Creating involves a level of courage. Putting work out in the world is scary and often something that gets put off until every last detail is perfect. This is not only common for startups, but for many creatives as well. We want to put our best work out because, ultimately, it’s a reflection of us.
It’s natural to feel this way, but it’s imperative that you push forward, despite the hesitation. The fact is there are plenty of reasons not to launch the project you’re working on. Each of those reasons has merit. We’ve found that adhering to a few core mantras allows us to push against the hesitation to ship, and put our work in front of people.
Creating involves a level of courage. Putting work out in the world is scary and often something that gets put off until every last detail is perfect. This is not only common for startups, but for many creatives as well. We want to put our best work out because, ultimately, it’s a reflection of us.
It’s natural to feel this way, but it’s imperative that you push forward, despite the hesitation. The fact is there are plenty of reasons not to launch the project you’re working on. Each of those reasons has merit. We’ve found that adhering to a few core mantras allows us to push against the hesitation to ship, and put our work in front of people.
Instead, we came to grips with the fact that our product—no matter how shiny and awesome it is—will always have imperfections. This is true not just of Loxi, but most of everything we use on a daily basis, whether it be a website, an app, or phone. That’s why patches, updates, and new versions are released. If a perfect product is the goal, then you will find yourself never shipping and in a giant hole of sunk costs.
Think minimum viable product
MVP is an acronym that gets thrown around a lot but often gets tossed out the window. The idea is to draw a firm line in the sand to determine when a product meets the basic requirements to solve the issue it was designed to address.
Anything outside of MVP is going to keep you from sharing value quickly and that, my friends, is an absolutely terrible thing to encounter. It’s easy to dream up things your product can do, but that can end up in an infinite loop that takes the project off course.
The dreaming has to stop at some point so that your team can build something tangible, something shippable.
The real magic of product development is knowing where to draw that line. Experience and expertise, in tandem with market/user research and data analysis, will help you identify where the “viable” milestone really lies. A solid product development methodology or design process should help you cut through the noise and identify your target definition of viable.
Here at Modern Tribe, we start many of our projects with an exercise that challenges us to put project ideas into one of three buckets: (1) Must Have, (2) Should Have, (3) Nice to Have. The ideas that end up in the Must Have pile help shape the scope for MVP, while things in the Should Have and Nice to Have piles gives us plenty of fodder for future releases. By structuring the roadmap in an iterative fashion, it allows us to continually learn, adjust, and vet ideas based on new information.
To continue with Loxi as a real-world example, it doesn’t have every bell or whistle, but it is extremely functional—no imperfection or shortcoming gets in the way of folks being able to accomplish the core need at hand: publishing and managing events on a calendar with ease and beauty.
Deliver value quickly
Delaying the release of a project means that someone out there is missing out on the value they could be getting from it. The beauty of working in a digital space is that we can evolve and add value to our users over time. Embrace that value and opportunity.
One of our internal rallying cries is “Deliver value quickly.” If we have something we can release, that’s an opportunity to add value for our users and learn something about where we should go.
This is the approach we used in our work with BigCommerce. Their goal was to integrate their ecommerce platform into WordPress by developing a plugin their customers could use to import products from their BigCommerce catalog into WordPress and display them on any page or post. That’s their MVP: import and display products. There are many ways we could have tackled this, and the BigCommerce team had no shortage of ideas or ways to make this plugin a real challenger in the WordPress ecommerce space.
But we always came back to the same question: is this needed to import and display products and deliver value quickly? If the answer was no, then it was an easy decision to backlog the idea for later.
This also allowed us to pin down a solid roadmap that was prioritized by the value a feature added to a user’s ability to import and display products. Ultimately, we used these priorities to break the project up into clear, distinct deliverables. Although there are many releases necessary to get to the full vision, each release feels impactful in its own right.
This gave us the framework we needed to have productive conversations throughout the project, and empowered our colleagues at BigCommerce to shape stakeholder expectations effectively. Heck yeah!
Leveling up
If you’re hoping that there’s an easy way to identify the right time to stick a fork in a project or product and call it done, then sorry to disappoint. We’ve found that releasing work is part of a bigger strategic picture—getting something out to market that addresses a specific need and becomes an ongoing series of iterations that either continues to improve how it addresses that need or expands the scope to address other areas.
Getting comfortable with an iterative release process takes time and practice. There are a ton of resources out there that give you solid pointers just like this, but ultimately it will come down to what works best for you and your team. In fact, if you’re looking to level up in this area, our friends over at BigCommerce are hosting an event this August 6–10 that will help with exactly that. The theme is “Make it Big,” and it’s a solid opportunity to hear from innovators and entrepreneurs about their creative processes and workflows to get something out to market. This free virtual conference covers a lot of ground with 25+ sessions over 5 days, and we’re excited to hear from others’ experiences. Definitely check it out.