Overview
The confidence you have in i) the importance of the problem your solving, and ii) the correctness of the solution you’re building, should determine how much you’re willing to trade off speed and quality in a product build. How it’s useful This mental model helps you to build a barometer to smartly trade off speed and quality. It’s easiest to explain this by looking at the extreme ends of the spectrum above. On the right side: you have confidence (validated through customers) that the problem you’re focused on is really important to customers, and you know exactly what to build to solve it. In that case, you shouldn’t take any shortcuts because you know customers will need this important feature forever, so it better be really high quality (e.g. scalable, delightful). Now let’s look at the left side: you haven’t even validated that the problem is important to customers. In this scenario, the longer you invest in building, the more you risk creating something for a problem that doesn’t even exist. Therefore, you should err on launching something fast and getting customer validation that it’s worth actually building out well. For example, these are the types of situations where you may put up a landing page for a feature that doesn’t even exist to gauge customer interest. —Brandon Chu