Kevin B. Ridgway

As a Product Manager and now as a Founder, one thing I have always struggled with is how to deal with 'nice-to-have' features. You know the ones - the little tweaks and flourishes that make a product look 'polished'. It could be adding consistency to UI elements, rounding some CTAs or adding in a little 'easter egg' you know your users will love. But when you are working on a startup you also have to be ruthless with your prioritization to ensure you are working on the things that actually make an impact. Big new features, new marketing efforts or outreach. So all those bits of polish fall by the wayside. But each day those little bits eat away at you, especially when you are using your own product day-to-day. After seeing a post by @frantzfries a while for what they do at Loops we were inspired and now think we have cracked it. We have 1 ticket in our backlog called "Monthly Polish" (I think Loops' is even more frequent from what I remember). As we go through the month, when we spot something we want to change or tweak we add it to this list. These are things that, if we didn't get to in the month or even the next month, it wouldn't be an issue. Nothing in the list can take more than 30 minutes to implement individually. We add things in an approximate priority order (but it's very rough and ready). Then one day in that month we have a 'polish' day, where it is a challenge for @RaineyAllDay to clear off as many of these items as possible going from top to bottom in the list. Wherever he gets to in the day is then the start of the list for the next month. It has now become one of the best days of the month because you get to see all these little changes go live at once so it looks like a bigger update has been made to the product. I highly recommend trying it out to satisfy the inner perfectionist in you.