The past few days have made it painfully clear just how unprepared the team behind the Spark Driver app really is. Such a mess would be understandable for a small bootstrapped startup, but this is the largest retailer in the world™ we're talking about. 

Why should we care? I mean, us drivers are just independent contractors... why does it matter how the app does? Wally-world most likely lost tens of millions of dollars in canceled orders over the past three days (Dec 23, 2022). Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, that's millions in unearned driver revenue. Beyond that, though, think of how many customers lost faith in the platform. How many customers will now pick alternative platforms going forward? Lastly, with Spark in the red, drivers can undoubtedly expect less incentives. They're already cutting down on attractive quantity-based rewards... with a seemingly endless supply of eager drivers, there's few reasons to not get increasingly stingy with rewards. We're expendable, after all. 

Moving forward, there are critical changes that need to be made to prevent yet another failure. First and foremost is the severe lack of communication between the development team and the drivers. We've all seen the "please provide feedback" emails and pop-ups. There's at least some interest in feedback -- whether or not it is utilized or even read is a different story. 

Two weeks ago, you could have asked any driver how they felt about the imminent holiday rush; how prepared they believed the platform was. Chances are, they would've had a lot to say about every system that we saw fail: from unprepared store staff to the same app bugs we've had for months. This was entirely preventable and predictable. What do we need to stop a repeat? 

 

Spark Team Representatives

So many other companies have support and development staff directly engaging with their unofficial subreddit and Discord communities. I haven't found a single example where an official Spark team member dare say a word there. 

 

Driver Community Advocates

On the other hand, the Driver community needs to be heard. We can't depend on Spark staff to see every post or issue. Spark needs to select a few engaged individuals to be the voice of the community. They should be expected to wade through the muck of new posts (across all platforms) and have the best understanding of trends and issues as they're immediately reported. These individuals would be the direct line of communication between the Spark App Product Management team and the driver community. 

 

Development Transparency

Beyond collecting feedback, the driver community needs to actually know they are heard. Why is it most single-dev freeware projects have better feature planning transparency than a billion dollar corporation? This isn't Google-X we're talking about -- no one is stealing ideas from a basic grocery delivery app. Put it all out there. There are things we've been requesting for months: obvious things that would take an intern half an hour to implement. At least show us we're not wasting time with feedback. 

 

Critical App Improvements

Across all the Spark Driver communities, requests boil down to a few basic features:

• Fix Full-Page Refresh Bug (New Offers, Forced Scroll to Top)
• Offer List Sorting (Start Time, Amount, $/mi, Item Count) 
• Offer List Filtering (Store, Offer Type, Bulk)
• Contact Customer Fix (Phone # is Wrong Customer)

If even a fraction of these requests could be fulfilled, we will never see a platform failure like we did this week again.