How can product managers prioritize small improvements in the product and measure impact
A great product experience is not just about what you can accomplish through a product. Its also about how you accomplish it in the product.
Minor things such as i) the product messaging in case of success/failure scenarios, ii) ease of getting started with a feature and iii) speed with which you can get things done in product, can have a profound impact on the user experience.
In isolation, it’s difficult to justify minor improvements when you weigh them against major feature requests or product innovations.
But as product managers we know that all these minor improvements can collectively make a significant difference in the user experience.
So, let us dive deeper into how product managers can prioritize these “minor improvements”
Why do we even need to prioritize “minor improvements”?
Let us first address the basic question of why should we spend effort polishing the rough edges and fine-tuning product communication.
Prioritizing these have the following benefits:
Creates a culture of customer obsession in the organization — Making these improvements is a great signaling mechanism. It tells the team that you care about every little detail in the end-user experience. This raises the bar for future enhancements you ship.
Minor improvements have a compounding effect — A single improvement might not amount to much. But take ten of them together and all of these accumulate to provide a better end-user experience.
Creates momentum — Shipping tiny improvements regularly helps create momentum as you see your changes going live in weeks (instead of months)
Thus, these are not as insignificant as they may seem in the first instance.
Which minor improvements to focus on?
By and large, these improvements will surface in form of customer frustrations. You will have customers mention these minor irritants during customer interviews, in support ticket or on social media.
Use these as signals (For every 1 customer vocal about an issue, there are 3 others who faced the same issue but kept quiet). Focus on fixing these customer frustrations.
Dogfooding (using the product internally) is another great way to understand the pesky irritants in your product.
Lastly, be open to suggestions from the design team on what can be improved in the product to create a better end-user experience.
Here’s how you finalize the list:
At the start of every planning cycle, work with design, support and other user facing teams to identify the list of all possible minor improvements. Focus on issues reported by customers. Prioritize the ones which can be finished within 1–2 weeks and are affecting higher number of customers.
How to measure impact of “minor improvements”?
By their very nature, its difficult to measure the impact of these changes. These improvements don’t directly move metrics.
It’s not necessary to measure the impact of each and every change. Otherwise, you will spend all your time measuring impact instead of shipping things.
If a large part of the team is aligned with the list, its a good enough validation to go ahead with those improvements.
You can also measure the impact through the number of support tickets closed or bugs fixed as a result of these improvements.
How to prioritize the relevant improvements in the development cycle ?
Once you have the prioritized list, its time to slot these for development.
Assign design, engineering and product leads for each of the prioritized minor improvement.
Empower them to reserve bandwidth in their team for these minor improvements. For example — 10% of every team member’s bandwidth in a quarter can be reserved for these minor improvements.
You can either have 1 full sprint (~2 weeks) where the entire team works dedicatedly towards these minor improvements or it could be continuous delivery (wherein each improvement is taken at a different point of time and a developer is assigned to it).
How the big companies prioritize smaller improvements?
Here’s how Facebook and Slack prioritize smaller improvements in the product.
“Countdown List” is the Facebook approach to addressing issues which don’t directly move metrics. This article by Deb Liu (former VP, Facebook) sheds light on the practice. Following are some pointers from the article.
- At Facebook, teams create a list of major customer-facing issues and work together to burn them down. These are often issues that would otherwise go ignored, because they don’t move metrics directly.
- The Countdown list is completely non-metrics driven. Instead, it’s sourced by a cross-functional team of Research, Design, Product Operations, and Product Marketing
- They gather feedback from people who use our products and surface the biggest pain points for our team to work on. This work is not done to move a specific metric, but rather to think deeply about experiences that need addressing.
- Teams self-select to own various items and sign up for Countdown as part of their roadmap for the next six months.
Slack
“Customer Love Sprints” is the slack approach towards prioritising minor improvements. This article By Zack Sultan touches upon this approach. Sharing some pointes from the article.
- Minor improvements were not getting visibility in the roadmapping process and debt was piling up.
- Decided to take two full weeks out of the regularly scheduled quarter to focus exclusively on small things — this was the “customer Love Sprints”
- Gathering inputs on items — The designer, PM and Engineers championing this pulled the proposed improvements (by going through existing feedback) into a single channel and refined it into a list of to-dos.
- Selecting projects — The chosen projects should be completed in two weeks or less and could be part of any core, user facing Slack experience. Priority was given to those projects which customers were vocal about.
- Who worked on what — People self-selected the projects they wanted to work on and teams were organically formed.
Key Steps to follow for prioritising minor improvements
Build a case with the leadership on why these improvements are crucial to the product’s long term success.
Work with design, support and other customer facing items to come up with a prioritized list of most important items — Given precedence to issues that can be solved within 2 weeks and have been raised most frequently by customers.
Measure impact through number of bugs fixed and support tickets closed.
Slot for development by assigning team leads to each of the proposed improvement. During the roadmapping process, allow the leads to reserve team bandwidth to make these changes. (You can anticipate that such changes will come every quarter and always have 10–20% bandwidth reserved for this)
Its the attention to tiny details that sets your product apart from the rest. So, don’t ignore those minor improvements and carve out time and resources for these changes.