Perfect is suboptimal..

One of the issues that I find myself fighting over with some of the CEOs I'm working with is their desire to do everything perfect...

The best example I can have is their desire to bring the best product to market.. a polished fully thought out product that the market would fall in love with instantly..... their own creation. In most of the cases, these products will get into the market a few months later than planned just to discover that the market doesn't really fall for many of its features...

Other, more experienced, CEOs hold the view that the market also should have something to say about the product they want him to buy (for lots of money). They prefer introducing the basic working product (with its inherent innovation) as fast as possible. Once they are there and implemented by the customer, they can start working with him on improving the product by adding additional features that the first group of CEOs (mentioned above) spent money and time trying to figure out..

My conclusion: perfecting a certain item is necessarily sub-optimizing the entire picture. If you have reached perfection on one front you have probably overallocated resources (in the case above, time! and money) at the expense of another front that got neglected (time to market AND more customer targeted product).

My advise - If you insist on perfection, I suggest you compromise on perfecting your resources allocation..

Comments

Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
June 11, 2006
Anonymous said…
What is it with today's Israeli VCs? You guys have too much free time?

First KavimLedmooto (http://israblog.nana.co.il/tblogread.asp?blog=24829) has a blog, next David42 has one(http://israblog.nana.co.il/blogread.asp?blog=52691) and now you :). Okay, I guess too many good posts did not kill anyone.

Fun
June 18, 2006
shamshins said…
Rami,

I totally agree. I've seen (up close), how company owners and entrepreneurs overrate the feature-set instead of thinking why their marketing and sales aren’t working.

You could also add that this kind of management style has another characteristic – whenever a customer says he will not buy the product because of a lacking feature, the CTO and CEO will rush off, insert the feature request into the roadmap in hopes that now the customer will change his mind. Of course, there will always be a new excuse why not to buy once the feature is inserted.

People need to understand better the concept of a value proposition - if your product has real value the customer will buy it and ask for the enhancements in future versions.

I'd sum it up by saying that roadmap decisions are not taken seriously enough by many entrepreneurs, especially if they are from a technical background.

This is a very interesting topic. I might write about it in my own blog ;)
Thanks for bringing it up.
February 18, 2007
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