1% improvements.

Adopting a 1% improvement mindset

Push for micro improvements to boost team velocity and morale

It’s natural to want to fill your team’s roadmap with large projects. You want to move the needle and get your leadership team excited.

Nicolas and I did exactly that. We created a compelling vision with a roadmap of 2–3 big projects for the year. In a perfect world, we would have been able to ship these projects with the engineering team we had at the moment. Reality is rarely ideal, though.

When having only large projects becomes a problem

During the year, we learned about a new company-wide project that needed help from our team. This inevitably meant that we would have fewer people for our big projects.

We quickly realized that having a smaller subset of people only working on large investments led to a lower rate of shipping. The unknown unknowns arose, as they always do with big projects, and before we knew it, we were spending months coding without delivering anything to customers.

Nicolas and I took a hard look at our roadmap, and we concluded that we had too many large investments without smaller improvements to balance. We shifted gears and made time for 1% improvements.

Ship 1% improvements to maintain velocity

A 1% improvement is a small step that moves you toward the vision you created. You don’t want to have only 1% improvements on your roadmap, similar to how you don’t want to have only large projects.

For our team, we defined a 1% improvement as something that could be developed in 1 month and tested and shipped to customers the next month. Each team will have its own definition, but this made sense for us because our company shipped features to customers in 1-month intervals.

Nicolas and I brainstormed small but impactful ways to improve our user experience using Miro, and we complied a backlog of potential projects. We prioritized projects that we wanted to prototype, using the RICE scoring method to guide us. We scored based on how impactful the improvement would be for customers, how aligned the improvement was to our long-term goal, how many customers it would affect, and how much confidence we had that it would move the needle. For the 3 projects that scored the highest, we spent 1–2 weeks creating prototypes and short 1 pagers. We then tested all 3 with 10 users.

Lessons learned

• Not all projects make the cut. Of the 3 projects we explored, we added 2 of them to the roadmap based on the user research results. The last project didn’t have enough impact to be worth the work.
• Our engineers were thrilled at having smaller projects to pick up. The field and customers were surprisingly excited for these tiny features we announced.
• It’s very easy for scope to creep. Our 1% improvements quickly became 10% improvements and we had to course correct.
• You don’t always have the people you need to tackle those big projects. Having a backlog of smaller issues that might otherwise be overlooked makes it easier to map a wide variety of projects to the people you have available on your team at the moment.

Recipe

When you’re faced with a situation where you and your team can’t tackle big projects right now for whatever reason, try prototyping and shipping 1% improvements that feed towards your north star.

Ingredients

1. A note tool to brainstorm. We used Miro.
2. A writing tool to write 1 pagers. We used Google Docs.
3. A prioritization framework. We used RICE, but there are many others out there.
4. A tool to stack rank ideas. We used Google Sheets, but a tool like JIRA or ProductPlan may have a stack ranking feature with it.
5. A design tool that has prototyping capabilities. We used Figma, but there are great options out there, like Sketch or Adobe XD.
6. At least 5 Users or customers to validate your ideas with. You can have more, but you start to recognize patterns after 5 users.

Instructions

1. Discover your opportunities. Talk to your users. Talk to your sales and customer success teams. Talk to your engineers. Look at data.
2. Prioritize with product, design, and engineering your opportunities to prototype (not yet build!) using a selected framework.
3. Product creates a short 1 pager for the top 3 opportunities so that the PM and the designer are on the same page for the problem and goals.
4. Design spends 1-week prototyping several options for each of the 3 opportunities.
5. Together, select the top options to do a user research study for and create a research plan.
6. Identify which opportunities resonate most with customers.
7. Make changes to the prototype as you learn how users react.
8. Share results with the engineering team and validate that each work item is indeed less than 1 month of development effort. If the prototype had a lot of scope creep, break up the work into smaller chunks.
9. Create requirements and design specs for the feature.
10. Prioritize on roadmap.

Thanks for reading our recipe. Our goal is to share our experiences working together using a short read format with instructions that you can try on your own — just like a cookbook. We hope you found it useful!

Katie Le & Nicolas Backal