Want to make sure you ship a quality product that the entire team is behind? When the time comes, make sure you know when to get out of the way – or, help folks push in to a situation where you can get out of the way and they can get their feedback and ideas in.
Having been through multiple large release cycles, I know that there is a time in each where an element of urgency and awareness kicks in. Everyone pushes towards a date, but sometimes that date falls by the wayside in favor of shipping something that’s got a high degree of quality. This is a good thing so long as it’s monitored. Folks dive in and start firing off things that need to be fixed / debugged / better / etc…
This is a great time. But know your place as the product person. You have to get out of the way and let the triage happen. Development will be just fine managing the intake. They are just as close (and in some cases, closer) to the product as you are and you’ll find 9/10 they will make good prioritization decisions on their own.
All you can do is make sure you stay on top of everything coming through your inbox / noted at meetings / discussed on calls and ensure things stay as consistent as possible. That’s your primary job during triage, aside from doing testing yourself. However, that can sometimes be hard since you’ve probably been super close the product throughout the entire release cycle, so do your best and provide development with as much as you can.
The other thing to watch out for is to make sure triage does not last too long. You don’t want to be entering the third week fixing things like, “this word should be that world” or “change color X to color y.” People will get demoralized really quickly and start to feel like the team is pushing for an un-attainable level of perfection. Don’t fall in to this trap.
If you see this type of thing start to happen, push back and get the release out the door. Unless there are critical things that continue to crop up after a period of weeks past the initially estimated ship date (at which point, your development process may need to be evaluated if this is happening regularly), you are going 100% fine getting it out the door. If you are running iterations, remember – that “critical” word or color change can happen in 2-4 weeks time without a problem.
It’s of utmost importance the product gets released.
So remember – ship early, ship often. But get out of the way of triage. A team of people (especially management and others who aren’t as close to the product as you are on a day-to-day basis) will call things out you didn’t think of and you don’t want to stifle their feedback at all.
Just make sure you are doing your job during this process / stage of the lifecycle. Keep things consistent across the product as much as you can, and make sure this doesn’t turn into a multi-week exercise in perfectionism.
Happy shipping!
