The small things matter
How you handle small things is a leading indicator
As an engineer, you always hate to get bug reports for “this button is off center”. Like that’s your number one priority. You spent countless hours designing the data structure, integrating with a third party API, ensuring the user experience is “snappy”, and building out the new infrastructure to support the user load. All for the first thing someone says to be about a stupid CSS issue. Not even a “great work, but…” to soften the landing. You are demoralized. You worked so hard and thought you had fixed most of the kinks. Is that button being perfectly centered really that important? Even though it pains me to say it, the answer is “yes”.
In the moment, those are always the most frustrating bugs. Sure, they are usually easy to fix, but you always feel just a little hurt that they didn’t see all the other cool stuff you built. On the other hand, if you missed that, what else did you miss? Sure, maybe that is truly the only bug in the code you wrote, but it often makes people wonder what else they didn’t catch. It isn’t going to prevent people from using the software or completely turn off a prospective customer, but it sows seeds of doubt in their minds. Some people will be more forgiving, some less, but how long do you want to take that chance? How many “small things” can you overlook before it becomes a big deal?
You want to know who is most affected by the little things? Power users. They are using every aspect of your software (or a subset of it). Any little issues in the system could fundamentally break their workflow. They could waste hours just trying to work around the bug. That time costs them money, which is on top of the money they are already paying you for your software. It’s not all about the money though, much of software (and other types of products too) is dependent on how it makes a user feel. Little issues here and there eat away at the experience in such a way that it no longer makes the user feel empowered. They get frustrated, and ultimately that can lead to their attrition. Sure, they might attribute it to a “missing feature”, but I’d argue that it started with all those little bugs they kept encountering. They might have overlooked a big thing if the rest of the application was excellent. Then they would know that when you finally built that missing feature, it would be as rock solid as everything else. This is what makes the small things a leading indicator.
"Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well." — John W. Gardner
Only focusing on the big ticket items can ensure you really put energy and effort into the most important aspects of your software. However, it can come at the expense of the little things. If you get those right, you’ll more than likely get the big things right. This isn’t to say you should chase perfection and risk analysis paralysis, but having a team culture of focusing on the small things will build good habits that permeate into every feature you deliver. Your habits and processes will take you much further than any single feature you could build. Having a good habit of delivering features will eventually lead you to product market fit. You will build that one feature that makes you stand out. But it isn’t that one feature that got you there. It’s the culmination of months and years of work that turned your software into an “overnight success”. It all started with the little things.