I'll build this later

Your roadmap is a cat-and-mouse game between new ideas/features/bugs that are added to it versus what you and your team can tackle. Ideally, it should go down, but it’s often the contrary that happens.

And then, you get a customer asking you for something that could be implemented on your service, but it’s faster to do it manually, respond to the customer and close the ticket.

Often, this is misleading because this one, isolated, customer indeed was faster to process manually than to build the feature directly, but what you tend to forget, is that a few others will ask the same thing.

And when you stack all these requests, the time spent is longer than it would have taken to just implement that feature.

In general in my life, I try to apply the principle that if it takes less than 5 minutes to do, I’ll do it immediately.
This is not really helpful for the present “you”, but your future “you” will thank you.

You put your tools on the kitchen table, thinking “I’ll move them to the garage when I’ll have the time”, and things start to pile up. When you do it now, you have less clutter, and one thing less on your mind. Granted, you did one more trip to the garage, but hey, you did more steps today :)

That’s the same principle we are applying at Fernand; If it takes less than 30 minutes to implement, we’ll do it right away, because we believe that if one customer reaches out about a request, 10 others had the same request but never bothered to ask.

We recently had this scenario. Until now, it wasn’t possible to change who was the owner of an organization. To change that, you had to reach out to us and we would manually change the ownership in the database.

Clearly, this is a typical case of “it just takes less than a minute to update the database”, so it didn’t make sense to jump on developing the feature right away. On top of that, we have a massive roadmap and this request is not in the top priority.

But this customer wasn’t the first, and certainly not the last. On top of that, I discovered a sneaky problem: the one requesting to change ownership was not the owner, but someone else in the team. What if it was just a simple, bad intentioned employee ? They could be a new hire that tried to take over the account.

So I worked on that feature, and less than half an hour later, it was possible - for the owner only - to give ownership to another team member.

I told that user about the new feature and let them change ownership directly from their owner.

That’s one request we won’t have to handle anymore, giving us more time to work on important things.