Craft or compulsion

Early access is seven weeks out and I'm supposed to be emptying the backlog — closing issues, shipping the thing. And I know I need to ship; I really do. But I keep stopping on each issue to ask why I wanted it in the first place, and what the best version of it would actually be. I can't just close the ticket and move on. I want to understand it first.

Not because I'm hiding. Some of it's fear — I'm always a bit afraid of the feedback — but that's not the whole story, and it'd be the tidy version to pretend it is. Mostly I just want the thing to be good; good enough that I'd want to use it myself, good enough that I feel right about it. The trouble is I can't always tell where "good" stops and "can't let it go" begins.

Here's what I keep landing on, though: for what we're building, most of that fussing isn't a detour. The point of the whole thing is that you never have to think about your server. So the questions I get stuck on — what does the customer actually need to see here, what can we keep out so they never have to worry about it, is this telling them the exact scope and nothing more — those aren't me polishing for the sake of it. That's the product. Get it wrong and the thing doesn't do what it says on the box.

Take onboarding. There are two ways in: bring your own server and your own app, or bring your app and let us hand you a server to run it on. Both have to feel right — not "good enough for now," actually right — because it's the first thing anyone sees. So I've spent days on the order of the steps, on skipping the ones that don't apply to you, on the wording of the invite and the email that greets you once your server's ready. Details, all of it. But they're the details that decide whether someone's first ten minutes feel calm or confusing.

And then there's the other kind. I spent way too much time making two panels line up — the help panel and the documentation panel, different heights by an amount only I would ever notice. Nobody has ever left a product because a panel was forty pixels too tall. That one wasn't the product; that was just me, unable to walk past something slightly off. That's the compulsion, and it wears the same clothes as the craft. From the inside they feel identical: something isn't right, so fix it. The backlog doesn't tell me which one was worth the afternoon.

I'd like to tell you I've learned to let go. I haven't. What I've got instead is a date — August 28 — and a date doesn't care which details are craft and which are me hiding in the work. It just arrives. Seven weeks from now the door opens whether the panels line up or not, and the only real question is how many of these afternoons I spend on the things that actually change someone's first ten minutes, and how many I spend on the forty pixels.

I'm still not always sure which is which. But the date is the one thing that makes me choose.