Good Enough is a Perfect Product Goal

If you’re trying to make your product perfect, you’re wasting your time. You’re just need to make it “Good Enough.”

This isn’t a new concept, but one that every perfectionist has to have beaten into them. Heck, even Voltaire (allegedly) said, “the best is the enemy of the good.” We can get so focused on making sure something is perfect that we fail to make anything good at all.

“Good Enough” can mean different things at different times. Certainly proposing to your girlfriend at a McDonald’s likely isn’t “Good Enough,” unless there’s something magical about those Arches in your particular relationship. Shipping a product that doesn’t work isn’t “Good Enough,” unless the consumer is somehow in on the bug fixing process (which is–oddly–a think in the game world). Delivering something significantly different than promised isn’t “Good Enough,” unless…well, I can’t think of an unless here. You shouldn’t do this one unless you discuss it with the client first!

Knowing when something is “Good Enough” is hard. Which is why the Entrepreneur world has developed a concept called the Minimal Viable Product.

Minimal Viable Product is the Perfect Product

If you are delivering a product, you can’t sit around on it, tinkering with it over and over again until you feel like it’s perfect. Ship SOMETHING to test out the idea. If the thing you ship is popular enough, then you know you have a product to improve over time.

If it fails, well…time for the next idea.

Let’s use Netflix for an example. It’s hard to remember, but back in the day they were a rental subscription service. I was first in line when they started testing video streaming. The product kinda sucked. Limit selection (Red Dwarf was the only standout), questionable video quality, and an odd time limit based on your disc subscription.

But it was good enough to get a taste into their future plans. People like me tested it out and saw a great product in the pipeline. Netflix saw the demand, and completely pivoted their business strategy.

If Netflix had waited until they had a full fledged streaming service, it’s likely the company would be the behemoth it is today.

Start Small, Then Grow

Approach your products with this MVP mentality. Do you need the best, fanciest website? Not at the start. Do you need to make sure every word in your book is correct? Big host publishers even have typos–just make sure it’s not a hindrance to the reading. Do you need a full, generational album before you can release your music? Obviously not, Singles are the currency these days.

You need something to bring people in, to get people excited. If that Minimal Viable Product strikes a cord, then you can invest your time and money into making it better.

Don’t spent countless dollars and hours making something perfect. It could be that after you do, you discover there was no market for your product at all.

SIDE NOTE: This post mostly discusses perfection where it relates to products. Soon I’ll touch on the problem of perfection in service.