Over the years, I’ve worked on many important, large-scale projects, from figuring out high level strategy and blue sky products, to overhauling core flows and IA, to implementing design systems from the ground up.
Working on these big projects can be exhilarating. They’re often deemed critical by company leadership and various stakeholders, and it’s validating to be trusted with and attached to something so visible and impactful.
I recently shipped two things at GitHub that had an impact beyond my wildest dreams. The amount of gratitude and love that spilled out of the community is like nothing I’ve seen before. But the things I shipped weren’t these huge, meaty projects. They were tiny.

When you think of the services you love the most, they’re filled with the small things that delight you. If there are enough of those in a service it can make you forgive the other absences.

The difficult thing is getting air cover for this - prioritising this over other features is hard to justify. The whole point of these features is that they’re things your users would never have requested, so you can’t reply on customer feedback, and I can’t see how you could have any supporting numerical data either. How do you get your team to buy into something that is just ‘gut feel’?

Even if you manage to do that, how do you get these tiny wins past your senior stakeholders that are expecting a new feature that will get that big customer to sign, or that will increase your market share and help meet your investors’ targets?