I think that even at the 90% mark, there's value in giving what I would call "craft-work feedback": the type of feedback one craftsman gives another.
First, you tell them that, from the perspective of the end-user, their craftwork is done, and nobody will notice anything wrong with it. It's shippable. It's usable. They probably won't hear one complaint, and sales will be good.
Then you point out the little things. The things that only other craftsmen will notice, but that end-users, despite not knowing to look for them, would still appreciate if you changed. The things that would take the thing from "done" to "perfect." The things that are, to most craftsmen, "just a matter of pride."
But you must finish off by reminding them that since they have a deadline (and they do, even if they call it "runway"), it's not even a matter of fixing all the little things. They don't have time to fix all the little things. Instead, it's a matter of picking the highest-impact ones they can fix in the time available, fixing those, and then shipping.
I think the key insight from such an explanation is that there are always some issues you point out that they must simply "accept": it's wrong, and now they're aware it's in there, but it's not going to get fixed, and it's going to ship like that, and everyone is going to see it (though only other craftsmen will notice it.) Tell them that they can't be paralysed by this thought: instead, they must accept it, learn from it, and do better with the next one.
Engineering, to some extent, requires mastering the art of knowing when to temporarily abandon a project in the intest of shipping. A mature engineer has gone through this cycle multiple times to the point that the "abandon to ship" concept becomes part of his/her normal process. It's far too easy to keep at it and never ship anything.
Absolutely spot on about the "craftsman advice". It's something I've really striven for, because while much of what we do requires that you just put in the time (structuring things well, designing robust systems, etc), "craftsman advice" can be used pretty much immediately.
> Often times, when I seek feedback on a project, it’s not actually constructive feedback that I want; it’s simply approval. I want a pat on the back and a “job well done.”
I think creative people want and need both. I spent a lot of my free time working on a non-fiction book[1]. I'm really aggressive about soliciting feedback: every page of the book links directly to its issue tracker on github[2].
I love critical, detailed feedback. I want my book to be great, and I can't improve the clarity of my writing without people telling me, "this was confusing" or "this was boring". Bug reports fill me with joy.
At the same time, though, the reason they fill me with joy is because they make the book better. And a big part of the reason I care about making the book better is because it means I get more approval, more email patting me on my back.
I'm fortunate enough to also get positive feedback, comments from people that say nothing more than "You're doing a great job!" That isn't actionable feedback, but if I didn't hear those kinds of comments too, I wouldn't have the motivation for the feedback that is actionable.
Asking what kind of feedback you wish to receive (or are asked to give) is important.
When asked for feedback on a 90% completed project you simply shouldn't comment on the big picture, that's set, the feedback is about what small, tactical changes can be done to improve the invested effort. While at 30% things are more strategic... are you missing an essential part? can it be restructured?
I think this post exactly encapsulates the pattern my wife and I have settled on after 15+ years of lively (sometimes embittered?) discussion. Now, we've learned to always ask: "are we editing, or scoping", or "tactical or strategic"? Asking what sort of feedback someone is seeks is essential to non-frustrating communication and having your review received properly -- in a manner that is actionable.
Has anyone else found themselves on the extreme end of focusing too much on shipping quickly? One of the realizations I had this year was that in the process of wanting to ship quickly, I'd started doing mediocre work. More recently I have been encouraging myself to take whatever amount of time it takes for me to build something I am at least a bit proud of. Sure I don't want it to take any more time than necessary; but I also don't want to be shipping things consistently that I am far from proud of.
If you release something that you are far from proud of and have users, I guarantee you will know what to build or fix next that will most improve your feature for your current user base. That is not something you will have if you didn't ship first
Totally. Though I took stock of all my projects in the last 15 years, and almost every single one of the projects that I launched for the sake of shipping quickly failed. The ones that got traction are ones that I spent a lot more time(and emotion) towards.
This is something I struggle with thinking about too as the founding designer, and generally most quality-driven person, at our company. The simplified version of the spectrum as I see it is:
1. Shipping quickly with a shitty solution.
2. Shipping slightly slower with a polished solution.
3. Shipping very slowly because minor details took over.
The frustrating thing is I can generally feel the difference between #1 and #2 myself, but I'm not sure how to distinguish between #1 and #2 enough to argue my point to the rest of the team. Instead I usually have to result in vague responses about quality and reputation and such, or just go into the UI or codebase and tweak things myself.
But on the flip side, I also know that I bring up issues that, at first glance, I think are must-haves for quality, but really aren't. Instead the scope should be decreased not to include the feature at all. But my credibility each time I bring up something like that is diminished, rightfully so.
I often struggle with this when giving friends advice about their MVPs too. Everyone has gotten so wrapped up in MVPs and they equate the MVP to throwing quality out the door, but MVPs are much more about throwing away scope in my opinion. I actually think quality can actually break or break an MVP, but it's hard to convey this properly to non-design-focused founders because they might not see the difference between certain purely-aesthetically-driven decisions and the more general and important product-quality driven decisions.
We built the Segment.io MVP in two days, but we did it by cutting scope, not quality. We didn't have a settings page, a way to delete accounts, a way to reset passwords, a way to invite teammates, anything that seems like it's necessary to work on a project. We literally had:
1. A junky home page.
2. A login page that literally just two inputs and a submit button.
3. A signup page that was similar.
4. *The* product page that was a glorified settings form.
Instead we spent that time making sure the core form in the product was as helpful and simple to understand as we could make it. There was an animation that we added when turning an integration on that was completely unnecessary from an MVP standpoint, but it was one of those quality things that made it super obvious how the form worked, and added a touch of polish to the product.
Obviously this is completely anecdotal, so I have no idea what would have happened had we went the other way, but I do really think that some of the things we spent time getting right had an impact on our user's perceived quality of the launch. I'm not sure how successful we would have been had we not done that.
There's a really good article[1] by Ryan Singer (from 37signals) on this topic that argues that it basically boils down to scope. And we've found this to be really true for ourselves while working on Segment.io. Basically you go with the designer's (or close to it) opinion on what quality should be, and the way you reduce time taken to ship a feature is to drastically cut scope. It sounds way easier than it is, but I think finding ways to cut scope is easily one of the top 5 things I've learned since starting the company.
And Ryan also has another good article[2] about how to cut down on design time by focusing on capability instead of styling. I think he's right there, style in the early stages (while important from a first experience point of view for your users) only need to be "good" not "great". Basically most designers can pretty easily decide on a style pretty quickly for an MVP and then execute on it, whether it's amazing or nt. But capability should be paid more attention to because that is where things like "did this solve my problem?", "do I want to share this with my friends?", etc. come into play more.
I don't know if that helps at all, but I'd definitely love to read more people talking about this.
the way you reduce time taken to ship a feature is to drastically cut scope
That's such a great way of putting it! I think what makes this difficult is that it is hard to come up with a formula - so much of it is a "feel" that you develop over years of doing it.
Also, in tech we often account for the development time but not as much the time for everything else. Even though segment.io took you two days to build the MVP, I have a feeling it took you many, many more "passive" hours of thinking about the problem(may be even before you decided to turn it into a startup). When you take that into account the time you spent experiencing the problem and thinking through the various solutions, the MVP took you a lot more than 2 days to build.
One of my most successful projects took me barely a day to code. But it was a painpoint that I experienced and thought about pretty much every week of my undergrad. But for some reason, I did not feel I was in a position to attack the problem until a very particular moment. I'd like to think that if I attacked the problem the very first time I had the inkling of the pain, my solution may have been very different and less likely to gain traction.
That's a really good point about passive time before the actual building. We had definitely been thinking about the problem for a while, and analytics.js[1] had already existed for at least 6 months in its current form and another 6 months in a prior one.
It just takes a while to start developing solid, bigger-picture ideas about a problem. This is also why it's hard to realize the negatives of "pivoting" all the time, since we take for granted how much we've already invested in groking a particular space.
The same thing happened recently while hacking on Myth[2]. To everyone on the team it felt like building the entire thing only took a couple days, but really I had been experimenting with a similar idea[3] for multiple months, and it was already being used in production for our own CSS. The piece that took a few short days was just figuring our the best way to design the landing page—much less scope that conceiving the entire idea.
It's really hard to quantify that kind of time investment, and even harder to explain that to friends who think that everyone is launching fully-formed, successful MVPs in a single weekend without much thought. It definitely seems like something that can only be learned through experience. It's just an earlier stage version of the classic problem of founders always thinking that successful startups spring out of nowhere, when really the multiple years of living in a cramped room and almost killing each other is just shielded from view.
