Joy on The Roadmap: In Action

In 2023, the Figma team held a talk at their annual conference: Putting Joy on the Roadmap. In it, Jenny Wen, Mihika Kapoor, and Kee Yen Yeo advocate for prioritizing delight – making time for joy, be it an extra round of polish, a surprising detail, or the last mile work that makes software feel like it knows your next move – in the software development lifecycle, a process usually bound by tight timelines and ruthless ROI calculations.

I'm a believer in the value of joy. I subscribe to the idea that "good design is good business" (Tom Watson Jr.), an idea supported by the makeup of today's software landscape.

Next-generation tools like Figma, Notion, Linear, and Vercel, to cherrypick a few, are succeeding in markets dominated by incumbents. Figma changed how we design, moving us from clunky, legacy native apps to a fast, local-first app in the browser. Notion changed what documents could be and how easily we can work with them. The list goes on.

These tools put joy on the roadmap – where joy isn't always overt. It's often architectural, prioritizing speed with local-sync architectures. In Vercel's case, it's attention to detail across every surface, from their docs to their developer experience. Other times, joy is hard to miss: delightful moments, from customization and playfulness to animation, break from the hyper-homogenized, over-optimized software of today.

Though joy's ROI can be hard to measure in the micro, the macro effects are hard to miss. Look at Lu.ma versus Eventbrite or Linear versus Jira. Many customers choose the joyful tool when they can because they're faster, more pleasant, more beautiful, and more caring. That's a positive business outcome those businesses wouldn't have had without joy on their roadmaps.

Further, creating joyful software – going above and beyond in prioritizing user experience – increases our own sense of purpose. To create joy, you look beyond "that works" or "that's good enough" to ask, "Is that the best it can be?" Have I done my best work today? You hear this sense of purpose in stories from the original Mac, iPod, and iPhone teams.

Our work makes up ~37.5% of our lifetime – we should spend that time doing our best and striving to make other's lives more beautiful. When we prioritize joy, we increase our sense of purpose and make other's lives better.

In creating Magical.pm, I'm putting joy on the roadmap. The app has a local sync architecture, thanks to InstantDB, optimized for speed and usability. Beyond that, I'm taking opportunities to introduce some surprises into the workday, which is how I landed on Magical.pm's latest release: Goofballs.

While Goofballs are, admittedly, ridiculous – the hope is that they're a welcome immunization to a tough afternoon lull or a fun way to connect with a co-worker.

You'll see Goofball options when you select a Template – "Shakespeare Mode," "Gen-Z Mode," or "Tech Bro Mode." With a Goofball selected, Magical.pm will write your product requirements in your chosen voice – Shakespearean iambic pentameter, Gen-Z slang, or Tech Bro tech-bro-y-ness. They even come with fun fonts.

Even better, you can share Goofballs via URLs, meaning you can send Magical.pm to a friend or co-worker in a Goofball Mode and watch their reaction as the tool responds with a unique personality.

You can try Goofballs below by selecting "Templates" and activating your Goofball of choice or by clicking here.

Here's to adding joy to the roadmap in big ways and small ways, fun ways and "you'd really only know if I told you" ways. Here's to doing our best work and making the world a little bit brighter when we do.