How to balance quality and time to release?

It can be exhausting to spend months crafting the smallest feature as a Product Manager. At the same time, you need a quality to give your idea a fighting chance. How to balance that?

Product managers deliver value. Actually, it’s more precise to say that product managers are there to bet on actions that will deliver growth of that value in time. We’re not really interested in sudden and temporary bursts of return on our investment. Instead, we’re looking for initiatives that will grow our main metrics on an ongoing basis.

Thus, it is an extremely difficult aspect of the Product Manager’s job to decide when to release a certain increment/product. Getting something that is full of bugs and hardly works will bury any promising initiative. At the same time, polishing something for months on end will result in growing uncertainty and value loss.

Not to mention that someone may beat you to the punch in the meantime. Reid Hoffman says that if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

Thus it is clearly about finding the right balance!

So to know your product is ready to amaze users? Here are some pieces of advice I’d wish to share with you: