The ongoing epic battle between “Good Enough” and Perfection…
I’m a semi-reformed perfectionist. I used to be “that guy” who always would look at the finished product and say ” we could have done that better”, lament over the many imperfections, and rail against those who made it that way (often myself). Nowadays, I still seek to achieve perfection, but with the knowledge (and hard-won experience) that true perfection in most crafts is near impossible to attain, and almost always infeasible - especially if you are trying to earn a paycheck through your craft.
In business, rapid-completion is almost always preferable to perfection. Of course, its also true that the concepts of getting things done, and getting them “right” are not black and white. So, when I say “rapid-completion is almost always preferable to perfection”, I mean that for every business or industry there is some concept of an average, “Good Enough”, break-even point where your product lacks the final gold-plating, but has enough of the bell-and-whistle features functioning in an acceptable way.
The trick is to figure out what that break-even point is as early as possible, so that you dont fruitlessly spend weeks, months, or years on a project, when your customer is looking for delivery in hours, days, or weeks. This scenario almost always ends badly, and even if you survive the realization of this expectations-mismatch, you end up having to go into hyper-mode cutting corners and hacking your project down to size, which inevitably ends up with a far inferior product than you originally sought to achieve.
Having said all of this, I have worked for countless dotcom’s from the 90’s, 00’s and even recently in 2010 where their single-minded focus upon “time-to-market” undermined the very product they were trying to create and ended up with a fruitless Death March, or changing the location of the Bulls-eye so you feel like you achieved something even if it wasn’t the product for which you initially were shooting.
In all of these cases, you eventually see these companies incur a large amount of “technical debt” which eventually dominates all of their costs and efforts, and prevents them from continuing to innovate and evolve into a profitable company. This is often one of the early signs of distress that will ultimately lead to the company’s demise. Only a company well-greased with ample money from venture capitalists or a generous (and idiotic) angel-investor will survive such mismanagement of quality over delivery.
So the question is; What is your definition of “Good enough”? When is “Good Enough” not really good enough? Is there some point when attempting to achieve perfection really is worthwhile? Is perfection truly unattainable and infeasible in all cases?
….and am I truly a semi-reformed perfectionist? (maybe I’m just deluding myself)
