On Shipping: Why Done Beats Perfect
Shipping is a skill. Most people think it is about speed. It is actually about judgment — knowing which 20% of the work creates 80% of the outcome, and having the nerve to stop there.
Every PM says they believe in shipping fast. Almost none of them do. You can tell by what they treat as a blocker.
The real blockers are not technical
The most common blockers I have seen are not infra or eng capacity. They are social. Waiting for alignment from a stakeholder who has not responded in two weeks. Waiting for a design to be pixel-perfect before a single user has seen it. Waiting to feel ready.
A 90% solution shipped today teaches you more than a 100% solution shipped next quarter.
What actually shipped
At Plotch.ai, the first version of the AI-assisted product listing tool was rough. Merchants had to manually confirm most suggestions. We shipped it anyway to 50 stores, watched sessions, and had our answer in a week: the problem was not suggestion quality, it was the confirmation friction. We would have optimized the wrong thing for months if we had waited.
Done beats perfect. Not because quality does not matter, but because you need real signal before quality is even the right question.
PM at the intersection of product, engineering, and design. Currently building things that matter.