At least it makes things more defensible :)
Random other thought: I often catch myself bundling up tons of logic into a "first commit" and wishing that that wasn't a common practice, so that we could learn about how the beginnings of codebases are iterated on.
> 2. A login page that literally just two inputs and a submit button.
> 3. A signup page that was similar.
I don't think I'd be amiss in pointing out the login page of the site we're using right now, which has one page with both of those forms in exactly that format. :)
I worked at a place where we tried practicing the principle of the 30% demo. We had one additional point -- at 30%, you should have rough "end-to-end" progress.
This made a drastic difference in how early we were able to assess a design direction. Previously we would have only made 30% progress but that 30% would have been polished. Making it an "end-to-end" demo allowed us to get that kind of rough feedback on the whole feature. And if we needed to, tuning our direction at that point wasn't that painful.
The result was that we no longer had to throw away work that was polished but didn't deliver the goals we wanted -- or worse, continue to force the path because of sunk cost bias, ignoring the feelings that something wasn't right.
When someone takes way too long to get a first draft out because they’re being perfectionists and you praise them for their quality craftsmanship
Does that ever happen in real life? I don't think people need any more encouragement to praise speed. Speed is already valued an order of magnitude more than quality to the point where it is the only thing that's looked at. (In part that's because speed is easier to measure and show on a chart.)
Totally depends on the person. You rarely see the work of those people because they never get anything out the door.
If you're familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, it's the flipside of the fools who don't know how little they know and ship garbage. The people who are strongly aware of how little they know may never ship anything.
Ira Glass puts this well: "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."
I agree. I think the speed argument is becoming a little oversimplistic. The problem usually isn't speed as much as folks not spending that time on the right items. No one would complain if you took 2 more days to build a feature that you felt was absolutely key for your product; but everyone would complain if you always felt rounded corners were super critical or you always feel every feature is critical.
Note that you don't always have to be always right(meaning that feature you thought was really needed does not have to take off) but you do need to constantly calibrate your judgement so you get a feel for the type of intensity any given problem requires.
Ive been doing this with my own startup. I am about 30% there (regarding talking to investors about it) and as such I have reached out to investors I am friendly with and asked for feedback.
Most of the feedback I have received was "you are about 25% there" which validated my assumption of not quite being ready to approach people for money, and it has allowed me to refine and adapt my pitch accordingly.
It was much easier to get feedback from people when I told them I was just starting out, instead of telling them I am ready to receive money. This opened them up to positive and constructive feedback that is helping me get closer to my goal.
1. Asking for feedback in a way that will result in a constructive response
2. Accepting constructive feedback
Just a few days ago I asked people to rip apart my consulting page [0], and I received a handful of truly excellent feedback; some positive, some negative, but all were constructive.
PS - Glad to see you're using a gag cartoon instead of just a stock image. For anyone else wanting to do the same (it gets more engagement than stock photos), I run a side project that helps you find and license these cartoons easily and cheaply [1]. I know Jason Cohen (of WPEngine) uses similar cartoons.
This is really great. It's really easy to disincentivize the right behavior. If you point out every typo in a first draft, then people aren't going to let you see work that's not "90%" done, even if you tell them to bring you a "30% draft."
Actually, I'm explicitly saying don't worry about that stuff when you come to me for 30% feedback. I don't want you to have to worry about whether you're being respectful of me. I simply want to be helpful, and I'm giving you freedom to deal with those typos, misaligned pixels, unformatted images, broken links on your own schedule.
I suspect both parent comment and OP are using the idiom of "typo" to refer to any inconsequential issue. That pixel is misaligned, that tone of green is different from that tone of green, there Lorem Ipsum text, etc.
But if I have the word Meat instead of Meet or Their instead of There, than yeah, you should probably correct me at any stage.
Jason brings up a very good point. Especially the first part (where people tend to dislike tough criticisms) resonated very well with me because - my startup, StartUpLift.com - specializes in providing crowdsourced feedback to startups. One of the features that we offer to startups is that they can reject any feedback / feedback provider at no cost to them. It's interesting to note that more than 65% of the rejection happens when when they get some sort of negative feedback, which in fact is a disguised constructive criticism.
