Making Progress

Do you know that saying…?

“How do you eat an elephant?” — “One bite at a time…”

Think about MVPs and iterative improvements.

Very often, we tend to invent projects that do a lot of things. Then we have a hard time finishing them and maybe never even release them. It is better to think about minimum viable products — a product that is just enough to be useful and shippable. You can then release that thing and improve it with the feedback you gain in following iterations.

Personal example: I’m creating a database/storage system called KVItems. I have a huge codebase and lots of hidden documentation about it. It is brilliant, maybe (at least I hope so ;-)), but never going to be finished. The website shows a work in progress hint, hoping that some day I will judge that whole thing good enough and release it. Guess what? This is never going to happen. My new approach is to start with a minimal version and improve it in iterations. We’ll see how far this is going to get me…

Make small steps. Release early and often.

There’s a software development philosophy called Release early, release often. It basically comes down to the same idea: Try to release a minimum viable product early and improve it with feedback, taking small steps in frequent iterations.

Don’t try to be perfect on the first beat.

How often did you not release a thing because you thought it was just not good enough? Don’t get me wrong: High quality standards are a good thing. They let you improve und deliver good work. But don’t let perfectionism get in your way. Maybe your thing actually is good enough already! You can release it and improve it in the next iteration…

For more input on this topic, check out this video from John Sonmez on my reader question:

Show off “Work in Progress” and beta content.

Sometimes, “work in progress” and beta content can be sexy.

Personal example: When I was working on my website take-home-message.de — basically a collection of quotes — I had the whole thing finished 95%. I was struggling to release it, because some quotes lacked fine-tuning. I knew that if I wanted to complete all of this, it would take days or weeks. I then introduced signs saying “Something has to be done here…”. My readers were very happy about the vast majority of complete content and also appreciated the work in progress...