Disrupting Your Own Routine

Being in product can be hard. You are almost always the person who says no. There is always something more important, something that needs to ship fast, something that will bring the next big win.

You enter this cycle, and sometimes it’s difficult to break out of it. Maybe that’s why I sometimes feel the urge to change scope completely, start from scratch. But I don’t need to be that drastic.

To avoid the infinite loop, I lean on an old habit: learning as much as possible from new people. When someone new joins the team, I take that moment to stop. To ask, to revisit the process, to listen to fresh perspectives and new stories.

It keeps me grounded — a consistent way to get honest feedback before routine takes over.

The last time I did this, the disruption was real. Our new UX designer had joined from another team within the company, but from a completely different scope. I gave her a simple task: spend the next two weeks exploring our checkout. Compare it with our main competitors and be honest about what you find.

The result was a comprehensive, data-backed analysis. I was genuinely shocked. I couldn’t believe how disconnected we had become from current layout patterns. We were so focused on shipping and iterating that we had never stopped to look from the outside.

This happens sometimes. You have those eureka moments, but you also have those we are on the wrong path moments, and you need to pivot. Different feelings, same reaction: move fast.

The impact was immediate. We ran user studies to validate the findings and built a roadmap of small, focused implementations to test each hypothesis. After the last one shipped, you wouldn’t recognize it as the same checkout.

No matter how close you are to the product, how many hours you’ve put in, or how good the results look — routine is quiet. It doesn’t announce itself. Sometimes it takes someone walking in on their first day, with no history and no assumptions, to show you what you stopped being able to see.