Three lessons the Workplace product team learned from a bowl of porridge
We’re very lucky at Workplace. Our London office, as well as being replete with cool breakout spaces and quiet areas to get work done, also has a canteen. Actually, that’s probably underselling it a little: we have a really nice canteen.
Every morning, I head to the canteen to have a bowl of porridge for breakfast. Except Friday — that’s full English day. And every morning I encounter the same problem: when you close the hinged lid on the porridge pot, the whole lid (hinge and all) pops off the top and falls into the pot. You then have to dig the lid out, put it back, and you and everyone after you gets sticky fingers.
Sure, this is a first-world problem. But it’s also an example of a poor product experience. And while it’s never stopped me enjoying a bowl of porridge, it is annoying.
Until last week, when I went to get my bowl of porridge — and smiled. Someone had got a pair of bulldog clips and used them to clamp the lid to the pot. Now when you shut the lid, it stays firmly in place.
As I ate my bowl of porridge (with blissfully non-sticky fingers) it struck me that this is a little picture of what we should all be doing every day to build quality product experiences.
1. Keep your eyes open to all the problems — even the small ones
When you’re building or testing something, are there things you don’t see that might be broken or sub-optimal because your attention is focussed on the ‘core’ thing? Don’t just sail past them. Flag them or resolve them because the little things matter.
2. If you do nothing, nothing happens
Yes, bug reports take time. Listing repro steps takes time. Taking screen-capture videos takes time. Maybe the issue’s tiny and you’re busy. But nothing is so trivial that it isn’t worth fixing. And if you don’t raise it, it will never get fixed
“…nothing is so trivial that it isn’t worth fixing. And if you don’t raise it, it will never get fixed.”
3. Fixing small things is never beneath any of us
Small details compound to make an okay product into an awesome one. They transform a product from one that you have to use into one that you want to use. It’s a product team’s job to make experiences more delightful — none of us should be too busy or think we’re too important to attend to the details.
“It’s a product team’s job to make experiences more delightful — none of us should be too busy or think we’re too important to attend to the details.”
The Porridge Lid Fix probably isn’t going to increase my porridge consumption. In fact, I doubt we’ll see any stat-sig rise in any porridge metric.
But spotting, reporting and fixing this made a small interaction a little more delightful, told me somebody cares about what they do, and improved my perception of the overall experience. That’s something we can all learn from.
Andrew Widgery is a Product Manager on the Workplace team working on cross-company communication. He is also an avid eater of porridge.
