We Should Take This Outside
TONY
We should take this outside.
JARVIS (O.S.)
I must strongly caution against that. There are terabytes of calculations still needed –
TONY
We'll do them in-flight.
There's been a lot written in our industry about the value of taking it outside (shipping). Today I'd like to write a little more, with an idea that I think makes the value of shipping clear: shipping tells you, precisely, what matters.
Before you ship, everything is theory. Does the landing page defaulting to sign up versus sign in increase user acquisition? Nobody is signing up or signing in, so there's no way to know. There are positions one could take, supporting theories and best practices, but zero data points.
Before you ship, there's almost no barrier to scope. Everything is on the table and everyone has a voice. Any nice-to-have can become a must-have with the right champion. And when hot topics like security enter the conversation, almost any idea can work its way into the pre-launch backlog.
And you might not ship at all. I've seen teams headed in this direction correct themselves, but it takes talented engineers and luck. That's your biggest risk: a gold-plated application sitting on localhost with no customers. How many teams have met this fate? We'll never know– because they didn't ship.
After you ship, a magical clarity sets in. You see the things you need to fix because they're in production screaming at you. Or, things you expected to be major launch blockers have fallen silent.
After you ship, scope either has or does not have data on its side. You're iterating on something that exists, rather than deciding if it should exist, and that frees up resources. Where to reallocate those resources? Moving forward with data in hand.
And the data! After you ship, you might have some. When Tony landed, JARVIS was overloaded with it. How high can the suit climb? That's a limitation. What happens when it gets iced up? That's something to mitigate. How fast can it go? That factors into every calculation. We must fix these problems so Tony can handle any surprises in the third act.
In software, these are the only problems I want to solve. There's one way to find them: ship.