Why it not good practice to have everything 100% perfect before releasing it?

One of the lessons I learned early in my career was that it does not pay to wait and have everything in your project working 100% perfect.  This also includes graphics and design elements.  So, what is the problem with waiting until everything is correct?

First off let me tell you a little story about a project I was working on twenty-four years ago.  I had registered a domain name for my property portal which would allow all of the estate agents in Ireland to have a central portal for their property listings.  I spent two years working on it creating the following:

• Excellent verified content on all matters relating to homes from decorating to repairs to planning laws and sales advice.
• Pixel perfect graphics
• Impactful Design and layout
• Finding partners for my portal
• Finding advertisers for my portal

Then I had some family issues that required me to divert my money to my mum’s health (no regrets there), however, I was four months away from the project now and forgot to renew my domain name (back then you got no reminder to renew).  This resulted in another company obtaining the domain name and within three months had released their portal to the estate agents and advertisers. This company released a database of clients and their property, none of the content that I had worked so hard to collect and verify was evident in their content, the had a simple database to offer.

Any way to make a long story short, twelve years later the portal was resold for fifty-six million Euro.  The lesson I learned was that what you may feel the end-user is looking for may not be what they actually want, and with this portal that was the case.  End users just wanted an image, location, contact details and price to complete their mission.  I failed to research the end user assuming that I knew what they wanted based on what I would be looking for in a property portal.

My waiting to have everything pixel perfect was my downfall, I should have released the portal as a beta version and progressed from there with the development of the portal and tested each version and researched my audience better along the way.

The same is true for any project including eLearning.  It is better to start with notebook drawings, then wireframe diagrams and finally a working beta module(s).  Completing every project to 100% before testing with your testers and clients will cost you money in the end. You may be putting in way more than the client expects or even wants in the project and this will hit your overall profit for the entire project.

It is best to agree on the release of your project at various points along the completion timeline to allow the client to sign off and or request more changes to the modules.  Remember to sit with both your client and a selection of end users to ensure you know what is required in the scope of works and that everything that goes into the project adds true value for the client and end user.

When I got involved with Google as a Product Tester I learned a lot about you should release, when you should release and how it good to let the client or end users find bugs in the works for you.  That’s not to say you should turn out shoddy or low quality work and let the client or end user do the work for you, rather it to help you improve your product by involving the end users by getting feedback about what the like, dislike, would drop or need to add to make the product more successful.

Take Google as a great example, they realised that all their end user needed to get started was a web page with a simple search bar located in the centre of the page. They knew that the end user was not interested in stock prices, latest news or what was trending, just a simple search box.  Compare that to Bing or Yahoo?