Blockers Are Urgent, While Friction Endures
Blockers trigger fire drills, but friction quietly shapes customer and employee behavior every single day. (Additional bonus included - The Toilet Paper Roll Test)
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.
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Brief digression before we get into this article’s main topic.
I was thinking through some of my favorite employees from over the years, and trying to figure out what they had in common. Not just good employees, but ones I’d beg to join any startup I made someday. The best of the best employees. It’s a pretty short list.
I’ve thought about this before and didn’t have an answer. But it finally came to me a couple of days ago.
They pass what I will forever refer to as: The toilet paper roll test.
Imagine you’re visiting someone’s house, and you need to use their restroom facilities. When you enter the room, you see that they’ve incorrectly put the toilet paper roll on backwards. That’s where the paper drapes down from the back of the roll instead of the front. You’ve probably seen this occasionally. It’s embarrassing, but some people weren’t taught how to hang toilet paper rolls before they moved out of their parents house.
The very best hires are those who will fix the roll when they use the rest room.
Why is this a critical test? Because people who fix the roll have three special qualities.
Bias for action - You don’t overlook the small things. You notice a problem, and you naturally look to solve it immediately.
Comfort with judgment - You’re willing to insert your opinion, even if someone might disagree. You have respect for your own common sense, and you’re not paralyzed by worrying if someone else disagrees.
Ownership mindset - You treat everything you interact with as your responsibility, even if it technically is owned by someone else.
People who pass the toilet paper test end up saying things like the following.
“I saw the org’s onboarding template was missing a few steps, so I updated it.”
“Your team’s app had a small error. I looked at the code, and it was an easy fix. Here’s the code review for you to look at.”
“I was talking to our recruiting partner and she said they hadn’t received our new headcount numbers yet. I just gave her the info while I was in the room.”
I’m sure every one of these actions felt like nothing in the moment to anyone involved. They were tiny issues, with tiny solutions. But they compound over time, and they are emblematic of a certain type of employee I love to work with.
And for what it’s worth, I’m totally the kind of person to fix your toilet paper roll.
Ok, enough of the toilet paper test for now. Let’s move on to our main topic!
Blockers and Friction
There are many aspects of blockers and friction at work.
A blocker means that something can’t be done.
An outage of the payments system for credit cards would be a blocker for credit card payments.
Friction is the aspect of the difficulty of doing something.
Asking a user to type in their credit card number again to verify a purchase would be considered friction.
What I’ve found over the years is that friction can impact your business or workplace just as much as blockers, but it gets far less attention than it should.
Friction has a hidden impact
When Amazon’s credit card processing went down, everyone knew immediately. We had graphs that showed how much money Amazon was losing per minute, and it was all hands on deck.
You might have a 13-minute outage, and that would require the responsible team to write a multipage document to explain exactly what happened, what the financial impact was (how many millions in revenue was lost), and what will be done to prevent it in the future.
But what about friction? Where’s the documentation?
The tricky thing about friction is that it’s rarely over in 13-minutes. In fact, with friction small enough, it’s rarely mentioned at all. Even if the overall impact was likely much higher than those 13-minutes of outage.
I remember a brief story about some button on retail that was moved years ago. It was a tiny change. Perhaps the change was to move it slightly higher on the page so that it was above the fold. I really don’t remember.
But what I do remember was looking at the screenshots. You could barely see a difference. With two screenshots next to each other, you had to look repeatedly to see what they’d changed.
And the impact? Something like a quarter percent lift. How much is that worth annually? At Amazon’s scale, it’s literally billions.
That was one memorable tiny change made, but there are thousands of friction points always being removed and added. And unless you’re Amazon with an incredible focus on data, would you even notice?