Not too long ago I’ve been studying the e-book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. An idea he talked about within the e-book round 1% enhancements every single day compound into large change. It jogged my memory of after I first turned a product supervisor at Dyn, one in every of my largest takeaways wasn’t solely about launching massive options or redesigning main flows. It was one thing a lot smaller, but surprisingly impactful: the worth of preserving a operating checklist of small enhancements.
Dyn’s product had been round for almost a decade by the point I joined the product workforce. As somebody who had spent years in buyer help and gross sales engineering, I knew the place all of the ache factors lived. These weren’t dramatic, headline-grabbing bugs. They had been the small issues. A button within the unsuitable place. A listing that wasn’t sorted alphabetically. Complicated wording. Sudden habits behind the scenes when sure choices had been chosen. Refined UX inconsistencies that wore on customers over time.
So I began an inventory. My prime 10 small annoyances. Then I requested our gross sales engineers and help reps so as to add their very own. These weren’t the forms of points that may ever make it onto a conventional product roadmap. However they had been friction factors our clients hit again and again. Each dash, once we had a little bit of room, we’d pull one or two of this stuff into our backlog and repair them.
It didn’t take lengthy to see outcomes. Within the first yr, we resolved the vast majority of that unique checklist. Prospects seen. Our Buyer Advisory Board seen. The expertise improved with none flashy launches. The product simply felt higher.
One instance stands out. We had a characteristic the place we mechanically assigned information facilities to observe from to confirm the well being of endpoints . Prospects wished extra freedom to pick out which datacenters had been monitoring and what number of had been monitoring. The substitute limitations didn’t make sense. Customers spent minutes looking for choices, wrote into help requesting workarounds, and grew pissed off with the shortage of flexibility. We redesigned the monitoring logic, shipped quite a lot of minor UX modifications to make the method simpler to make use of,, tweaked documentation wording, and rewrote even the sentence or two utilized in electronic mail notifications. Immediately, the complaints stopped. A lot of the modifications took only a few hours of effort and a few took a little bit additional dash time, however the enchancment within the buyer expertise was large.
Small fixes like these not often get prioritized as a result of they don’t include executive-level buzz or lead to one other gong hit. However they’re extremely essential. They scale back product friction. They scale back churn. They save time. They enhance inner effectivity. If a gross sales engineer is spending 20 minutes on each implementation working across the identical bug, that point provides up shortly. If a buyer has to jot down into help each time to workaround a platform bug or limitation, that’s time that buyer and your workforce won’t ever get again. Repair it as soon as and that point compounds into many hours or possibly even days over the yr.
Help tickets are one other nice strategy to measure ROI. Fashionable help instruments allow you to simply tag and categorize points. Should you discover the identical query arising 50 instances in 1 / 4, that’s a transparent sign to research. In case your help engineer is feeling ache with consistently responding to a specific bug, then clients are feeling that much more. Little points, left unfixed, compound over time into main friction.
So, right here’s my pitch: Each product workforce ought to have two roadmaps. The primary is your big-ticket roadmap – new options, market-moving releases, the sort of issues that get talked about in board conferences. The second is your annoyance checklist. Your paper cuts. The small however persistent points that frustrate customers and decelerate your clients and your workforce.
And who owns this checklist? The product supervisor in the end. However it solely works for those who construct a suggestions loop with help, gross sales, onboarding, and engineering so that you perceive each nuance of your product and the way it’s getting used. It’s a must to get your fingers soiled and within the combine, really feel that difficulty your self. Some fixes take 5 minutes, some would possibly take a little bit extra effort. But when nobody surfaces them, they sit in silence, degrading the expertise.
It additionally exhibits that your workforce cares. It sends a sign to your clients that you just’re listening. That you just’re sweating the small print. That you just’re not too massive or too busy to enhance the issues that matter.
All of us obsess over the preliminary onboarding expertise. However the ongoing expertise, what your product seems like on day 37 or day 10,000, is simply as essential. And it’s formed by dozens of tiny moments. Get these proper, and your product turns into one thing customers belief and advocate.
Small enhancements might not get a press launch. However their ROI exhibits up in buyer satisfaction, retention, and inner effectivity. Over time, they compound into one thing a lot greater than the sum of their components.
So what’s in your checklist?
