Not too long ago I’ve been studying the ebook “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. An idea he talked about within the ebook round 1% enhancements day-after-day compound into huge change. It jogged my memory of after I first turned a product supervisor at Dyn, certainly one of my largest takeaways wasn’t solely about launching large options or redesigning main flows. It was one thing a lot smaller, but surprisingly impactful: the worth of conserving a operating record of small enhancements.
Dyn’s product had been round for practically a decade by the point I joined the product workforce. As somebody who had spent years in buyer assist and gross sales engineering, I knew the place all of the ache factors lived. These weren’t dramatic, headline-grabbing bugs. They have been the small issues. A button within the unsuitable place. An inventory that wasn’t sorted alphabetically. Complicated wording. Surprising conduct behind the scenes when sure choices have been chosen. Refined UX inconsistencies that wore on customers over time.
So I began a listing. My high 10 small annoyances. Then I requested our gross sales engineers and assist reps so as to add their very own. These weren’t the varieties of points that might ever make it onto a conventional product roadmap. However they have been friction factors our prospects hit time and again. Each dash, once we had a little bit of room, we’d pull one or two of these things into our backlog and repair them.
It didn’t take lengthy to see outcomes. Within the first 12 months, we resolved nearly all of that unique record. Clients observed. Our Buyer Advisory Board observed. The expertise improved with none flashy launches. The product simply felt higher.
One instance stands out. We had a function the place we robotically assigned knowledge facilities to observe from to confirm the well being of endpoints . Clients wished extra freedom to pick which datacenters have been monitoring and what number of have been monitoring. The synthetic limitations didn’t make sense. Customers spent minutes attempting to find choices, wrote into assist requesting workarounds, and grew pissed off with the dearth of flexibility. We redesigned the monitoring logic, shipped 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. Many of the modifications took only a few hours of effort and a few took a bit further dash time, however the enchancment within the buyer expertise was huge.
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 cut back product friction. They cut back churn. They save time. They increase inside effectivity. If a gross sales engineer is spending 20 minutes on each implementation working across the similar bug, that point provides up rapidly. If a buyer has to write down into assist 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 perhaps even days over the 12 months.
Help tickets are one other nice solution to measure ROI. Trendy assist instruments allow you to simply tag and categorize points. When you discover the identical query developing 50 instances in 1 / 4, that’s a transparent sign to analyze. In case your assist engineer is feeling ache with continuously responding to a selected bug, then prospects 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 type of issues that get talked about in board conferences. The second is your annoyance record. Your paper cuts. The small however persistent points that frustrate customers and decelerate your prospects and your workforce.
And who owns this record? The product supervisor finally. But it surely solely works if you happen to construct a suggestions loop with assist, gross sales, onboarding, and engineering so that you perceive each nuance of your product and the way it’s getting used. You need to get your arms soiled and within the combine, really feel that difficulty your self. Some fixes take 5 minutes, some may take a bit extra effort. But when nobody surfaces them, they sit in silence, degrading the expertise.
It additionally reveals that your workforce cares. It sends a sign to your prospects that you just’re listening. That you just’re sweating the small print. That you just’re not too large 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 appears 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 suggest.
Small enhancements could not get a press launch. However their ROI reveals up in buyer satisfaction, retention, and inside effectivity. Over time, they compound into one thing a lot larger than the sum of their components.
So what’s in your record?
