Done over Perfect

You can’t learn from something that’s still in your head.

Every day spent polishing is a day not learning from real users. Every feature added before launch is a feature that might be solving the wrong problem.

You can’t think your way to product-market fit. You have to ship your way there.

And shipping is not the finish line — it’s the starting point. The real question isn’t “did we deliver on time?” It’s “did it make a difference?” A feature that ships on schedule but moves no metric is not a success. It’s well-organized waste.

What This Means in Practice

• Ship the MVP — validate demand before perfecting the experience
• Define success criteria before building, not after launching
• Set deadlines that force scope cuts
• Treat “good enough” as a deliberate, strategic choice
• Measure user outcomes, not delivery dates
• Follow up after launch — did it actually work?
• Be willing to kill or iterate on features that don’t deliver results

Common Traps

• Pushing back launch “just one more week” (and then another)
• Adding features to avoid the discomfort of launching
• Celebrating launches instead of celebrating impact
• Moving on to the next feature before measuring the last one
• Treating the roadmap as a contract instead of a hypothesis
• Confusing “we shipped it” with “it worked”

Remember

“Real artists ship.” — Steve Jobs

Done beats perfect. Not because quality doesn’t matter — but because shipping is how you find out what quality actually means. The roadmap is a guess. Results are the truth.