Practice / On shipping

Thyme to market

Whoever ships first gets paid to learn from real buyers. I’ve learned that a launch usually loses to somebody who sold a rougher version to the same buyers first and used the money to catch up.

Two more weeks#

In January 1984, days before the Macintosh software was due, the team building it asked Steve Jobs for two more weeks to fix bugs.

He said no and told them, “Just make it as good as you can.” The Macintosh launched on schedule.

What shipping first buys#

The market solves its problem with whatever exists on the day it goes looking. It pays whoever showed up first, however rough that first thing was.

A rougher product sold in droves earns real revenue, real users and real feedback, all at once. The team behind it starts iterating on evidence, funded by sales that already came in. The more careful team, meanwhile, is still iterating on a hypothesis nobody has paid to test.

What waiting costs#

Every week a launch sits unshipped has a price, though most teams never put a number on it. Donald Reinertsen calls that number the cost of delay. He says that if a team quantifies only one thing about a project, it should be the cost of delay.

“Let’s make it better first” usually wins the room, because the other side of that choice has no number on it. The team still pays the cost, usually to whoever launches first.

Delay usually sounds like diligence#

Most of us agree with shipping early, at least on paper. Agreeing with it doesn’t stop a launch from slipping, because fear rarely says to stop outright. It asks to check one more thing or wait one more week, which sounds like diligence.

Enough small asks in a row can keep a product in testing far longer than anyone planned.

A team in that loop treats the launch as the last chance to improve the product. Shipping is the next chance, and a better one, because real buyers teach a team more than another internal round does.

Perfectionism and high standards#

Perfectionism looks like high standards from the outside, but its attention is on how the work will make you look.

In 1991, the psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett sorted perfectionism into three kinds. The kinds differ by whose standards drive it: your own, the ones you set for others and the ones you believe others set for you.

The third kind, which they called socially prescribed perfectionism, is the one that keeps turning up alongside procrastination in later research.

So when a team says “we’re not ready yet” about a product that already works, the worry is often about who will see it.

A bar a team can reach#

Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, said that if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. Eric Ries named a related idea, the minimum viable product.

An MVP is the smallest version of a product that still lets a team learn something real from the people using it. Neither Hoffman nor Ries is asking for sloppy work. Both describe a bar a team can reach, since perfection moves every time a team gets close to it.

What I check before I let a launch slide#

Name the cost of waiting out loud, even as a rough guess, so waiting has to justify itself against a real number
Ask who else could meet this need first and price the delay against them instead of against an imagined perfect version
Remember that whoever ships first gets paid to learn from real buyers, while a delayed launch keeps learning from guesses
Notice whether “not ready” is about the product or about who will see it
Ship the version that teaches something real, and treat embarrassment as information

The poem I wrote about shipping#

I wrote this poem as a funny reminder to myself. It turned out to be one of the harder lessons I’ve had to learn. The lesson only shows up in hindsight; while I’ve been testing, tweaking, refining, reworking, second-guessing, and generally iterating toward near-perfection, someone else is already in the market selling a lower-quality product in droves, getting thanked for it, and cashing in.

They use that money to keep iterating.

What launched as the rougher product becomes a funded one.

A funded product has time to grow into something better.

Thyme is money, they said, so they logged it as a cost.
Thyme is of the essence, so they measured what they’d lost.

No thyme like the present, they said, so they waited for a better crop.

Give it thyme, they said, so they let the greenhouse run the shop.

Buy some thyme, they said, so they bought it by the crate,
they stored it in the walk-in, but said the batch wasn’t quite great.

Thyme heals all wounds, they said,
so they let the wound decide.
They watered it, and weeded it,
then watched their “deadline” slide.

Down the street, their neighbors sold thyme in packets.
The packets were torn and small.
Theirs tasted like nothing special,
but they sold out before the fall.

And meanwhile, at the market, others’ jars were selling out.
They were dried, a little bitter, and labeled instant (no doubt).

Thyme’s up, they said, finally!
They opened the greenhouse door.
Their thyme was perfect!
But no one needed it anymore.