This is a great post. There is alot of value added to getting feedback before the "proof-reading" stage. What is harder perhaps in this equation is finding the time, the person, and the structure to provide you this feedback. But it is in the "30% done stage" when even a small amount of astute input can have a huge productivity benefit. There is a real art to getting something in "good enough shape" to be interesting for the reviewer (ie, not wasting their time), and thought through enough so that the important tensions & dynamics are able to be shown in rough-hewn relief (ie, so the analysis is also useful to you). I'm a firm believer that this is a great place to have a mentor (or, if it fits your fancy better... a muse). And also successful people are often blessed with having this type of support infrastructure in place. It really helps to build depth into the work, in a way which is different from pure "hyper-focus". The can counter the trend toward narcissism and lessen the tendency to attribution error.
I think developing a thick skin is most important when asking for someone to review your work. I don't have any developers locally that I can ask to look at stuff, so I'm never going to get a professional point of view.
Instead I just ask friends / family / people I meet in the pub to review an app and sit back and listen. Since these are "normal" people, a lot of them will be put into the mindset that you're trying to show how clever you are because you wrote an app and will instantly try and find every little thing wrong.
You have to just sit back, nod and smile, say thanks, and then pick through the feedback looking for the important bits.
In fact I believe this is a generally useful life skill. Try and listen to everyone, even if you think they're completely nuts, and sieve out the decent remarks without ego. It's not easy but I think it's important to practise.
Dead on. I used to this model to edit student and colleagues' work for years. Impt to note is that it's a huge time investment to give feedback for the 30% part. I want to know from the start what the person wants, so that I don't invest time and energy into a project when he or she really just wants a copy edit. This model is a win-win for both sides.
I think your missing the tactical advice here as well, which has to do with how you interact with other people. If you use the example of a piece of art that is going into a gallery, there is a huge difference in the advice you get at the 90% level (ie, you get color, lighting, framing, sequencing, perhaps media technicals). Whereas if you go in and get advice for your project at the 30% phase, you are likely to get feedback on the conceptualizations, themes, media choice, and perhaps even some research notes to follow up on. In other words, this is a similar distinction between what is the long-run and what is the short-run (answer: more variables are in play). So at the most extreme level of abstraction you are correct, but this post is more about understanding there are multiple levels of abstraction over which to optimize. And I do think that's a good lesson for people who are in creative/invetive/entrepreneurial endeavors. Getting an idea to 'gel' or to 'crystalize' is a hugely different process than getting one 'polished'.
Not sure. Applying it to the design. By 30%you should have a general feel for what it's going to do, how it's going to do it, and why. You might even have a rough idea of the interface. This is probably 30%. Asking for criticism at this point is probably invaluable.
We do this all the time at Mindsense. It's a great way to go about giving and asking for feedback.
Whenever I'm asked for feedback, I first provide only high-level feedback about the direction of the work, ignoring little things like sentence structure. I then say when they are ready for the typos and grammars feedback, let me know.
Giving and receiving feedback is one of the hardest things to do in a company. (Or relationship) There are books about it, there is training to do it, but sometimes it still just doesn't work. As such, most managers shy away. I will give this a try.
Off topic but what is the HN "share" icon on the right sliding box supposed to show? Up votes or submissions or comments? It's reading 0 right now so either way it doesn't seem to be working (unless it's just me).
Practical application: when I work on a large new feature I will often create mini pull requests to gather feedback on a few hundred lines of code and then merge them into my feature branch, which may be thousands of lines.
This is good insight, and it's precisely the problem I'm starting to see with GitHub repos. People have no easy, standard, way of telling if a given repo is 30% complete or 90% complete. :/
First, you tell them that, from the perspective of the end-user, their craftwork is done, and nobody will notice anything wrong with it. It's shippable. It's usable. They probably won't hear one complaint, and sales will be good.
Then you point out the little things. The things that only other craftsmen will notice, but that end-users, despite not knowing to look for them, would still appreciate if you changed. The things that would take the thing from "done" to "perfect." The things that are, to most craftsmen, "just a matter of pride."
But you must finish off by reminding them that since they have a deadline (and they do, even if they call it "runway"), it's not even a matter of fixing all the little things. They don't have time to fix all the little things. Instead, it's a matter of picking the highest-impact ones they can fix in the time available, fixing those, and then shipping.
I think the key insight from such an explanation is that there are always some issues you point out that they must simply "accept": it's wrong, and now they're aware it's in there, but it's not going to get fixed, and it's going to ship like that, and everyone is going to see it (though only other craftsmen will notice it.) Tell them that they can't be paralysed by this thought: instead, they must accept it, learn from it, and do better with the next one.