Stop trying to be perfect- How to know when your business is good enough
“Perfect is the enemy of good.” - Italian proverb
We’ve seen this over and over again.
As leaders, who also tend to be a single point of failure for our companies, we have a tendency to want our work and that of our teams to be the absolute best.
Leaders establish lofty standards - which can push our team to strive for better but can also quickly turn into a set of unreasonable standards.
Leaders strive for perfection as if perfection is the single indicator of potential success.
The actual indicators of success
The actual indicators of success are straightforward. Answer these two questions about your business:
Are people buying your product?
Is your team happy?
Everything else beyond these two things is superfluous because it means you’re no longer working on your customer needs or team needs.
What to focus on instead of perfection
Perfection is not real.
Perfection assumes you alone know exactly what your customers will want and will pay for.
Perfection is expensive - both time and money - and limits the quick feedback loops that help startup teams be nimble and focused.
We let perfect get in the way of good enough. Because of this choice, things take too long, frustrations can rise, and we create a pressure cooker.
How to decide when it’s “good enough”
So, how do you decide when you’re done? How do you know something is “good enough?” What is the amount of effort that is appropriate to apply to a given project?
These are big, tough questions.
First, internally assign a grade to the project, you can choose the scale.
A→F (Where an A+ is perfect but a C is something that gets the job done.)
Pass/Fail (Where a failing grade prevents the project from accomplishing the objective.)
Then, if it gets a passing grade, it goes into the “good enough” bucket to be shipped without much more work.
The deciding factor is not subjective to yourselves but objective to the desired result (or the definition of success).
Here’s an example
Take product development, a massive potential time suck and a project with many stakeholders.
How can you determine the ‘right’ amount of effort (and how can you lead your team to operating under these same goals?
It starts in your customer’s minds.
Are your current customers people who will like and delight in a C level product if priced cheap?
Or will they wait for the A product?
What portion of your TAM follows this “A > C” product?
How does that fit with your go-to-market strategy of asking innovators and early adopters to purchase first?
By focusing on this customer-first mindset you can better determine when to ship a C product and keep moving forward, or when to iterate and refine an A product.
We’ve found that by asking these questions when exploring initiatives we can immediately create a mind share on the team and a path to get there.
This most simple sounding of tools can massively change how a new initiative is approached.