Richard Hart

Head of Something @ Somewhere
Kent, UK

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If you’re not shipping, you’re sinking

Shipping is not easy. Shipping might actually be the hardest part of creating anything. When the moment comes to ship your head is filled with questions and doubts (Thanks Lizard Brain). “What if I’ve made mistakes?” “What if I’ve missed something?” “What if there are bugs?” “What if no one likes what I’ve done?” “Oh if I could just get this extra feature in.” This fear makes shipping hard and as a consequence we push back and back and back. But by doing so we only expose ourselves to ever increasing risk. The risk that there’ll be too many features to debug, the risk that there’ll be too many unknown things to fix, the risk that we’ve been trying to solve the wrong problem all along.

I’ve shipped enough broken deployments that I no longer worry too much about bugs or broken builds. Yes, I’ve had users complain multiple times about things I’ve broken. But, more times then not, getting a half arsed solution out the door quickly has answered more questions and solved more problems then stalling and trying to do something perfectly.

Don’t be afraid of shipping and don’t hold back. No matter what you do, you will never get it right. The wonderful thing about the world is we always have tomorrow to try again.