The Aggregation of Marginal Gains

If I had to identify a single principle that has allowed Rogue Amoeba to consistently develop high-quality, award-winning software for the last twenty-four years, it would be the aggregation of marginal gains.

You might know that term from the story of cycling coach Dave Brailsford. Brailsford took the helm of the British national team in 2003, after a century of underperformance. The team’s historic rankings were so poor, in fact, that at least one manufacturer refused to sell to the team. The vendor feared that the British using their bikes in competitions would sully the brand’s reputation.

How do you fix that? Previous coaches had attempted sweeping changes, but they had no success in improving things. By contrast, Brailsford approached the problem through what he called “the aggregation of marginal gains”. He and his team looked at every conceivable aspect of competitive cycling: seat comfort, rider posture, tread grip, rider self-care, and more. For each, they asked the same question: “How can we improve this by 1%?”.1

Over time, the team made hundreds of small improvements, and positive results followed. Five years after Brailsford took over, the British won 8 gold medals at the 2008 Olympics. Four years later, at the 2012 Olympics, they set multiple Olympic and world cycling records.2

When it comes to software, major updates with big new features catch attention, but we’re also constantly working on our own “1% improvements”. I’ve recently worked on a handful I’d like to highlight.

Customer Dashboard

Our Customer Dashboard provides a single location for our customers to access everything you might need from Rogue Amoeba, including a comprehensive record of your purchases:

This may seem like a larger initiative rather than a marginal improvement, but we’ve had automated systems in place for years that allowed users to recover license keys. Last year, we decided to improve upon that. First, we built a page that provided a list of your license keys, along with download links. Later, we provided the ability to manage the email address associated with purchases, then added purchase invoices. Our most recent enhancement adds automated notifications of eligible upgrades.

We started with something that matched our previous system in terms of functionality. From there, small, incremental changes rolled out features as they became available, resulting in a more robust system over time.

Permissions Window

Each year, MacOS includes more and more OS-level permissions. The resulting stream of prompts can interrupt work and cause friction, especially for folks trying out our software for the first time. While we can’t do much about this at the system level, in the spirit of incremental improvement, we asked ourself how we could make this marginally better for our users. The result is our centralized Permissions window, which has now been implemented across all of our apps:

This Permissions window provides a single interface to grant permissions to the app. It’s also a useful store of information, showing which permissions are required and which are optional, along with details on how each permission is used.

Unobtrusive Updates

Speaking of things that interrupt work, how many times have you launched software on your Mac only to be confronted with a workflow-interrupting update notification? We encourage our users to run our latest versions, but we also know that the moment you’re getting ready to launch a recording session is not the optimal time to update. So, we recently developed the unobtrusive update notifier to…um, unobtrusively notify users about updates, which they could then handle at their convenience:

This is a small improvement, and one that may well go unnoticed. But as Paul noted in the post announcing this change, this is a very nice quality-of-life improvement.

License Window

We provide free trials of all our software for users to evaluate, with a paid license required to unlock them for long term use. Over the years, we’ve made multiple refinements to our licensing system to improve that experience, including both visual and audible feedback, helpful messages to alert you to your eligibility for a discounted upgrade, and most recently, single-click-to-copy license codes:

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We want users to have as little friction as possible, from evaluating the software with an easy-to-access free trial to unlocking the software once it’s been purchased.

Conclusion

In my 10 17 year tenure at Rogue Amoeba, I’ve seen the principle of incremental improvement applied consistently. Over time, small gains have aggregated to incredible functionality, accessibility, and performance for our users. While our software hasn’t won any Olympic medals, it has been used to facilitate Olympic broadcasts, among countless other uses. We’re proud of the steady stream of incremental improvements we’ve provided over the last twenty-four years, and look forward to continuing that practice long into the future.

Footnotes:

You can read more via James Clear’s blog post. Clear is also the author of the book “Atomic Habits”, which focuses on getting 1% better every day. ↩︎

Learn more about cycling at the 2008 Summer Olympics and records at the 2012 Summer Olympics. ↩︎