Living On

Photo by Nicolas Thomas on Unsplash

Contrary to what most teams celebrate, shipping is not the goal. Is it important? Yes. Sufficient? No. Creating a product people tell their friends about (in a good way) is a much better target. As makers, our way of working needs to recognize this recalibration in our aim, but it often does not.

In too many organizations, once ‘requirements’ are done, the development process looks like this:

Code → Test → Ship (when bugs ~ 0)

Write the code, make sure it’s ‘bug-free’, and ‘release’ it to customers. However, the real test for when something is ‘ship-worthy’ isn’t about a bug, it’s about the experience. Does it do what’s expected? Does it provide the right feedback? Does it feel good to use? For most teams, that real-world validation step happens later, in the wild, with customers.

I recently read Creative Selection by an apple iPhone engineer names Ken Kocienda, and Apple has an approach he referred to as ‘living on’. The idea is that you build something and ‘live on’ it for a while — to see how it holds up to actual use. In fact, the whole iPhone team would live on the software before iterating to another version.

It’s important to note that at Apple, they aren’t inserting this step at the end of a linear process. They don’t always ship after living on a feature — it’s both a gate and a place to learn. It’s only once the experience of living on a product is delightful that they let the capability out of the office.

Returning to our process from above, we can now add a step:

Code → Test → Live On → Ship (if great)

Sounds slow right? Well, I guess it depends on the destination you’re running towards.

Of course, working on the iPhone has an advantage — you are the user. In that model, living on the software is much easier than if you were building, say, dental software, but the same principle applies.

If you’re skipping the ‘living on’ step, the chance your product is raved about by your users is abysmally low. Find a way to inject real-life use into your process, it may take a bit of creativity, but it’s worth it.

“The closer you get to experiencing your product as a customer the greater the odds of success.” — Brian Norgard

Like articles like this? Subscribe to receive via email.