Somewhere between the long nights troubleshooting the CSS and XHTML for the new Alt Text and the creation of not one or two but three lists of tasks that needed to be completed for the site to be “just so” I mentioned to Jesse the things I still needed to do before I launched. He told me something interesting, and off-handed. He said “Just launch it, that’s agile baby.” Now I may be paraphrasing a bit but that is the gist. I laughed him off, thinking that launching a half-finished redesign of my personal blog is not really what the agile method is all about. But as it turns out Jesse was right. I finally did allow many of the tasks on my list to flow onto the “after launch” list and even some big ones to be open for public help. The way I looked at it, the new design represented a pretty big improvement (even with the bugs) over the older one and I just needed to get it out there.
It turns out Guy Kawasaki would agree. I am currently reading his last two books:The Art of the Start and Rules For Revolutionaries and there is a lot of similarities with what he is saying and what folks like 37signals are preaching. Kawasaki tells us in Rules for Revolutionaries that we shouldn’t fear shipping an imperfect product…
Revolutionary products don’t fail because they are shipped too early. They fail because they aren’t revised fast enough.
He goes on to quote Winston Churchill:
To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often.
Although he calls it churn, Kawasaki is really talking about constantly changing and refactoring your products be better. He illustrates the Japanese model as it contrasts with the traditional American way:
American:
Concept –> Engineering –> Marketing –> Customer
Japanese:
Concept –> Engineering –> Customer –> Churn (repeats as a circle)
You must plan for change and embrace it in your products life cycle. Furthermore you should change your product for your users, not for your non-users. This may seem to make sense but many companies ask, “What would our product need to have in order to increase market share?” That is the wrong question. A better question would be “what do our user’s need to make their lives easier?” or “how can we allow our customers to use our products less?”
Though only somewhat related to this post, Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start presentation this past May at TiECon is worth checking out.
