Opinion: I once sold a company to BlackBerry – I saw its decline coming

Marc Gingras is a Canadian entrepreneur and angel investor. He is the CEO and co-founder of Bloks, an AI-powered productivity assistant.

Ever since word broke that a movie adaptation of the rise and fall of BlackBerry BB-T was in the works, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about my time at the company. Monday’s news that executives were considering a breakup of BlackBerry, a potentially ignominious end to one of Canada’s greatest success stories, made me think back even more.

A few memories surfaced that, looking back, I think were indicative of BlackBerry’s impending demise, and I share them not to point fingers, but to hopefully illustrate why hubris and the inability to change mindsets can sometimes be the kiss of death, even for once-great companies.

In 2011, a few months after BlackBerry acquired Tungle, a calendar service I founded, I was asked to lead product management for the wider company’s personal information manager, which comprised the smartphone’s core applications – e-mail, calendar, contacts, tasks and memos.

At the time, the software division was siloed. Product management for all applications reported to one senior vice-president (SVP) and the R&D team reported to another.

This created an adversarial environment between the two teams. The product team naturally wanted to deliver more features to its customers, while the R&D team wanted to make sure they could deliver on their promises and do everything in their power to reduce the scope of what features were needed, which led to a lot of compromises.

I was willing to accept the new role under one condition: both product and R&D for the PIM would be grouped together and report to me.

Obviously, BlackBerry wasn’t about to embark on a massive reorganization, so it was decided that I would report directly to the SVP of product and indirectly to the SVP of R&D.

The SVP of product was all for this approach, but the SVP of R&D had reservations.

“Why do you want to change the way we have been doing things?” he asked.

“Because we are failing,” I replied.

“What do you mean?” he quickly jumped in. “We’ve managed to ship our releases on time. They’re good-quality. We’ve had to make many changes to our processes over the years, but we finally have things under control.”

I was confused by his response. It was as if we weren’t fighting in the same war.

“But Apple is kicking our butt,” I replied. “We’re failing our users. We’re failing in the market.”

He didn’t see things that way.

For the head of R&D, his measure of success was whether or not products were being delivered on time. For me, it was whether or not we were delivering a product that delighted our customers (who were already flocking to the iPhone).

It was one of the first signs that not everyone was on the same page, and it was not the last.

Our first mission was to ship a new phone with a new operating system that could deliver an experience like Apple’s iOS, allowing users to navigate using fingers as opposed to keystrokes.

Everyone was excited. But to me, something felt wrong. The new BlackBerrys looked like iPhone copycats, with the keyboard either gutted or sidelined.

Our diehard users had refused to switch to the iPhone, partly because they loved the experience of using a physical keyboard. Doubling down on the features that made BlackBerry a success in the first place would have helped secure our diehard user base – at least for the time being.

Instead, we alienated them.

What happened afterward could be studied in many MBA classes:

Over the years, BlackBerry had a litany of features built specifically for it. But to succeed in this next phase of touchscreen phones, it was believed that we’d have to deliver most of these capabilities on the new device and OS at launch.

Imagine cramming 10 years of development into an unproven phone OS and developing brand-new UX frameworks in only a few months. It led us to miss deadlines, build capabilities that weren’t necessary and ignore opportunities.

I still believe that BlackBerry could have turned the ship around and remained a dominant smartphone player. But old habits die hard, and instead of reinventing itself, BlackBerry continued to bleed out over the next few years and ultimately left the smartphone industry.