The shipping mentality

I strongly believe that once a startup reaches a certain maturity, the mentality of shipping things as fast as possible becomes less relevant, and the mentality of quality becomes more relevant.

It’s probably blindingly obvious when viewing this in hindsight, or from an outside perspective and thinking “shoulda just done that from the beginning”, but we all know there is never that ideal scenario to work with, and the roadmap to maturing a product is a messy one.

When we start to build up quality in a product or service, we have to remove this notion of getting things out as fast as possible.

In a startup environment, pace is quick, change is quicker, things are unpredictable, but we must focus and deliver the best we can in the given situation, which means that if something is not good enough, we need to question whether we should release it. Because if you really think about it, what is the benefit of speed when other aspects of this thing we’ve shipped has been compromised?

Quality cannot be built with speed, it cannot be measured by a percentage, or a feature, it’s a complex puzzle that includes a ton of things, and those things affect other things; it’s like a puzzle inception. It has to take time to mature because the quality is only felt by experiencing.

If something is worthwhile building, then let’s make it worthwhile using.

There has to be a foundation, a belief in quality, in everyone working on the product to really make this happen.

The mentality of shipping should then shift to the mentality of quality.