At what point is a solution ready to be shipped?

You should think of it as: it should be ready to be shipped when it's the first shittiest version, and when it's the best version of itself. The question should not be not so much about readiness of the solution, but readiness for whom? I've witnessed teams who got too excited when creating a new product and opening the floodgates to let anyone try it too early. That usually doesn't end well... You don't want many people jumping on the solution when it's not ready for them: first impressions won ...Read More

It's never going to be "as ready" as you want it to be. Because we don't work in a vacuum, the product is never built to 100% (I've never worked on anything where we had P2 requirements built into the product on launch day - it doesn't happen). There are three components that come together to ID when a product is ready to be shipped:  1) Business needs: If you run an ecommerce product, then your product needs to be out for Black Friday and the holiday rush. Similarly if you work in fitness, Janu ...Read More

It depends on the lifecycle of the product and goals.  0>1 product: Goal - to find product-market fit. Here its very important to think through your hypotheses, possible outcomes (Prove, Disprove, insufficient signals) and what you would do next - next set of features, V2 of the MVP and so on. Charting this out helps you then answer what you must absolutely answer to get to the next step. Once your product enables you to achieve testing of your hypothesis, ship it! This assumes that product/s ...Read More

For early stage products, a feature or solution is usually ready to ship when it meets the functionality for the main user journey(s) i.e. "golden paths" defined in your PRD or user journey maps, and passes the predefined usability bar from a QA perspective – user can complete the common tasks within expected reliability and performance metrics, all expectation cases may not have been hardened yet.  In basic terms, a user should be able to use the solution to complete the predefined task in a re ...Read More

Several factors come into play in deciding this: Product target market: B2B / B2C / Enterprise Striking the right balance between customisation, integrations along with data security and legal compliance are key for B2B, Enterprise markets. However for Consumer markets, a mass market appeal driven by modern UX is often desirable. Product maturity phase: 0 > 1 / Maintain and growth phase / Market leader For a 0>1 market, the focus is always on validating the base hypothesis on product marke ...Read More

I dont think its possible to ship a 100% ready product. At some point, youll have to deal with V2 of the product that you thought V1 was just ideal. Thats fine, its how it goes. Now, the product is ready to be out assuming you have validated your UVP and some features have been used by some potential users in your MVP stage. Now, its time for stability and scalability test. - Bug Threshold: Your product must be stable enough not to ruin the user experience. Major bugs that affect the product’s c ...Read More