How we ship fast. 🦅
I've seen a lot of frameworks and mind-bending advice on how to ship products fast. When in fact it's pretty simple.
I've boiled it down to 5 points:
1/ Know what you want- the indecisiveness of people you're working with or your indecision is what drives missed deadlines.
2/ Organise your milestones in weeks. Easy to track. Don't overcomplicate things.
3/ Focus on locking things in. The beginning of a project is the toughest part. You're at the top of the decision funnel, so you need to work with your client and yourself to reach decisions fast.
4/ Be obsessive about details. As you're working, don't leave anything for later or to chance. Everything you ignore or postpone will bite you on your ass.
5/ Mind the architecture. Few in design (even dev for that matter) work on architecture. You'll be running around your tail for a long time if you don't have a clear product architecture. Time not invested in architecture = 10x time wasted later.
We can usually deliver a complex website from just a name in 5 weeks. We've shipped working web apps in 8 weeks. It can be done. And it's the pace startups work at nowadays.
Also - the tools available to designers and devs nowadays are incredible.
But PSA: they're supposed to make your life simple, not complicate it.
Sharing these because there are a lot of posts going around describing complex processes or made-up frameworks for delivering quality work fast.
This is how we do it and it worked amazingly so far. Hope it's useful!
Love these tips! Thank you for sharing. Points 4 and 5 stood out to me as things I want to work on to ship faster in 2023 (particularly on the dev side). Do you happen to have specific examples that might illustrate some key principles, habits, even mindsets about what you mean by “be obsessive about details” and “mind the architecture”? Whether design or dev related
Haha thanks! Glad it helped!
For sure, here are some examples:
usually, when we're working on web apps or websites there's ALWAYS that 10% that you just leave to figure out later. We usually pause a little, then come back to it the same day and wrap it up. Else it will take a lot of mind space, just for that 10%. And mind space = time. That 10% are usually key details, and it pays off to sweat the details in this case.
architecture - this is a more complicated one. Usually, this is what we bump into: we implement a design for some feature, then another feature impacts it and we have to change it. If we didn't provision for this change, we have to change whole lotta things to accommodate for the increased complexity. It can also lead to a chain of things not working properly or having to be redesigned. So provisioning for complexity and anticipating volatility ends up saving a lot of time (and sometimes the entire project)