When good enough meets quest for perfection

Conditioned for perfection

From the early days of schooling we have been conditioned to aim for perfection. Tests are graded against that, your educational choices are widened or narrowed by your performance in comparison to perfection.

Early career you strive to deliver perfect reports, presentations, etc even when given minimal or little guidance. Sometimes feedback on these efforts can be harsh especially when you have interpreted the ask differently from the way it has been intended and considering all the effort you have poured in to give it you best effort.

But as the old adage by Winston Churchill goes - “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”

MVP

Minimum.

Viable.

Product.

As product manager those words introduced by Eric Ries in his book Lean Startup have been imprinted to your consciousness deeply.

Their meaning is multi faceted. You want to be able to start shipping your product as early as possible to:

1. Start generating sales i.e. cashflow
2. Getting real-life experiences what is working and what is not working
3. Customer feedback of what features and functionality to develop next

You spend a lot of time analysing the market, user behaviour, engineering effort for different features and functionalities when devising your plans for the MVP. Because ultimately getting it wrong may mean that nobody will use or buy your product, but delaying it too far may also mean that competition has beaten you to the punch.

Good enough

So can we adapt MVP approach to everyday working life? After my early career years I have been employing this approach to work. Especially when I have felt that the task setting has been too high level for me to grasp the expected outcome or there are many possible different ways to approach the assignment.

I call this approach good enough as in is this good enough for getting feedback early and fast enough to make adjustments before spending hours going off in the wrong direction.

Another application of good enough is to get things done with the minimum amount of effort, so that you can focus on the more important topics. Not all things that you do and are being asked to do are equal in importance, so preparing a board level $100M+ investment proposal presentation and answering a request for latest product sales funnel figures by your boss need different levels of refinement and also fine-tunement of the way they are presented.

Finding the balance

The tricky bit is finding the balance between perfection and good enough and when to employ each one or a combination of both.

You want you work to be taken seriously, so you would be well served in always striving for perfection in such things as spelling, ensuring right dates and years in your collateral.

Things like graphs, the underlying data might be more coarse as you want the feedback on those to see if your thinking is aligned with the ask.

Speed is of the essence. If you take 4 months to produce a 5 page skeleton document it will most likely not be well received, but if you do that in 1/2 day the feedback will surely be different.

Also worth considering is this work that already has established set of expectations that your work can and will be measured against.

This is a journey that starts by few psychological adjustments:

1. You don’t need to be perfect all the time
2. Practice when to go for perfection and when not
3. Part of the art of good enough is to learn that you don’t need to know nor understand everything perfectly to make decisions. It may not even be possible.

Accepting good enough

It’s one thing to learn accepting yourself to do good enough, but a whole another ball game to accept that in other people’s work. Especially when they are your reports - direct or in-direct. As you have risen through the ranks by producing superior work, how can you now pass on good enough work?

Being one that is still on this learning curve there are two considerations:

• Is it a “teachable” moment for the person submitting the work. Will the be better served holistically for requiring them to spend the extra effort so that future work quality will improve
• Is it worth the effort - 80/20, Pareto, etc - spending time on getting to the next level. Will it give you that much more value add that you can justify it instead of closing other work that adds collectively more value.

For latter it is still highly recommended that you give feedback on what could have been improved.

Obviously you can always step in and do the final improvements by yourself, but you don’t want that to become a habit where others expect you to finish their work.

MVP from ProductPlan - https://www.productplan.com/glossary/minimum-viable-product/

https://chiefexecutive.net/when-good-enough-should-be-good-enough/

https://medium.com/swlh/good-enough-is-enough-2cacfda48928

https://hbr.org/2011/08/good-enough-can-be-great