Get it Out There

When is a product ready? When is a project done? When is the document finished?

It never is of course. Nothing’s perfect in the B2B world. It can always be improved upon. It can always receive another iteration. We can always go round again.

Back in the heady dot com days of the late 1990’s, it was all about ‘ready, fire, aim.’ Look where that got us. In many cases it generated false hopes, over-inflated intentions and a lot of failed businesses.

But there’s still an important philosophical argument to be waged between the ‘it’s ready enough, get it out there and see how it goes’ and the ‘no, it needs more work, let’s put the brakes on and get it out late but better’. This inevitably creates tensions within the business.

The younger and more junior you tend to be in an organisation, the more you favour the former camp. Customers will tell us what they think. It’s time to ask them and then we can iterate accordingly, or so runs the argument. ‘Pick a point and go,’ as I’ve said before. The older and more senior you are, with more at stake, and more experience to back it up, the more you side with the latter camp. It’s not going out like this. I’m not happy. We can do better and we should wait, get it right, and offer customers a better experience, you might say.

Hmm, get it right, versus get it out there. When is a product right?