had a foolproof plan to make it happen.

Inconvenience speaks louder than words, clearly.

This user approves of this brand of malicious compliance.

Once the right person got annoyed, the fix came right away! Who knew?

You know what they say: the squeaky wheel gets the grease!

If you enjoyed that story, read this one about a mom who was forced to bring her three kids with her to apply for government benefits, but ended up getting the job of her dreams.