How to define when you’re ready to ship
It’s not always easy to know when you are ready to ship an update for your product — which takes a wholly different approach from shipping the first version of your product (hint: no business plan survives first contact with customers).
I write this from personal (whose else!) experience and not because I have dissected every single word from the Wise Bearded Old Men Who Know How To Build Awesome Digital Products™. Plus it’s something I have been thinking about lately.
Benchmarks. Benchmarks everywhere.
When you design a new feature, you probably got inspiration from a lot of products made by kickass product teams. Your usual suspects are Facebook, Slack, Trulia, Amazon, Valve, etc. I mean, look at those products. You can taste the quality. Jesus Christ. I just want to have their Product Team’s babies, yeah.
So you see a lot of simply breathtaking stuff. And you want to join the big league — with your own shit that you just know you can make just as great.
And you work your ass off until everything is just as shiny, with slick screen transitions, parallax scroll animations and the whole shebang.
… aaaand now your ego is most likely in charge of deciding what to build and when to ship. Idiot.
Better than what’s in prod? Cool, ship it
And abandoned at the curb lie your current users. Because you left them with a half-broken product while you were pretending to be awesome.
The way I try to see it is this: just ship stuff that’s better than what’s out there right now. It’s not as great as the layout the designer has sent you in the first place? But it still works betten than what’s currently live? Too bad, dude. Just suck it up and ship it.
There’s always the temptation to ship something great only when it’s edging perfection. Worse: upper management probably won’t bust your ass for seeking perfection (who would!). Even worse: they will usually frown upon half-assed implementations — which is another bad incentive for you to take your time and leave your users rotting in filth.
But please resist this urge. Take the hit. It’s gonna feel embarassing, but don’t mind that look on you peers’s face because both of you know your new feature isn’t top notch — at least not yet. Because you have shipped. And you did the right thing.
Caveats
Now, I know that this approach can’t be applied for any kind of product at any stage. But if it ever feels like it may make some sense, than just use it. Really. Your users will thank you.
Well, not really because there will most likely be a lot of other broken stuff in your product wating to be fixed, but you can pat yourself in the back.
