Essay · About a 10 minute read

Building Products

Julie Zhuo · The Year of the Looking Glass (Medium) Free Beginner

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.

  • 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.
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The question it answers

  1. How much should I invest in design polish for an MVP versus just shipping something functional?

Read with it

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  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. Video · ~13 min How to Plan an MVP Michael Seibel (YC)
  4. Design tactics written specifically for developers and non-designers who need to ship good-looking UI without a design... refactoringui.com Book · ~250 pages Refactoring UI Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger
  5. The most accessible, practical intro to usability ever written, you can read it in a weekend and immediately fix your product.... sensible.com Book · ~200 pages Don't Make Me Think, Revisited Steve Krug
  6. Michael Seibel, who ran YC, makes the blunt case for shipping something almost embarrassingly simple and learning from real... Y Combinator Startup Library Video · ~10 min video How to Build an MVP Michael Seibel
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