speed to market vs polish

You’re presented with a choice: either release something quickly, or take some time to make it better before releasing it. Which do you choose, and where do you draw the line?

Easy: always choose speed to market.

Assuming the thing you’re building will actually provide value, getting it released to customers will help you begin to accrue value that you can later spend on making it more polished — so you’ll at least have the opportunity to do both.

If, instead, you choose to polish your product you introduce a number of problems:

• How polished is polished enough? You’ll need to know this before you release if you want to wait until crossing this threshold. This can turn into a product that is never released.
• Are you sure that your customers or potential customers actually see the additional polish as all that important? How will you know if you never release anything, and therefore never get any feedback on what is important?
• Any reason for delaying a product release only delays the point at which you can start learning, which means you’re incurring a significant opportunity cost. Why bother spending any time on the product if you’re not going to get it into customers’ hands?

but if it’s not polished, no one will use it

If this is true, then the rough cut version isn’t going to provide value, is it? And if it’s not providing value, then that is the reason no one will use it — not because it solves the problem, but does so in an unpolished way. You’d be surprised how many products aim to solve the same problem, yet the most successful one is one of the least polished. There’s many more dimensions to why people choose products than simple perceived quality.

More often than not I see teams delay something because they believe it’s not good enough for whatever reason. If you don’t release you’re guaranteed not to be providing value, and you’re guaranteed to fail.