Lately I’ve been studying the guide “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. An idea he talked about within the guide round 1% enhancements daily compound into large change. It jogged my memory of after I first grew to become a product supervisor at Dyn, one in all 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 maintaining a operating record of small enhancements.
Dyn’s product had been round for almost a decade by the point I joined the product staff. 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 had been the small issues. A button within the fallacious place. A listing that wasn’t sorted alphabetically. Complicated wording. Sudden conduct behind the scenes when sure choices had been chosen. Delicate 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 assist reps so as to add their very own. These weren’t the varieties of points that may ever make it onto a conventional product roadmap. However they had been friction factors our prospects hit time and again. Each dash, after 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 12 months, we resolved the vast majority of that authentic record. Prospects 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 characteristic the place we mechanically assigned information facilities to observe from to confirm the well being of endpoints . Prospects needed 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 assist requesting workarounds, and grew annoyed with the dearth of flexibility. We redesigned the monitoring logic, shipped various minor UX adjustments 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 adjustments took just some hours of effort and a few took slightly further dash time, however the enchancment within the buyer expertise was large.
Small fixes like these hardly ever get prioritized as a result of they don’t include executive-level buzz or end in one other gong hit. However they’re extremely necessary. 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 put in writing into assist each time to workaround a platform bug or limitation, that’s time that buyer and your staff 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 technique to measure ROI. Trendy assist instruments allow you to simply tag and categorize points. In case you discover the identical query developing 50 occasions in 1 / 4, that’s a transparent sign to research. In case your assist engineer is feeling ache with consistently 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 staff 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 record. Your paper cuts. The small however persistent points that frustrate customers and decelerate your prospects and your staff.
And who owns this record? The product supervisor in the end. 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 fingers soiled and within the combine, really feel that concern 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 reveals that your staff cares. It sends a sign to your prospects that you just’re listening. That you simply’re sweating the main points. 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 necessary. 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 reveals up in buyer satisfaction, retention, and inside effectivity. Over time, they compound into one thing a lot greater than the sum of their components.
So what’s in your record?