Fix the papercuts

Product management can be so freaking tough. 

I think most, if not all, software businesses suffer from the same chronic disease: Never having enough developers or enough time to do everything they want to.

The devil's advocate would argue: "You don't need more developers, you need better priorities!"

Well, sure, yes and no.

Regardless of your team size and ambitions, you have this mutually exclusive triangle of features, quality and speed.
You want all three, but you can only pick two! 

So the question is: What do you pick? 

It depends... But have you ever heard the phrase: "Death by a thousand paper cuts"? 

It's obvious that if you somehow manage to blow your head off, you die. 

On the contrary, a single paper cut, a mosquito bite, a bee sting or a bruce will probably annoy you and piss you off, but it won't kill you.

 A thousand bee stings or paper-cuts, however? Yeah, that'll probably get you.

This idea translates directly to software product development and setting your priorities (back to the "what do you pick"-triangle). 

While a major outage or product issue (or something else equating to getting your head blown off) will undoubtedly cause massive customer churn and possibly even kill your business, all the small things that annoy the customers day-to-day will eventually grow from annoyance to pissing them off to them screaming "fuck it!" at their computer and cancelling their subscription.

Those "paper cuts" are all the seemingly small things like: 

• The application is slow to use (basically anything above 200ms load time).
• Bugs. You need to squash those bugs. Immediately.
• The GUI (graphical user interface) being unintuitive or feeling cumbersome to work with.
• The monthly invoice not being attached to the "we received your payment" email, so you have to sign in, download it and manually send it to your accounting software (rather than just setting up an email forward rule in your client)

And so on, and so on ...

One of those things won't cause a customer to churn.
But several of them? Repeatedly?

If it persists and enough experience it, you're in trouble...

That's why you must prioritise quality and "fix the papercuts", even at the cost of speed and features.
This only gets more important as your business grows.

It's so difficult and expensive to get new customers. So do your best to keep them happy and on board.
Preventing churn is one of the best and cheapest growth strategies for recurring revenue businesses.

I do it myself every Friday.I dedicate the day to fixing "all the small things" that'd otherwise never be prioritised among all the other big and strategically important projects. 

So yeah, it's "costing me" between a half and a whole day every week, which delays other projects.
But it continuously helps improve our product, keeps our customers happy, keeps churn very low, and thus grows our business.