Product Iterations: Quantity > Quality? Also, skydiving. :)

“If you’re not embarrassed when you ship, you’ve waited too long.” – Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn

One of the themes of the week was quantity of iterations over quality of iterations. In other words, get the first version of the product out the door ASAP rather than wait to perfect it. Both Jeff Veen, founder and CEO of Typekit, and Chris Golda, founder and CEO of Backtype, emphasized the importance of throwing that first rough cut out, then focusing on iterating as quickly as possible, based on customer feedback. A few weeks ago, Danny (from our very own Kwedit) and Hiten Shah from KISSmetrics also said similar things: get cash flow fast by selling a smaller product first.

As one of my professors last semester put it, what you want is to get some cash flow as soon as you can–then you can take what little money you’re making and plow it back into making the second, third iterations even better. But the point is you gotta have some money to play with first. Taken that way, the whole quantity > quality makes sense. I would say there are a few caveats here, though. One is that both Jeff and Chris are building Internet products–which are way easier to iterate in the fashion they suggest. But take Dave Merrill of Siftables TED-talk fame (one of my two big highlights of the week was getting to play with these things!)–there’s no way he’s going to release a first-generation imperfect product, then suggest that his users merely buy a new version every few weeks. Reason being, he has to work with hardware.

So cool! But not so easy to iterate.

The other part where I disagree is that I think that there is some timing to releasing iterations–I’m not convinced that the answer really is as simple as quantity > quality. A few weeks ago we attended GigaOM’s Structure conference on cloud computing, during which I attended a Bluewolf workshop. To my disappointment, the “workshop” turned out to be a glorified sales pitch for the most part and waste of time, but there was one thing the speaker mentioned that stuck with me.

Users need a window of time to “digest” between product iterations;
figure out what that window is for your audience and match that speed.

I think he was right; Jeff Veen’s users might be as happy as a clam with Typekit’s  iterating every 2-3 days (according to Jeff), but Facebook users were hella mad when privacy changes came even weeks apart. And can you imagine if Salesforce changed things around every other week? Omg, its users would stage a riot. My point isn’t that speed of iteration is bad–just that I think it really is very dependent on your audience’s speed of “digestion.”  Thoughts or experiences, anyone?

I’ll end the way I began, with a quote. Playing with Siftables was one of my two highlights this week. This was the other:

“Entrepreneurship is throwing yourself off a cliff and building a plane on the way down.” – Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn

Amelia