Sometimes, and quite often, we delay delivering our work because we believe it is not ready. We think that we still have things to improve or correct, that we still have to work on it. More often than not, that actually comes out of fear of failure. Fear of our product meeting the market and nobody buying it, because it is not perfect, or it is not good enough.
It can also be fear of our product being criticized, because either the product or the book or our software has some typo or small bug. “I will only publish the latest blog post when there are no possible ifs, ands, or buts.” Other times it’s just perfectionism leading to paralysis.
A pottery teacher in an art school divided his students in two groups and told them what they had to do to get an A+ in his class. He told the first group that they had to do 100 vases in order to get the highest mark. However, he told the second group that to get that A+ they had to make the best vase.
This last group devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to debate and read about the best techniques for creating vases. But the best vases were actually done by the first group. They had devoted their time to practice, practice, practice and made 100 vases. Their technique had improved. It’s the same with your blog, your app or that design you’ve been thinking about. Let them meet the real users and let those users give you a thumbs up.
The world of software is full of products that were developed over years until they had every feature a client could imagine, in the way they were initially designed by their creators. Sadly when the software met the market, the market had its own ideas and needs. Very few people used every feature in those applications. Other features were heavily demanded, but none of the creators had thought about them when those products were first designed.
There is a Spanish proverb: “perfect” is the enemy of “good.” When you have a small but already useful product, ship it, show it to the public, get your first clients. They will tell you what’s missing. Learn about that, launch a second version, then a third. If you can’t get at least a small client base with your first version, maybe it is not the right time or place for your product. At least you’ll learn lots of things you didn’t know yet, and you won’t have wasted months and months of your work.
You can find texts like this and many other about how to manage agile projects in my book Agile 101: Practical Project Management (available on Amazon).
Translation by Begoña Martínez. You can also find her on her LinkedIn profile. Proofreading by David Nesbitt.
