Resolving Critical Tape Failures in Post-Launch

🧩 Problem

Multiple customer sites began reporting systematic tape failures that interfered with device operation. These failures posed a high risk to both patient trust and business credibility, with escalating calls for a product recall — a situation that could severely impact strategic direction and partnerships.

🧠 Discovery & Research

As the primary point of contact with the customer, I:

• Coordinated with FAEs to gather firsthand user complaints and failure logs.

• Led internal analysis to differentiate hardware (HW), firmware (FW), and BLE-related failures.

• Worked with the engineering team to reproduce edge cases and validate against app behavior and backend telemetry.

• Identified lack of backend visibility as a key gap, especially for understanding device health at scale.

🔧 Key Decisions & Tradeoffs

• Introduced a new tape association flow in the app to log device state more robustly.

• Added backend status capture and logging, despite short-term engineering bandwidth constraints.

• Prioritized a “Force Active” override mechanism to allow continued use during similar future failures — a strategic fail-safe for critical use cases.

• Balanced short-term patching with long-term platform improvements to mitigate risk without slowing product roadmaps.

🚀 Execution & Delivery

• Identified the most failure-prone tape batch, enabling targeted interventions.

• Conducted multi-functional triage with TRK teams (Manufacturing, HW, SW, FW) to isolate issues.

• Evaluated customer BLE/network conditions to rule out environmental noise.

• Scoped and shipped app updates with advanced logging and diagnostics for future debugging.

• Updated the platform to begin tracking all failed tape data for KPI and quality analysis.

📈 Outcomes & Impact

• Prevented a product recall by addressing root cause within weeks.

• Released new app version with critical backend enhancements.

• Enabled future risk analysis and trending by capturing structured tape failure data.

• Maintained customer trust during a high-risk period with transparency and speed.

💡 Reflection

• What I’d Do Differently:I would have initiated proactive health monitoring of connected tapes much earlier, using real-time alerts on backend failure patterns to preempt support escalations.

🛠 Tools & Frameworks

• Root cause analysis (5 Whys)

• Emergency triage workflows

• App telemetry instrumentation

• Internal Power BI dashboards