I agree with the other answers, regarding "leadership", and meaningful ways of taking responsibility. And kudos for having the guts to write that down, and open yourself up for feedback of any sort.
Beyond that, what I find refreshing:
Several people across different teams felt that those numbers didn’t match their experience with meta and community interactions. Yaakov Ellis ... took the initiative to do a deeper dive into the data and discovered that we were operating under false assumptions after all. Digging into it, while there are about 200-300 Meta users that are responsible for most of the posts, the vast majority of our curators (the folks that edit and flag posts and perform reviews) are avid readers of our Meta sites. ... All of these things together made it obvious it was time to revisit my decision around how we interact with our Meta sites.
Please allow me a short moment of "well, we told you so".
On the other hand: I very much appreciate that Sara wrote exactly that sentence down, and that they followed suit by
- getting that message, publicly, on the blog and
- putting up this question on MSE, to give the community a chance to give feedback
I’m grateful that people followed their guts here and challenged our assumptions. If they hadn’t, we might still be in the same place, or making other decisions that go against the best interests of our users.
Hear hear.
My quick summary: it is really good to know that both side now share one common understanding regarding: MSE, MSO, the users in those communities have "decisive" influence on the "main" communities!
When the company seriously interacts with "us", that is "good" for the company. To a degree that affects their long term business results.told you so
Finally: a very neat idea to directly link from the blog post to the question here. This approach of pointing "back" to MSE might send people here who never noticed this place before. Making this place stronger, which as outlined, will help the company!