Just Ship*

For years, my career has been centered around one short, simple phrase. When you're the only designer at a five-person, seed-funded startup, "just ship" is the name of the game. You're sprinting to launch the product, to get the next feature done, to fix that bug in production. If you stop shipping, someone's going to beat you. If you stop shipping, you're dead.

It's also really easy to get caught up in the act of launching stuff. The high of hitting that deploy button to x-number-of-millions-of-users is addictive as hell. And in a metrics-based world, quantity is a charming indicator. You shipped one thing a month this year? That's way better than three things all year, right? You must be a really nimble team to ship all of that stuff so quickly. There's a sense of pride when looking at your product roadmap and joking with your coworkers, I have no idea how we're going to get all of this done. ;)

I've been doing it all wrong. "Just ship" needed, and still needs, an asterisk attached. An asterisk that, at the bottom of the page, reads: Great products.

I've been asked a few times by design candidates whether we evaluate Etsy designers by how much they've shipped in a given period of time. The answer to that question is a resounding no. We evaluate designers based on what they chose to ship and, even more importantly, what they decided not to ship. In a world where we can deploy to production with the click of a mouse, it takes a hell of a lot more guts to pull back on deploying a so-so product than it does to push it out. It takes a lot more moxie to say that's not good enough to your own work and choose to give it that last ten percent.

We work in a world now where fast isn't good enough. Where quantity is fairly regularly getting edged out by quality. You shipped twelve just-good-enough things this year? You're about to get smoked by folks who shipped three of those things thoughtfully and holistically. Where you cut corners on twelve projects to get them out the door, someone else crafted three focused experiences and left themselves little-to-no design or technical debt.

Now, I'm not suggesting we all run off and build monolithic, year-long features. It's as important as ever to find small ways to validate our ideas before dedicating time and resources to larger efforts. Not to mention there's a metric ton of value in finding and executing quick wins (we do that all the time at Etsy). But those wins and idea-validating experiments are only sustainable and real if they are done well. Wins don't happen after you ship, they happen when you're executing. Launching alone is not a key indicator of success.

Let's start congratulating ourselves for a job well done, instead of simply a job that's done.