If you spend enough time digesting hackneyed business or self-improvement advice, you've probably seen someone wax poetic about the following image:
This is meant to be an illustration of the power of incrementalism (often referred to as kaizen when the writer is trying to be particularly obscure/profound) [1]. Get 1% better every single day, and then a year later you're one and a half orders of magnitude better!
This is a very lovely concept, and I like it in the abstract. The thing that I butt into every time I see it deployed is that getting 1% better is actually quite hard once the thing is a non-trivial size.
In general, it's a pretty useful practice to napkin-math out the impacts of various initiatives, but one impact doing so has is that you realize how hard it is to hit 1% from object-level work:
- Fix a few game-breaking edge cases in a project that 10% of your paid customer base uses, and only 3% of those customers have ever run into the bug? Oh, and your paid customer base is only a 20% subset of your free tier? Oof — only 0.06%.
- Improve TTFB on a specific page for prospects based in Japan? Well, only 5% of your incoming prospects are coming in from Japan, and all that TTFB did was lift conversion from 5% to 5.2%...
You get the idea.
This isn't to argue against that work — that kind of incremental work is my favorite, and I'm the happiest when I get to point to small object-level improvements that make a real difference. But it's important not to overstate their efficacy.
Instead, I argue three things:
- Devote outsized amounts of incremental work to the most well-paved parts of your product. Focusing on grace notes for a nascent SKU with only a couple dozen MAUs makes less sense than on the tentpole part of your app.
- Be really, really cautious when making product or strategy decisions that exclude portions of your userbase. Gating a really compelling feature behind a specific price point might make sense in the short term to drive expansion revenue, but makes it much harder to justify additional work against that feature because a very small subset of users will glean the results. [2]
- Shoot for
.1%better instead.1.001 ^ 365only gives you1.44— not quite as gee-whiz astounding — but 44% per annum is a pretty damn good return, plus whatever big roofshot projects you end up taking on as well.
Let's be clear: I am the guiltiest of them all when it comes to this. ↩︎
For the maximally obvious example of this behavior, consider: every single PE-acquired SaaS which has changed branding and marketing pages three times in the past five years without shipping a single new feature to the app dashboard. ↩︎
