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The Arrogance of Building a Perfect Product
How familiar does the following story, of a production team that is building a product called “The Product” sound to you:
A Tale of Building The Perfect Product
Day and night they build on The Product. Week in and out they checked if all the features were added, found new ones to add and irrelevant ones to remove.
The scope shifted more or less. During the development project one manager got a burnout because the deadlines came closer.
Another one got replaced because of disappointing progress reports.
“The Product had to be perfect”, the product manager said in last month’s investor meeting.
“We only get one chance at a first impression, so this has to be pretty darn good!” his manager told during the weekly status meeting.
The product team got less and less motivated while working off their asses on what seemed a small bundle of functionality and a single goal in the beginning.
Only 3 more months and the product will be released, the manager told his team with a delight. The Product is finally going to be good enough to be released…
