Recently I have been reading the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. A concept he mentioned in the book around 1% improvements every day compound into massive change. It reminded me of when I first became a product manager at Dyn, one of my biggest takeaways wasn’t only about launching big features or redesigning major flows. It was something much smaller, yet surprisingly impactful: the value of keeping a running list of small improvements.
Dyn’s product had been around for nearly a decade by the time I joined the product team. As someone who had spent years in customer support and sales engineering, I knew where all the pain points lived. These weren’t dramatic, headline-grabbing bugs. They were the small things. A button in the wrong place. A list that wasn’t sorted alphabetically. Confusing wording. Unexpected behavior behind the scenes when certain options were selected. Subtle UX inconsistencies that wore on users over time.
So I started a list. My top 10 small annoyances. Then I asked our sales engineers and support reps to add their own. These weren’t the types of issues that would ever make it onto a traditional product roadmap. But they were friction points our customers hit over and over again. Every sprint, when we had a bit of room, we’d pull one or two of these items into our backlog and fix them.
It didn’t take long to see results. In the first year, we resolved the majority of that original list. Customers noticed. Our Customer Advisory Board noticed. The experience improved without any flashy launches. The product just felt better.
One example stands out. We had a feature where we automatically assigned data centers to monitor from to verify the health of endpoints . Customers wanted more freedom to select which datacenters were monitoring and how many were monitoring. The artificial limitations didn’t make sense. Users spent minutes hunting for options, wrote into support requesting workarounds, and grew frustrated with the lack of flexibility. We redesigned the monitoring logic, shipped a number of minor UX changes to make the process easier to use,, tweaked documentation wording, and rewrote even the sentence or two used in email notifications. Instantly, the complaints stopped. Most of the changes took just a few hours of effort and some took a little extra sprint time, but the improvement in the customer experience was massive.
Small fixes like these rarely get prioritized because they don’t come with executive-level buzz or result in another gong hit. But they’re incredibly important. They reduce product friction. They reduce churn. They save time. They boost internal efficiency. If a sales engineer is spending 20 minutes on every implementation working around the same bug, that time adds up quickly. If a customer has to write into support every time to workaround a platform bug or limitation, that is time that customer and your team will never get back. Fix it once and that time compounds into many hours or maybe even days over the year.
Support tickets are another great way to measure ROI. Modern support tools let you easily tag and categorize issues. If you notice the same question coming up 50 times in a quarter, that’s a clear signal to investigate. If your support engineer is feeling pain with constantly responding to a particular bug, then customers are feeling that even more. Little issues, left unfixed, compound over time into major friction.
So, here’s my pitch: Every product team should have two roadmaps. The first is your big-ticket roadmap – new features, market-moving releases, the kind of things that get mentioned in board meetings. The second is your annoyance list. Your paper cuts. The small but persistent issues that frustrate users and slow down your customers and your team.
And who owns this list? The product manager ultimately. But it only works if you build a feedback loop with support, sales, onboarding, and engineering so you understand every nuance of your product and how it is being used. You have to get your hands dirty and in the mix, feel that issue yourself. Some fixes take five minutes, some might take a little more effort. But if no one surfaces them, they sit in silence, degrading the experience.
It also shows that your team cares. It sends a signal to your customers that you’re listening. That you’re sweating the details. That you’re not too big or too busy to improve the things that matter.
We all obsess over the initial onboarding experience. But the ongoing experience, what your product feels like on day 37 or day 10,000, is just as important. And it’s shaped by dozens of tiny moments. Get those right, and your product becomes something users trust and recommend.
Small improvements may not get a press release. But their ROI shows up in customer satisfaction, retention, and internal efficiency. Over time, they compound into something much bigger than the sum of their parts.
So what’s on your list?
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