Tiny Wins Build Trust
Hey there! I don’t have a new "hard conversations" article ready this week but I do have something pretty awesome for you. I just read Jade Rubick’s post on how he implemented a way to deliver small improvements while keeping bigger projects moving. He calls it “Tiny Thursdays” and I think it’s great.
Balancing small improvements with big projects is a common problem. You want to be disciplined and focus all of our time on the big important thing. But when a backlog of tiny things builds up, your internal and external customers start to feel like you're not there for them. Delivering some tiny things along the way does two things: it shows that you care and it demonstrates that you are capable of delivering. Both of those can seem distant when customers are waiting for that bigger deliverable. And it keeps your product healthy by fixing broken windows and adding small delighters.
This isn’t limited to product or engineering or IT. If you’re in marketing, HR, oroperations, or some other area, there’s a good chance you have customers who still want tiny things that are hard to prioritize because you’re working on the big important things.
The other stellar thing in Jade’s article is that his team added a status called “Communicated.” So their work isn’t done when code is deployed; it’s done when the right people know about it. I could write a whole essay just on that, but Jade threw it in for free.
So, go read Tiny Thursdays and then come back for your dot release.
Your Dot Release: Find three small things you or your team can do that will tie up loose ends, fix broken windows, or add a tiny bit of delight this month. Maybe it’s fixing some broken links on a web site. Maybe it’s updating a process doc to reflect what you really do so you don’t have to tell new hires every time “oh that’s not right anymore.” Maybe it’s adding some search filters or sorting options to make searching easier. This is a dot release, so you don’t need to implement a whole process. Just go do a few tiny things—and communicate them! If that goes as well as I think it will, then you can think about how to rinse and repeat ;).
One More Thing: My birthday is this month so I'm going to ask you a favor. I love writing the Dot Release and hearing that it is helping people. I'd like to reach more people--kind of improve the ROI on my time, you know? Currently the Dot Release has 82 subscribers and it would be fun to hit the nice round number of 100. If you know someone who might also enjoy the newsletter, will you please forward it to them? Thank you!
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Image by Doris Rohmann from Pixabay via rubick.com