You can’t build on top of “we’ll decide later” but you can build on top of “done”.
— Jason Fried of 37Signals.
I had this quote swirling around in my brain today. I love the writing of Jason Fried — since Getting Real back in 2006, he's inspired me to build software and build online businesses.
This relates in many ways to my recent piece on how decisions tend to be made by one person, and perhaps flies in the face of yesterday's piece on how it's perhaps too easy to build these days.
The truth is, when building anything, decision making is hard. You rarely have all the information you want, and making some decisions too early can set you off down the wrong path.
However, I believe strongly that there is an art to building good products. It is not a science, even though an appreciation of science can help. And making decisions on a product — especially one built by a small team with hundreds or thousands of customers — is an extremely non-scientific endeavour.
The allure of deciding later is a strong one — it feels more comfortable, it kicks the problem away for today, and it has the appearance of keeping your options open and giving you space to think.
But deciding later of course has a cost.
It's like when you buy a piece of flat-pack furniture from IKEA: there are some items where you don't want to tighten all of the screens and all of the bolts immediately, because some of them may need a little shuffling. And the whole piece benefits from a little flexibility while you're assembling it.
But at some point, when you're nearing completion, you want to tighten all the bolts, and get the cupboard as robust as possible. Nobody wants a cupboard with half-turned bolts and screws — it'll fall apart and quickly become useless.
Are you skirting around some loose bolts and screws in your product? Isn't it time to tighten them up? If not, what information or decision are you waiting for, and how can you get that sooner?