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Julie Zhuo ran design at Facebook, and here she draws the exact line this question is about: the bar for something you ship to test a hypothesis is not the bar for something you launch broadly. She says once you get a positive signal, make a separate, deliberate decision about how much polish and functionality a full launch needs, instead of assuming your rough test version is ready to ship. It is a clean, honest way to think about polish as a phase-dependent choice, not a fixed rule.
Building Products
From The Year of the Looking Glass (Medium) by Julie Zhuo About a 10 minute read
- What is acceptable to test and what is acceptable to ship broadly should have different criteria, so treat them as two separate decisions.
- Getting a signal fast often means taking shortcuts, so do not confuse a validated hypothesis with a launch-ready product.
- Decide the polish bar intentionally after you have signal, rather than defaulting to either pixel-perfect or bare-minimum.
