Decisions, decisions, decisions — Part 1 of many
Someone once told me that the single most important trait in successful senior executives is their ability to make decisions. As the founder of a young startup (www.loctoc.com), I have to make decisions nearly every single moment. It is easily the one task that takes up the most of my mental and emotional energy.
In this series of posts, I want to put down on ‘paper’ examples from my mental quandary which I hope will serve three purposes: (1) help me actually get the thoughts out of my system, (2) allow other founders, friends and the generally helpful folks to chime in with their own experiences and thoughts, and (3) to give a window into a founder’s mind for anyone interested
These are by no means exhaustive thoughts. In the interest of focusing on my users and product, I’ve also only minimally edited my mental dump — you’ve been forewarned!
Done is better than perfect vs. Sweat the details
The one mantra that seems to pervade the startup world right now is “Done is better than perfect”. Whether it be Lean Startup methodologies, Agile software development practices or even Facebook’s posters, they all extol the virtues of rapid, iterative progress. Get the product “out there”, in front of users as early and often as you can and then enhance it, modify it. Make quick decisions, perfect it later.
I love it. But I see an increasing number of people apply this mantra to everything and that is where we run into trouble — imagine picking your spouse with the “done. married. let’s move on” philosophy!
I admire Facebook as a company a lot. While they started off on the “done” mantra, as their product matures and they become a large company, they’ve started to focus a lot more on the details. Their posters now say “Sweat the details”. I think it’s very admirable of a company to recognise when a complete change in mindset and culture is needed and put its complete conviction behind that.
This dichotomy is one of the things constantly on my mind: release a new version of the product even though we want to redo the UX (and risk putting off a bunch of users — “in this digital world of aplenty users only give you one chance” I hear a bunch of people say) or go out there now, raise a $small round of funding quickly and move on or spend a bunch of time to close a $bigger pot, hire this person (even though they may not be perfect for the role) or stick to your beliefs on early colleague hires, focus on a vertical that’s showing progress or try to persevere with the vertical with “promise”, and so on.
For now, my simple approach (which is in itself a recursive application of the “done. let’s pick this approach” philosophy), is to sweat the details on hires, perspire a bit on the product but get it out there, and just get everything else done. Thoughts?
