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Written by Eric Gockel
We all like it when things go as planned. Just the way we wanted. Perfect.
But sometimes priorities change, objectives get reordered, and resources reallocated. But you still need to ship something. What to do?
Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn famously said
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
Basically, it’s more important to launch a product and new features and iterate rather than take extra time to perfect things.
“By ‘release early’ I don’t mean you should release something full of bugs, but that you should release something minimal. Users hate bugs, but they don’t seem to mind a minimal version 1, if there’s more coming soon.”
— Paul Graham
We’ve had projects where the client hadn’t updated their website in years. Yet delayed launching because some new features weren’t quite perfect yet. It’s totally possible to do an unannounced soft launch with follow up releases the next day or next week. Your website/app isn’t carved in stone.
This behavior compounds itself. If the project wasn’t perfect this week, odds are more imperfections (aka tweaks and improvements) will be discovered by next week, bumping things out again.
If your team follows a Continuous Improvement (CI) approach, don’t forget your kaizen and “Just do it”. If you have goals of 50% improvements, it will take at least five passes to become optimal.
Your task for tomorrow: push something out, start that blog post, start breaking down that BHAG.