Hi! The current UI design isn't the best at illustrating how exactly production chains work. The two issues I've personally ran most often into were:
1) Assigning new roles while forgetting that 'adding' a role causes the 'removal' of an equal number of peasants
1.1) ^This can quickly lead to running out of food. If you have no food, well... No bueno.
2) Assigning more roles sounds more good, but if you can't afford the necessary production chain material (fur most often was an issue for me), then all the extra people just slow the process down or halt it completely.
Try and see if either of these could've been the issue!
Also, thanks for the kind words! This has been a massive passion project for us for almost a whole year now!