Do Something!
Don’t let ambiguity deter you from action. In product discovery, almost any team-based, sanity-checked action is better than inaction. Then prioritize quickly and ruthlessly: sometimes not acting is the boldest action of all.
Ship Now, Perfect Later: The Real Value of Iteration
The core philosophy of building successful products is counterintuitive: the path to creating great, lasting value is found in relentless simplification, constraint, and speed. We often feel compelled to build everything at once–to out-feature the competition or overwhelm our stakeholders. This path leads to bloat, slow delivery, and costly rework. The truly effective approach, inspired by lean development, is to do less, but do it exceptionally well.
Focus on the Essential Core
The first critical shift is to prioritize shipping over perfection. It is a common trap to spend excessive time polishing every detail before a first release. Instead, I try to drive this mindset: “Just get the stuff on the page for now. Let folks use it–in real life. Make sure it works. Later on you can adjust and perfect it.”
This principle underpins the concept of the Time Value of Value (it could probably use a re-brand). Any validated insight or functional feature delivered to the customer today is inherently more valuable than the same feature delivered six months from now.
This is true for:
- Your customers, value today allows them to start solving their problem immediately, driving adoption and loyalty.
- Your team, shipping early provides validated insights — real-world data and feedback — that are far more reliable than internal debates or elaborate functional specs.
This speed-to-market is the “engine” of your product cycle. It means embracing an iterative process, whatever Capital Letter Framework you’re currently using. With more experience I have found a double diamond or simply the Build-Measure-Learn loop to be easy to convey to non-technical members of product teams: it is easy! Your goal is to learn as quickly as possible. The details you worry about in a vacuum are often the wrong ones. Instead, “Details reveal themselves as you observe people using what you’re building.” Let your users guide the prioritization of your next steps.
Run a Lean and Adaptable Organization
Get Benjamin Anderson’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The product is only as agile as the team that builds it. To facilitate fast, valuable iterations, you must aggressively cut the organizational and process “mass” that slows you down.
- Flex on scope, not on time: That is how remind my product managers when they are waist deep in decision overload. But they know that it means fix time and budget, flex scope (so long as you can deliver a delightful, usable iteration from which you can learn something. All that work takes place in backlog refinement and sprint planning. This is a hard-line rule for execution.
- Prioritize ruthlessly. It is always better to launch a smaller, high-quality product on time than a bloated, half-finished one that hits a feature deadline. Use limited resources — like funding or time — as a positive constraint to force good decisions.
- Fight the Flow-Killers: Meetings are toxic to deep, valuable work. Implement dedicated, company-wide Get to Done Time for uninterrupted flow. The best communication is often asynchronous; if something is too complex to explain in an email or document, simplify the process, don’t schedule a meeting to talk about the complexity.
- Build an Agile Team and work in some form of regular time-bound structure: I usually recommend a sprint-based set-up. Some tips for when you don’t have “a feature” to build for everyone on the cross-functional team: Really early stage orgs might only have reports from user feedback to share at the end of the sprint. Larger, more mature (and more bureaucratic) organizations may have backlog items that define done as “prepare a presentation for the review committee and present it to the executive director. At the sprint review those who completed that backlog item should share what they learned or what questions or feedback the ED shared. Stay flexible, but focus on DONE.
- Hire fewer people and ensure those people are quick-learning generalists who can fill multiple roles. They are the most effective at adapting to the rapidly revealed needs of the business.
3 Actionable Steps to Ship More Value This Week
You can start applying these principles today to accelerate your value delivery:
- Cancel a non-critical recurring meeting and designate that time as “Get to Done Time.” This immediately frees up valuable deep work hours for focused development.
- Review your current feature backlog and eliminate the bottom 25% of requests. Focus only on the absolutely essential core and enforce a “Start with No” policy for new features.
- Identify the smallest, most functional piece of your next big feature and commit to shipping it (even internally) within 4 hours. Don’t wait to perfect it; race to running software for immediate, real-world data. Share the validated learnings with the team. Asynchronous video is a great way to avoid disruptions but still share quickly.
