Lately I’ve been studying the e book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. An idea he talked about within the e book round 1% enhancements on daily basis compound into huge change. It jogged my memory of after I first grew to become a product supervisor at Dyn, one among my greatest takeaways wasn’t solely about launching huge options or redesigning main flows. It was one thing a lot smaller, but surprisingly impactful: the worth of preserving a working checklist of small enhancements.
Dyn’s product had been round for practically a decade by the point I joined the product group. 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 incorrect place. An inventory 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 high 10 small annoyances. Then I requested our gross sales engineers and help reps so as to add their very own. These weren’t the varieties of points that will ever make it onto a standard product roadmap. However they had been friction factors our prospects hit again 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 authentic checklist. 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 had been monitoring and what number of had been monitoring. The factitious limitations didn’t make sense. Customers spent minutes trying to find choices, wrote into help requesting workarounds, and grew annoyed with the dearth of flexibility. We redesigned the monitoring logic, shipped plenty 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 e-mail notifications. Immediately, the complaints stopped. Many of the modifications took just some hours of effort and a few took slightly further dash time, however the enchancment within the buyer expertise was huge.
Small fixes like these hardly ever 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 identical bug, that point provides up rapidly. If a buyer has to put in writing into help each time to workaround a platform bug or limitation, that’s time that buyer and your group 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 help instruments allow you to simply tag and categorize points. For those who discover the identical query arising 50 instances in 1 / 4, that’s a transparent sign to analyze. In case your help engineer is feeling ache with always 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 group 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 prospects and your group.
And who owns this checklist? The product supervisor finally. However it solely works should you 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 arms soiled and within the combine, really feel that challenge your self. Some fixes take 5 minutes, some would possibly take slightly extra effort. But when nobody surfaces them, they sit in silence, degrading the expertise.
It additionally exhibits that your group cares. It sends a sign to your prospects that you simply’re listening. That you simply’re sweating the small print. That you simply’re not too huge 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 could not get a press launch. However their ROI exhibits 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 checklist?
