Quantity trumps quality (at first)

I found the following excerpt on Derek Siver’s blog. It’s from a book called Art and Fear:

The ceramics teacher announced he was dividing his class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio would begraded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right graded solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an A.

Well, come grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity!

It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

This story perfectly articulates  one of the fundamental Lean UX principles: prioritize making over analysis. Instead of sitting around, debating ad nauseum which direction to go in, what features make sense, which colors perfectly reflect your brand values or which words will get your customers to convert, just make something. It won’t be perfect. It won’t work as well as you’d hoped at first but it will teach you something. You’ll get some feedback, some insight on how building your product can be better and you’ll do a better job the second time around.

Sitting around in meetings debating these things usually means one thing: you don’t have enough information to make those decisions. And guess what? That information is not going to magically appear the longer the meeting goes on. Instead, take a first stab. Make the call and give it a shot. Even if it fails thoroughly, you’ll still learn something.

How many pots will you make this week?

[Jeff]