Small Wins Are Still Wins

You don't have to wait for the big finish to recognise that you are moving forward.

I have to remind myself of that more than I'd like to admit. Most weeks don't hand you a launch, a sign-off, a big visible finish line. Most weeks are smaller than that. A hard conversation that went okay. A risk you caught before it became a problem. A plan that finally makes sense after three tries. None of that shows up on a highlight reel, so it's easy to walk away from a week like that feeling like nothing happened.

But something did happen. It just wasn't loud.

I think that's the part we get wrong most often. We wait for something big enough to announce, and in the meantime we quietly stop noticing the stuff that's actually holding the whole thing together.

Some days my “small win” is just getting through it upright — my neck's been out of commission for over a month now, physical therapy and all, past the point where over-the-counter stuff makes a dent. Add a 3.5-year-old who has her own opinions about literally everything, and on the days both are in a mood, just making it to bedtime with everyone still speaking to each other counts as a win in my book. Nobody's putting that on a highlight reel. I'll take it anyway.

Why we skip past them

We're trained to only count the big ones. Go-live. Launch day. The final sign-off. Those get the announcement, the applause, the little dopamine hit. Everything smaller gets filed under “just doing my job.” (I have never once seen “successfully avoided a completely unnecessary meeting” on a performance review, and frankly, I think that's a miss.)

The problem is, most of a project — most of a career, honestly — is made of the smaller stuff. If the only wins that count are the big ones, you spend most of your time feeling like you're not winning at all. That's not because you're not moving. It's because you set the bar somewhere you only reach a few times a year, and then you're surprised when most weeks don't clear it.

What a small win actually looks like

Not everything needs a name and a diamond on the chart to matter. Some of it is quieter than that.

Catching a risk before anyone else noticed it. Saying the hard thing to a stakeholder instead of avoiding it for another week (and then rewarding yourself with a coffee like you just ran a marathon). Getting through a meeting where you actually listened instead of just waiting for your turn to talk. Finishing a plan you'd been avoiding, even a rough one. None of these will show up in a status report. All of them are real progress, and all of them deserve a moment where you actually notice them instead of moving straight on to the next thing.

It shows up in how you run projects, too

This isn't just a personal-life thing. I see the same pattern on every project I've ever run. We build the plan around the big milestones — launch, go-live, the final sign-off — and we forget to build in anything for the space between them. So a team can do genuinely excellent work for eight straight weeks and never once get told it's going well, because nothing “milestone-sized” happened in that stretch.

I've been on the receiving end of this too. I once had a stakeholder tell me, three weeks into a very quiet, very steady project, “so... is anything actually happening?” Everything was happening. None of it was loud enough to notice from the outside. That was on me, honestly — I hadn't said a word about it either, because none of it felt “update-worthy” on its own.

That's a mistake, and it's an easy one to fix. Call out the small stuff while it's happening, not just at the retro. “That risk you flagged on Tuesday — if you hadn't caught it, we'd be having a very different conversation right now” costs you one sentence and does more for a team's morale than most of what's in the recognition budget. You don't need a ceremony. You just need to say it out loud, close to when it happened.

Why this matters more when things feel heavy

This isn't really about productivity. It's about how it feels to be in the middle of something long, when the finish line is nowhere close and the days start blurring into each other.

If you only let yourself feel good at the very end, you're asking yourself to run the whole distance on nothing. That's how burnout creeps in — not from the work itself, but from never letting yourself feel like any of it counted along the way. You can be doing genuinely good work, week after week, and still feel like you're failing, simply because you never gave yourself permission to notice the good weeks as good. Ask me how I know.

Noticing the small wins isn't a nice-to-have. It's what makes it possible to keep going without running yourself into the ground before you get there.

A small practice, nothing fancy

I don't have a system for this. I just try to ask myself, at the end of a hard day: what actually went right today, even a little? Sometimes the answer is small enough to feel silly saying out loud — some days mine is “my neck didn't seize up and my toddler ate a vegetable without a negotiation.” That's fine. It still counts.

You don't need a framework for this one. You just need to stop walking past it. (I know, I know — a PM telling you not to build a system for something. Mark this day on your calendar.)

So this week — what's your small win? Not the big milestone, the quiet one. I'd love to hear it. Milestone by milestone, remember — not all at once.