Settling on Procrastination
Having options and constraints is good in moderation. Sort of a twist on explore and exploit here.
I fall in line with the thinking behind Tim Urban’s Monkey Mind TED talk [2]. Hold out until we know [1] just the right amount of information to proceed, not a second less or longer.
Feels chaotic though!
I remember I had a coworker who was all about “scope creep man, watch out for that!” His preference was for seeking comfort-in-constraints. Like business, as usual.
But I realize “wait for it…wait for it” is not everyone’s preferences.
The MVP Mafia
Ive self reflected that the 80/20 rule has turned me into a 70/30, sometimes 60/40 monster. The industry teaches perfection is wasteful. And it is the enemy of done. Often it leads ironically to a procrastination of done though!
Avoidijg waste makes sense on paper. You should release software early and often, to get early feedback and not overthink a solution that possibly no one actually wanted. But often what happens, is you release the MVP, and then life gets in the way and you are working on other deliverables.
That MVP now gets feedback in the form of bugfixes or refactors, over time. That might be fine. Long tail feedback is good too.
So maybe a dash of procrastination is the cure for MVP syndrome then. Release early and often yes, but not too early. You get a lot of pressure to release 60/40 work valed as 80/20 . Often this is because of gotchas you run into as you are deep in the weeds that were impossible to anticipate and plan for. And now you are at a deadline. You now have to renegotiate it for that extra bump from 60/40 to 80/20. Painful but worth it .