Be The One Who Ships

Vineet Thanedar — Sun, 20 Jan 2019 18:38:54 +0000

As hackers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and side-project doers, we tend to be perfectionists. We care about the work product we put out there, and want to make sure we showcase our best work.

However, most of us likely have half-done (abandoned) projects, ideas we have that never seem to get off the ground, or projects that move so slowly that we might as well have never started. I've been there numerous times myself.

It's not that we can't quite see the problem - perfection is the enemy of good enough. This is especially true when there are time and resource constraints.

I documented some of what we did right and pitfalls we avoided in the past year and a half of shipping product at my startup.

You may relate to these, and I hope you catch yourself the next time you find yourself committing one of these (unforced) errors, and course correct your way to done sooner.

I originally posted this to my personal blog here - https://vinthanedar.com/2019/01/17/teams-that-ship/

Hope you enjoy reading it and would love to hear about your experiences!

tl;dr

Whether it's a side project, or building software at your company:

Build and preserve momentum like your life depends on it
Keep moving forward one bit at time, no matter how minor the step may be.

Progress > Polish
It is a vastly better approach to circle back to make something better, but after having gone to battle with it.

Be your own customer
Dog-food your product to enable faster progress.

Beware of rabbit-holes. They are the plague.
Be ruthless in doing things that need to be done, not the things you want to do.

DEV Community: Vineet Thanedar

Be The One Who Ships